Class Description
This course is designed to help writers turn fifty to eighty years of life experience into a collection of page-turning stories. Where to start? What to leave out? You will practice foundational storytelling skills in characterization, voice, setting, dialogue, and plot while also developing tools unique to this challenge, like growth timelines, turning point detectors, and ways to focus the lens of perspective. By the end of this class, students will have completed the first story in their collection, an origin story about unforgettable people and influences.
Each class will include a mix of craft lecture, generative prompts and writing time, community discussion, and close investigative reading of examples from memoirists including Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank McCourt, Sandra Cisneros, and more. There may be short take-home readings, and students are encouraged to work outside of class to produce a draft they can bring in for end-of-session feedback that will be both verbal and written.
This class is suitable for experienced humans who are new writers, and for experienced writers looking for community and scaffolding in writing life-stories, and for memoirists of any experience level interested in writing a collection of stories instead of a novelistic memoir.
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.