Creative Nonfiction Week is an event filled with creativity and intellectual conversation as students, teachers and artists come together to explore their talents and inspire others.

The annual event took place from Oct. 17–20 at Stage Two, in the 618 S. Michigan Ave. Building, and brought together the English, Journalism and Fiction Writing departments, which formed a committee to plan the events of the week.

“The idea [of Creative Nonfiction Week] is to celebrate this common form that we have, that we approach somewhat differently, that we use a different language about, but that we all agree is a really powerful form of story telling,” said Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, associate journalism professor and committee member.

Each year, the departments rotate the position of chair, who is in charge of planning and coordinating the events. This year, Ames Hawkins from the English Department was the chair and was described by Fiction Writing Department committee member, Eric May, as full of “grace, charm and efficiency.”

“[Creative Nonfiction Week] is driven by the areas of interest of the people [who] are on the committee,” Hawkins said. “There’s an after-the-fact development of parallel themes of memoir and one on digital video essays, but we had no guiding idea of what we really wanted to do other than bring quality folks to Columbia.”

This year was a bit more challenging to plan as the program had less money because of the college’s budgets constraints, May said.

However, the committee wasn’t worried about the budget because they knew people to invite who were close to home, May added.

“We weren’t able to bring in people from the other side of the country,” he said. “Fortunately, one of the advantages of being in Chicago is that it has a world of

marvelous artists.”

The Goggles, award-winning creators and producers of the magazine “Adbusters,” were a big hit on the Oct. 18 agenda with their workshop. They spoke at the “Digitizing and Video-izing the Essay” event, and ended the night with a viewing of their documentary “Welcome to Pine Point.”

During “Digitizing and Video-izing the Essay,” the Goggles joined with guest speakers John Bresland, Northwestern University professor, and Anne Wysocki, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee professor, to talk about the collaboration between written work and the potential to display that work with images and videos on the Internet.

This event, as well as its title, was conceived by Hawkins, who wanted to explore ways to get creative with digital spaces.

“When putting this together last spring, I really wanted to create a space where we could discuss some of the ways that the digital and video essay figures into the larger field of creative nonfiction,” Hawkins said in the introduction to the event.

On Oct. 19, two Chicago Sun-Times reporters and Pulitzer Prize winners Frank Main and Mark Konkol spoke to students about their award-winning article titled “Why they won’t stop shooting in Chicago.” They also talked about the importance of storytelling and encouraged students to take failure in stride.

“[Failure] is what motivates me every day,” Konkol told the audience. “Forget you, I’ll do it. I’ll fail. Failure will motivate you. When people tell you you can’t do something, take it for what it is, but I’m telling you that all of you, you’re not going to [make it]. You suck.”

The reporters also went on to talk about interviewing skills and the importance of being on the scene of a story.

Also on Oct. 19, Laura Kipnis, a professor from Northwestern University and an essayist, journalist and memoirist, spoke to students about moving between different genres of creative expression.

Kipnis told the crowd that she is obsessed with scandal—but not celebrity scandal. She prefers the scandals involving people who are successful and then do something totally bizarre, like a taboo.

After this introduction to scandal, Kipnis read a chapter of her book, “How to Become a Scandal,” that students enjoyed, evidenced by the laughter that filled

the room.

“There is an untold benefit from bearing witness to the actual artist reading [his or her] work, and that’s what it does for everybody,” Hawkins said. “You don’t have to have Creative Nonfiction Week to do it. Students should go out and listen to readings on their own as well. But this way, it’s right here.”