24PearlStreet Workshops
ASYNCHRONOUS with LIVE elements
Who am I to tell my story? The writing of memoir often begins with the daunting questions of permission, story ownership, and truth-telling, which together can keep the new memoirist from moving into a place where voice and story are free to emerge. In this generative workshop, we will tackle questions that will enable the new memoirist to move beyond the constraints of fear to a place of creative clarity. Come with a willingness to unravel process and permission, and an acknowledgement that the impulse to tell one’s story must be honored. We will read from seminal works including those by Mark Doty, Melissa Febos, Vivian Gornick, Ocean Vuong, and Emily Bernard. This is a rigorous workshop for intermediate writers who are wanting to take their work to the next level.
Please submit 10 pages of your memoir-in-progress to jjean@dev.fawc.org two weeks before the workshop start date.
Optional LIVE elements: one Zoom meeting per week for 1.5 hours—day TBD.
Biography
Elissa Altman is the James Beard Award-winning author of three memoirs: Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man's Feast. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Orion, Narrative, The Rumpus, On Being, The Washington Post, and beyond, and has been widely anthologized. She has appeared live on the TEDx stage, at the Public Theater in New York with Wallace Shawn, regularly on NPR, and in 2020 was a finalist in memoir for the Lambda and Maine Literary Awards. She lives in Connecticut.