Event

Setting Stone in Water: Creative Nonfiction Workshop

Writing memoir and personal creative nonfiction is like building a rock wall in water we must mine the stones of our story to build our narrative in a new location. The landscape in which we rebuild or reshape our stories is as mutable and permeable as water. Each stone we pull from the earth and submerge to stack will cause ripples and distortion through memory or emotional backlash. And each section of the wall is a small world we must master before the wall is complete.

In this three-hour intensive, we will focus on the stone-by-stone mining, holding them to the light, and finding their place in our wall. Through fostering a creative and supportive environment we will answer important creative nonfiction craft questions:

1-How do we mine our own narratives?
2-How do we decide what facts, scenes, dialogue, characters, and events are important enough to labor over?
3-How do we know that what we have dug up is significant and will move the story and situation forward?
4-How do we know where on/in the wall to place it?
5-How do we handle drafting in a flood?
6-What do we do with the emotional wake caused by crafting and structuring our stories?
7-When the waters recede and we stand back, have we created something beautiful?

Individuals with all levels of writing experience are welcome. Writers at any point in the crafting of their story will benefit from this intensive.

Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, and native New Yorker who received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Art of Work, and a forthcoming memoir. She is the host of New Books in Poetry Podcast as part of the New Books Network, a member of New York Writers Workshop, and teaches for LitReactor. She is a community and social activist whose work has been featured on PBS Newshour and Harriet: The Poetry Foundation Blog and in Tin House , Salon , PEN Anthology , AAWW: Open City , and in forthcoming anthologies among others.