“[A] writer has to believe in themselves—even when the world doesn’t leap to affirm that belief.” —Michael Copperman
On Saturday, October 4, Michael Copperman will teach “Narrative Nonfiction Craft Essentials.” In this class, students will use tense and retrospection to interrogate the past and explore a model that can determine whether a piece succeeds or requires revision, ultimately learning the essential tools of narrative nonfiction.
Michael Copperman is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His memoir Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. His next book, Seeking Eden, is about the extremes of the American subculture of wrestling as seen through the story of five-time national champion Kenny Cox’s pilgrimage deep into the wilderness of Kauai’s Na Pali Coast, and is forthcoming in the Fall of 2026 from University of Iowa Press.
Here’s what Michael had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
Michael Copperman: Earliest influences is a hard one—because as a kid I read everything, and I do mean everything, in the public library. I would carry off my body weight in books each week. Early on I cleaned out the series—by seven or eight I’d read all the Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, Great Brain, Asterisk and Obelisk and Rin Tin Tins. In fourth grade I do remember reading Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and then burning through all the other books she’d ever written. And I read all the books by my great grandmother Emma Gelders Sterne, who wrote hundreds of Big 5 books both for children and adults, about everything from the story of the Amistad to the March on Washington to the horrific genocidal violence perpetrated by Vasco Nunez De Balboa in the colonization of South America. That someone in my family had written books—important ones—certainly inspired me, as did the stories about her being a close friend of MLK and giving shelter to Angela Davis for a time. But I also don’t know if I found that heritage or it found me—I was a kid who declared at two that the warm water I was being bathed in “felt quite queer,” and I’d declared I was going to be a writer by age five. I have an essay I wrote about my grandfather from the opening days of sixth grade—I wasn’t yet 11—which sounds like something I’d write today.
And then I deeply loved science fiction and fantasy from about twelve to fourteen—the point where I’d read every book in those genres in the library—at which point I slowly graduated to all sorts of more adult books. I remain obsessed with Shakespeare, and Willa Cather, and Fitzgerald, all of which I read then, as a teenager. But I suppose these days I return to James Baldwin, Kazuo Ishiguro, and poets—Cesar Vallejo, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Richard Siken, to name a few.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
MC: Well, I mean, I’ve contended with a thousand rejections. I learned to persist—I’ve risen from slush to publication more than a hundred times. I’ve risen from slush to being agented four times—and that means I also know what it is to have a book be rejected again and again, by agents and then by publishers before finding a home. All of that taught me that a writer has to believe in themselves—even when the world doesn’t leap to affirm that belief.
In terms of my own work, I have learned to let myself work at my own pace, and to trust that my writer brain works to solve problems on its own terms—I can’t sit and reason my way through, but I will wake at five am with the words that I need flowing forth.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
MC: When someone reads your work and is moved by it and shares that with you—what it means to them, for them, and you see that it matters.
Who do you write for?
MC: I cannot say that I write for myself as if I have no awareness of audience, because that would not be true. But I do write because writing is how I understand the world and myself in it.
I will say that with my first book, Teacher, I was writing in part for the children I taught in the rural Black public schools of the Mississippi Delta. And in my book due out this coming Spring from University of Iowa Press, I wrote in part for my friend Kenny Cox, a wrestler who I’d idolized and wanted to be in many ways, as a way of affirming that his life and tragic death had meaning.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
MC: I hope writers will come away feeling inspired and empowered by the two best tools I have found for writing creative nonfiction/memoir—tense and retrospection as a means of interrogating the past from the perspective of the present, and the creation of a personalized conceptual model for writing that considers all the choices and craft that can result in whatever total effect we seek. That is, I hope the class gives each writer a way to take essential nonfiction tools and understanding and make those things work for themselves.
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Thanks, Michael!
Click here to learn more about Michael’s upcoming class.
