Are you prepared to write the truth, and nothing but the truth?

If you said yest to this question, the next 6-week writing course will be a deep exploration for you. If you are prepared to make yourself vulnerable, then you have an opportunity to write something that could not only change your life, but the lives of those you read your work.   In the next course – The Anatomy of You – you will have the opportunity to cover stages of your life story, from the beginning (there are many beginnings, aren’t there?) to the final message you might want to share with the world.

Why We Write About Ourselves

Author Sue Monk Kidd writes about herself because “One of my big fears is to be disconnected from my own story. It’s like being unmoored from my life. At the bottom of all memoir writing is the question – Who Am I? and I suppose I was trying to figure that out. I find that the deeper I go into myself, the more I’m freed from myself.”

I write my own essays and keep looking back on my life stories because I continue to distill the experience of growing up in a small town and expanding out of that town, while discovering all the meaning that I can integrate into my life today. I try to create stories that will grow into tomorrow, and assist students to create stories that will grow into tomorrow. My stories don’t just belong to me, and your’s won’t just belong to you. They belong to everyone who has ever touched your life, to every author you have read, every musical not you have hummed. What haunts me most as a writer and teacher of writers is the unexamined experience. Both mine, and yours.

Writing is mystical, but we have to show up

Writing memoir and poetry based on our life stories has the ability to unpeel layers and change the writer and the reader. Writing true stories is really about bringing wholeness to each experience.  Perhaps we are trying to make sense of loss, the life cycle and our own place in the world.  Perhaps we are trying to heal something inside – the part of us who feels orphaned or disconnected.

Writing has such a mystical element to it, but it’s also about showing up. Writing in our community is part of showing up for your own writing and the magic of the other writers in your group who will influence your craft and feed yur stories by revealing the truth in their stories.

“At best, writing draws from the inner life,

from a place deep within where we are sourced.

This place is filled with so much genius – an ordinary genius

that’s common to us all.

It’s a room where our dreams and imagination live.

It’s where our wisdom lies, where memories are metabolized,

images are born,

and creative connections are made.

I see it as an inner reservoir.”

-Sue Monk Kidd

Spontaneous Creativity mixed with Craft

In this next 6-week workshop, students will receive work from memoirists and poets around each theme in the course – and writers will also learn to play with craft each week.  We create lists and go deep into each topic before we write for thirteen minutes, so writers are primed for the experience of writing. After we write, we read back to each other and offer deep listening for each story.  Writers will create their life stories using a fresh, new perspective, pulling inspiration from poetry, philosophy and contemporary writers who are changing the literary landscape.  Each week we will also explore an element of craft inside the exercises.

The only way I know how to write

is to plumb the depths of my own heart,

mind, body and spirit. So I had to make myself

ready for a life in which I share the most private parts

of myself with the public.

I didn’t learn how to do that all at once.

It’s a muscle you work and build over time.

Cheryl Strayed

Literature used for this course include the following books:

Topics explored in the next six-week course include*:

BEGINNINGS

Beginnings of stories don’t necessarily begin with a birth story – maybe your story begins with a wedding, a divorce, a death or a diagnosis. In the opening class we will explore beginnings through othe memoirs and all the time in your life that felt like a new beginning.  I remember telling a famous screenwriter the end of my story, and he grabbed my shoulders and said – that’s your beginning!

THE MOST FLAWED CHARACTER:  YOU

In this class we will find our personal flaws and details of the self through a series of exercises that will help the reader see vulnerability and bring your character to life as a relatable character – one is prepared to tell us a compelling story and show us what was learned along the journey.

BREAKING UP OR BREAKING APART

Separation stories change our lives – whether it’s a breakup, a blowup, a friendship gone sideways or a death – they are a critical part of every story we write. In this class we will explore the extremes that often come from breaking up or simply breaking, showing the emotions inside story that shapes who we become post trauma. This is the place where the roots of our wisdom grow.

WISDOM

Our wisdom illuminates the path for others and becomes a contribution to the world. But how to we write our wisdom stories without preaching, but instead showing our human vulnerability and frailty inside the life lesson? Every book imparts wisdom, and this week we will look at the aha moments that show up in memoirs, and how to mine our own wisdom.

TRAGIC COMEDY

We all know tragedy often has an element of comedy. When my brother’s wife died days after their second child was born, the children next door drew crayon drawings and slpped them under his front door:  So sorry Terri died, but glad the baby lived!  And…Sorry Terri died, but Happy Fourth of July!” I remember bent over holding the drawings and laughing with him, then crying again.  No all funny stories are laugh out loud funny –  some is a chuckle, some have irony and other funny stories are just ridiculous, where the reader may wonder out loud if the scene or the story could even be true. We will explore funny memoirs scene by scene, then play with writing our own.

ENDINGS & EPILOGUES

The end of a story of an essay or a poem aren’t really endings at all, but another beginning, and not all endings have closure. In this class we will explore how to come around full circle, or leave a story or essay opened ended.  Perhaps we end with an unanswerable question. We will explore endings of memoirs and also explore how we imagine ending our own stories, essays and poems then practice. Some endings need more clarity, which are often reserved for epilogues.

*Topics subject to change as the class evolves