2 Sessions: Wednesday, July 31 + August 7
6:00-9:00pm ET
Kristi Coulter

This craft seminar will be led by Kristi Coulter, author of the memoirs Nothing Good Can Come from This and Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. Kristi's writing has also appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, The Believer, DAME, and elsewhere. She is a recent finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the recipient of residencies at Ragdale and The Mineral School. She lives in Seattle and Los Angeles with her husband and two golden retrievers, Ella and Waffle. Some of the other people Kristi has written memoir about include her mother, some fairly sketchy ex-boyfriends, and Jeff Bezos, and she is still alive and kicking.

Honestly, memoir would be so much easier to write if it weren't for all the *people* in it: people we love, people we want to protect, people we fear. But our most compelling stories do intend to involve other human beings, and to write memoir *well* demands courage, ethical clarity, and the skill to honor both the truth of the story and the privacy of its supporting characters.

In this two-day seminar, I'll offer a set of ethical, creative, and practical best practices for writing about other people, and you'll have a chance to refine or add to it for your own needs. We'll look at work from writers like Melissa Febos, Jennifer Lunden, Hervé Guibert, Carmen Maria Machado, and David Sedaris, focusing on specific craft choices they made and practicing some of their techniques in generative writing sessions. There is no workshop component to this class, but there will be opportunities to share your work. We'll also talk about the process of publishing work about other people, and what you can expect when working with an editor or publishing house. There will be ample time for Q&A.

Workshop Highlights:

• Develop an ethical code for writing about other people truthfully and with compassion

• Learn to work with the people in your memoir (including yourself!) as literary characters

• Practice anonymizing and using composite characters

1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com