2024 Summer Workshops
This workshop is part of our Memoir & Creative Nonfiction Week.
The profoundly human compulsion to tell our stories makes us who we are; the act of crafting them into engaging personal narrative elevates them beyond the abstract. But the writing of memoir often begins with the daunting and universal questions of permission, story ownership, and intimacy, which together can keep the new memoirist from moving into a place where voice and story are free to emerge. In this workshop, which will be both generative and workshop-focused, we will explore the magic in the mundane and the creation of engaging personal narrative, and tackle bigger craft questions that will enable the new memoirist to move beyond constraints of fear and ownership to a place of creative clarity. Come with the memoir you are working on, a willingness to unravel process and permission, and an acknowledgement that the impulse to tell one’s story must be honored.
Please bring to class 10 copies of ten pages, double-spaced, 12pt font, of your memoir project.
Biography
Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of three memoirs including Motherland; Treyf; and Poor Man's Feast. A finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in memoir, Altman has published her work in Narrative, Tin House, Dame, O: The Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post, The Rumpus, LitHub, The Guardian, On Being, and is widely anthologized. She has appeared live on the TEDx stage, at The Public Theater in New York, and on NPR. She lives in Connecticut.