Class Description
Some of the most fascinating—and most honest—essays and memoirs involve writers confronting their fears on the page. Writers may write to unpack and come to terms with their fears, as in Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, Domenica Ruta’s With or Without You, or Jerald Walker’s essay "My Fear of the South." Sometimes the author’s worst fears have already been realized: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index, Gregory Orr’s The Blessing. Whether nagging or crippling, immediate or irrational, fear is a primal emotion that is always very near our core selves. It can be a driving force in our lives, even a positive one, as often as it is negative, stifling or sabotaging us. It can show us what we’re most afraid of losing (or gaining).
In this seminar, we’ll look at ways in which fear (interpreted broadly from mild phobias to chronic anxiety to existential dread) can be explored, analyzed, and harnessed in your writing. By reading and discussing excerpts, doing writing exercises, and sharing in-class work, we’ll examine how writing your fears can allow flashes of clarity and help you find the heart of your story. While many texts highlighted in the class will be nonfiction, topics and techniques covered are useful for fiction writers, too.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.