Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown

2024 Summer Workshops

Brian Turner Connecting the Personal to the Political: A Memoir Workshop June 28 to July 3, 2020 Tuition: $650 Workshop: 1-4pm Discipline: Nonfiction/Memoir OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

This workshop is part of MEMOIR & CREATIVE NONFICTION WEEK

In this workshop, we’ll be in conversation with journalists and global thinkers struggling to make sense of the events of our time. As we work on our own personal memoirs, we’ll explore ways to connect the large-scale and public experiences with our own life journeys. This is an interactive course—and I will arrange for us to be in conversation with writers and thinkers across the globe as part of the class. We’ll also experiment with form as the class progresses, considering fragmentation, collage, the interruption of time, the questioning of narrative space and progression, and more. This is going to be a fun and challenging class, one that encourages the profound and sublime while leaning always toward surprise and delight.

Biography

Brian Turner is the author of the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country (W.W. Norton) and two poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise). He edited The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers (W.W. Norton) and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres (McSweeney’s/Poetry Foundation). He’s published essays and poems with National Geographic, The New York Times, Harper’s, Vulture, VQR, and other fine journals. Turner is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a USA Fellow, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship—and he’s received the Poet’s Prize, an NEA, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship. Turner has been featured on NPR, the BBC, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and on Weekend America. He is the founding director of the MFA at Sierra Nevada College.