September 9-November 17
Cost: $435 if registered before 8/19/19; $485 after 8/19/19
Hosted online through Creative Nonfiction
Stories of illness can be hard to write and even harder to read, asking writers to render vividly long timelines, entangled ailments, periods of disorientation, and dense, technical language—while not overwhelming readers with the grief of loss or proximity to death. And yet these stories are essential to our understanding of what it means to be human.
In this workshop, writers will craft nonfiction narratives that explore the experience of illness. We’ll open by discussing the established therapeutic value of writing about such experiences, exploring the difference between writing that primarily seeks to heal and writing that seeks to reach literary audiences. Next, we’ll explore how craft choices can help us avoid the common narrative pitfalls of illness writing, using exercises on chronology, framing, structure, research, and character-building to glimpse the different ways our stories might be told. Near the end of our time together, we’ll consider the book-length illness narrative, and clarify for ourselves why we should tell illness stories at all—what our experience has to offer the world.
Whether you are just beginning to tell the story of your own illness, or you have a written a book you know needs tightening, this workshop will provide you with the craft tools and support to critically and creatively approach unwieldy stories of illness.
Week 1: The Challenge of Telling Stories of Illness
Week 2: The Tyranny of Play-by-Play
Week 3: Bite-sized Intensity
Week 4: The Terrible & the Beautiful: Character and Syntax
Week 5: Beginnings
Week 6: Time Management in Illness
Week 7: Framing
Week 8: Not Just Your Story
Week 9: Incorporating Research in Compelling Ways
Week 10: What Is the Point of Illness (and Telling Stories of Illness)?
This is a weekly, asynchronous online course. Register here.
Your course registration includes a FREE 4-issue subscription to Creative Nonfiction or True Story magazine (US residents only), or a free ebook; more details here.
See the complete syllabus here.
Katherine E. Standefer's writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. Her debut book Lightning Flowers is forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2020 and was shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize. A Fall 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at The Carey Institute for Global Good, her recent work appears in Virginia Quarterly Review, The New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and teaches in Ashland University's Low-Residency MFA program.
Her unique embodied pedagogy helps writers consider the physiological hurdles, social barriers, and craft challenges to telling stories about the body. She completed more than 30 hours of training at the Arizona Trauma Institute and has extensive experience in writing trauma herself. Check out her website here.
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