2023 Summer Workshops
This workshop is part of SOCIAL JUSTICE WEEK
Some memoirists borrow from other genres. Some write from a surprising perspective, in multiple tenses, even into another genre or multiple genres. This class will explore, through various memoir excerpts, the ways in which writers have experimented with memoir. We will also explore, through poetry and fiction, commonplace techniques memoirists use to enrich narrative nonfiction. We will discuss how order and narrative distance can be adjusted to produce stronger sentences and deeper insight into the human condition. This class will be a combination of generative exercises, discussion, and traditional workshops. Most important, this workshop is designed to inspire us to have fun with our prose.
Biography
Garrard Conley is the author of Boy Erased (Riverhead, 2016), now a major motion picture, and the creator and producer of the podcast Unerased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America (Stitcher/Limina House). His second book, a novel about queer 18th-century lives, is forthcoming. He has written for The New York Times, Oxford American, TIME, VICE, The Florida Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. He serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University.