2024 Summer Workshops
How do you tell a story from your own life in a memoir if you can’t recall every fact? Is it better to tell that story as a work of fiction, reshaping events as if you hadn’t lived them? There are so many barricades we face before we can trust ourselves with the stories we need to write. The key is how we use the tensions inherent in the creative process where the goal is to reveal and not to deceive. Each day of this generative workshop will be different, filled with in-the-moment writing exercises and discussions. We’ll look hard at memoir and fiction as we consider the weave of actual facts with those (not so) simply imagined.
Please bring two copies of two different selections of your work—fiction or memoir, in full or as an excerpt–typed, double-spaced, single-sided, each ranging between 1200-1800 words, max. One selection should please you in the full sum of its parts, and the other? Not yet and not so much. Also bring pens, pencils, and paper for writing each day.
Biography
Marcie Hershman is the author of the novels Tales of the Master Race and Safe in America, and the memoir, Speak to Me: Grief, Love & What Endures. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Ms., Tikkun, Women’s Review of Books, Ploughshares, Agni, & on NPR. Anthologies include: The Norton Anthology of Women’s Literature, Creative Nonfiction, Amazon Poetry, American Fiction. Among her awards are those from the Bunting Institute, Harvard University; the L.L. Winship/Boston Globe Foundation; Massachusetts Cultural Council; Corporation of Yaddo; the MacDowell Colony. She has held the Hurst chair in fiction at Brandeis and taught for many years at Tufts University. She currently leads a private writing group in Boston.