Confessional labour: Teaching with drafts in the non-fiction classroom

This essay reflects on my experiences teaching a module on confessional writing (2017–2020) and student responses to studying the labour, craft, or work of non-fictional writing, particularly poetry, diaries, and letters on themes of heartbreak, sex, grief, and other heightened states. In order to highlight the labour of writing that either writers or critics call confessional, I taught the most famous writers – Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Anaïs Nin – with or through their drafts, materials which received mixed reactions from students. Thinking about confession as an already contentious framework for non-fiction, as well as the ever-present discourse of authenticity as a marker of non-fiction’s success, this essay reflects on the difficulty of valuing these texts as complex sites of labour and creativity in the classroom.