2024 Summer Workshops

Tessa Fontaine Writing Your Way to the Spark: A Memoir/Personal Essay Workshop June 30 to July 5, 2019 Tuition: $650 Workshop: 9am-12pm Discipline: Nonfiction/Memoir OPEN TO ALL On-site Housing Available

This workshop is part of our Memoir & Creative Nonfiction Week.

In this generative workshop, we’ll focus on translating personal experience and research into effective memoir or personal essay. Through prompts, we’ll invigorate both right and left brain memories and ideas, incorporate outside materials, understand when to use invention, juxtaposition, patterns, and more. We’ll read and discuss short outside examples. We’ll jump into unexpected threads in our writing. This workshop is open to writers working on long projects, or starting something new. No submitted manuscript is required in advance. We’ll write vigorously, share work each day in mini-workshops, read voraciously, give and get feedback, and leave with lots of new material.

Biography

Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, a New York Times Editor's choice, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, an Amazon Editors' Top 100 of 2018 and Best Memoir/Biography of 2018, and more. Tessa’s writing won an AWP Intro Award, and has appeared in Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She has taught at various universities, for the New York Times summer journeys, and in prisons.