Workshop: That Thing You're Avoiding, Write It: Leaning Into the Discomfort in Personal Narrative with Ryan Berg
Workshop: That Thing You're Avoiding, Write It: Leaning Into the Discomfort in Personal Narrative with Ryan Berg
6 Sessions: Saturdays, April 6, 13, 20, 27, May 4, 11
3:00-5:00pm ET
Ryan Berg
12 students
This 6-week writing workshop is taught by award-winning writer Ryan Berg, author of No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions.
In this class, open to all levels, students look at the paralyzing stories that must be told, and examine how experience, reflection, and imagination are integrated in personal narrative. Discussions focus on published works that journey honestly into the hard stories, integrating traditional and contemporary styles to create new ones. Students practice techniques for entering into their own stories, creating original works, and analyze one another's attempts to artfully place the subjective in the context of the larger world.
We’ll examine the stories we've avoided writing, the way experience, emotion, and intellection are integrated in these personal stories through structure, pacing, dialogue, and other craft methods. We will read an array of authors, including: Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado, Joan Wickersham, Alexander Chee, Esme Weijun Wang, Kiese Laymon, and Cathy Park Hong. Each student will have an opportunity to workshop one piece of writing.
Workshop Highlights:
Instructor and peer feedback
Generative writing exercises
2 partial scholarships available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
Ryan Berg is the author of No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions (Nation Books, 2015), winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, the 2016 NCCD Media for a Just Society Award, and listed as a Top 10 LGBTQ Book of 2016 by the American Library Association. A prominent journalist and well-known activist, he has traveled the country speaking out and engaging communities in discussions about the issue of LGBTQ homelessness.