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Undergraduate student published in Professor Grewal’s class[07/17/2020]
USF undergraduate student Karen Gonzalez-Videla’s first publication, “A Catalog of the Events After I Boarded a Plane in Buenos Aires, Argentina,” appeared in Sidereal Magazine’s sixth issue. The piece was a midterm lyric essay, written and revised in Professor Gurleen Grewal’s course, LIT 3093 Contemporary Literature: Poetics of Loss, in spring 2020.
Amidst the grim disruptions of COVID-19 came the good news from Gonzalez-Videla. “This was my first acceptance from a magazine and I could not be happier,” she said. “I just wanted to thank [Professor Grewal] for inspiring me to write it, and for teaching the art of memoirs, personal essays, and nonfiction in general so well! If it weren’t for [Professor Grewal’s] class, I would have never written nonfiction and fallen in love with it.”
Assignments in the Contemporary Literature course allowed for both analytical papers and creative nonfiction writing. Gonzalez-Videla responded to an assignment where students were asked to write about losses experienced, using as a model Brian Arundel’s short prose piece “The Things I’ve Lost.”
“Dr. Grewal’s teachings and passion for nonfiction opened my eyes to the possibilities of this art, one that I will continue to explore for years, and I could not be more grateful.” Gonzalez-Videla said. “As a fiction writer, I had the incorrect idea that to write nonfiction meant to replace the creative use of language that I was used to with something uninteresting and tedious. And yet, I’ve been at the height of my creativity when writing my now-published nonfiction essay ‘A Catalog of the Events After I Boarded a Plane in Buenos Aires, Argentina.’”
Filed under:Arts and Sciences English CreditsAuthor:Gurleen Grewal, PhD Contact: