In this co-taught 8-week workshop, we will read and share stories that explore three topics that are often only whispered about: pregnancy, abortion, and miscarriage. Our stories will highlight the profoundly personal experience of pregnancy, and the profoundly personal choices we must be allowed to make about our bodies. At a moment in time when the ability to choose has been revoked from millions of people, there is an urgent need to share stories that capture the full extent of what it means to grow a body in your body.
In a sensitive and supportive environment, you will bring one essay through two rounds of workshopping, with an eye towards publication. As a class, we will read published examples, hear from guest speakers, participate in small, intimate discussions, and learn about the specifics of publishing on these topics. This class welcomes anyone who feels ready to write about their personal experience(s) with pregnancy, abortion, and/or miscarriage. Essays need not be limited to just one of these topics; this class is designed to address the whole continuum through a reproductive justice lens.
Please note: Class does not meet 11/22.
This seminar will be co-taught by Tatiana Johnson-Boria.
In this 4-hour seminar, we will read examples of published essays about miscarriage, respond to writing prompts that will help us tell our own stories, and share our work in small breakout groups. This class welcomes anyone who feels ready to write about their personal experience(s) with miscarriage, especially through a reproductive justice lens. Writing in this class can incorporate the whole reproductive continuum–pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage–but the focus of our discussion will be on writing about miscarriage. Hybrid-form essays that incorporate poetry and nonfiction are also welcome in this class.
Screenwriting Tricks for Fiction Writers – Remote!
The most important element of a novel is a good story. No matter how gorgeous the prose or likeable the protagonist, without a good story, readers will stop turning pages. But story is hard. If a brilliantly shaped narrative arc doesn’t flow intuitively onto the page, writers often kick and scream. Plot and structure are considered by many to be dirty words. Luckily these elements can be learned, and screenwriting is a good place to start. While novels have the luxury of hundreds of pages, a film’s story is generally told in a taut 90 minutes. Quickly a story is meant to grab you and hold you. Because film is such a compressed and precise medium, its bones are a blueprint for story. There are precise beats audiences expect, having experienced them in stories from the Greek myths to Jane Austen to Hollywood superhero epics. Whether you’re starting your first draft or revising it, instructor Andrea Meyer will show how the basics of screenwriting structure can help you move forward. Using film clips, readings and in-class exercises, Andrea will provide tools to brainstorm, structure, flesh out and pitch your story, addressing such precise story-building blocks as creating a sympathetic yet flawed hero with a desire and a need; building tension and pacing; beating out a narrative arc that ensures character transformation.
The Tough Stuff: Strategies for Writing About Pain, Trauma, and Loss – Remote!
Every reaction to tragedy, heartache, and loss is valid. If crawling under the covers works, do it. Raging at the universe is your right. But once you’re done, why not take the rawness and power of those emotions and channel them into your work? Writing through heartbreak and loss can provide a tool for discovering the insight lurking beneath the pain. At its best, such writing will stir readers’ emotions, even helping process their own pain. Think Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Instructor Andrea Meyer will assign readings and writing exercises to help you tell your darkest, scariest, and most gratifying stories, the stories you need to tell.
The Muse and the Marketplace
April 25, 2021. 2:00-3:15pm Eastern
Plotting, Pantsing, and Everything In Between: How to Find Your Way Through That Messy First Draft (with Michele Ferrari)
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” —Yogi Berra
Do you make a detailed outline before writing your first scene, or do you follow the muse wherever it leads you? Most writers fall somewhere on the spectrum between extreme planning and seat-of-the-pants pathfinding. Whichever way you intuitively get through that first draft, you can streamline your process and minimize frustration (and writer’s block) by understanding the pros and cons of your personal style.
In this session, we will define these different approaches to writing, assess which category best describes you, and offer specific strategies that help you both capitalize on your strengths and overcome the challenges of your usual process. You’ll leave with new and enhanced strategies to get to a strong finished draft.