Workshop: Put The Pieces Where You May: Working With The Narrative Fragment To Create Story Fields with Lidia Yuknavitch
Workshop: Put The Pieces Where You May: Working With The Narrative Fragment To Create Story Fields with Lidia Yuknavitch
1 Sessions: Saturday, November 7
2:00-5:00pm ET
Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch is a highly acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction. Her most recent book is the memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead, 2025), which was praised by Booklist as “emotional and darkly hilarious,” and as "electrifying" by Suleika Jaouad. Her memoir The Chronology of Water has been adapted into a feature film by the actress Kristen Stewart. She is a practicing/publishing writer, a teacher/facilitator, and an arts advocate, who founded Corporeal Writing. She has published 14 books, taught in academia for 30 years, then exited.
"Arrange whatever pieces come your way" is a quote from Virginia Woolf. She was describing how one might find and arrange meaning from disparate, small, or seemingly unimportant "pieces" of experience. As anyone has ever witnessed in her work, rather than linearity, she created patterns where stories emerged from kaleidoscopic turns.
In this creative lab we will generate narrative fragments
(fiction, nonfiction, poetic, doesn't matter) and explore different modes of arrangement to yield stories. In particular, we will look at examples of as well as create diptychs, triptychs, and a narrative braids.
Participants will leave the creative lab with draft material for further development, possibly (it happens!) juicy completed works, and even material that could inject vibrancy back into dormant or stuck work.
Highlights:
Participants will emerge with the makings of both a diptych/triptych as well as a narrative braid (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, hybrid…doesn’t matter)
We will have fun playing, working, sharing collaboratively in creative process together
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, October 30.
Lidia Yuknavitch is a highly acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of memoir, fiction, and nonfiction. Her most recent book is the memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead, 2025), praised by Booklist as “emotional and darkly hilarious,” and as "electrifying" by Suleika Jaouad. Her other books include the novel Thrust (Riverhead, 2022), named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Verge: Stories (Riverhead, 2020), a finalist for the Story Prize, The Misfits Manifesto (TED Books, 2017), a book based on her widely viewed TED Talk, The Book of Joan (Harper, 2017), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, national bestseller The Small Backs of Children (Harper, 2015), Dora: A Head Case (Hawthorne Books, 2012), the groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011), a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge, 2001).
