Karen J. Renner
NONFICTION WRITERS
WHY ME?
During my sixteen years as a professor of English, I helped writers of all levels, from college freshman to established academics, turn complex ideas into compelling essays and books. Reviews of my edited work consistently commented on its accessibility and readability: a reviewer described one of my edited collections as "delightfully easy to read, very entertaining, and extremely clear" and said that "the concision, precision and limpidity of all the chapters in the book immediately place it astride two markets–academic and non-academic." Students I mentored presented at academic conferences and published in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Journal of Popular Culture, Dread Central, and other outlets.
I also reviewed submissions for the Journal of Children in Popular Culture as a member of the editorial board, as well as for PMLA, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and Style and assessed book proposals and manuscripts for MIT, McFarland, University Press of Mississippi, University of Wales Press, Routledge, Palgrave, and Wallflower.
Plus, I've published a lot of nonfiction myself, including a book (Evil Children in the Popular Imagination), three edited collections, and some forty other chapters, articles, and reviews. Although much of this work was academic, I adapted it for general audiences as well, through public lectures, interviews with newspapers and radio stations, and on podcasts. I once even appeared as an “expert” on The Travel Channel’s The Dead Files.
Though the majority of my published work is academic, I've recently taken classes in mainstream nonfiction from Gotham Writers and Narratively and have offered my own, teaching students how to pitch their cultural criticism to mainstream outlets like Slate, Vox, or The Guardian. I'm also currently working on a trade nonfiction book of cultural criticism titled Troped: The Stories We Live By.
TURNING IDEAS INTO BOOKS
I work with experts on idea-driven nonfiction: books that take a compelling argument or body of knowledge and change the way readers see the world.
Although my professional background is in the humanities, I read widely outside my own field: Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Pollan, Diana Ackerman, Stephen Pinker, Yuval Harari, Oliver Sacks, David Quammen, Peter Stearns, Brian Greene, Bill Bryson, Mary Roach, Barbara Ehrenreich, Seth Godin, Ryan Holiday, Chip and Dan Heath—and I could go on—have all had a big impact on me. And I think that makes me a better editor: I love to learn, and I find pretty much every subject thrilling.
What I've learned as I've shifted from academic to more general audiences is that the best trade nonfiction is more than information. It's a narrative of discovery and wonder. It offers a line of thought that keeps revealing something new and a voice that makes readers want to follow it—a voice excited about what it knows and excited to tell someone else all about it.
It also requires a different relationship to research. Academic writing often makes the research visible through citations, qualifications, and exhaustive documentation. Trade nonfiction still needs to be grounded in serious research, but the research serves the reader rather than announcing itself. The goal is to find the evidence, examples, and connections that make an idea vivid and memorable. The research may be extensive behind the scenes; what the reader experiences is the argument.
My job is not to make complex ideas simpler. It is to help you find the clearest, most compelling way to communicate them without losing what makes them complex in the first place.
Come tell me what you know, and let's figure out how to get everyone else to realize just how cool it is.