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