Creative Nonfiction Workshop with Susan Harlan: Writing Personal Essays and Memoir
What are personal essays and memoir, and why do we write them? This workshop will help you build confidence in your own voice and your ability to transform your thoughts, impressions, and experiences into narrative. We will ask: What is your writing about, and how can you communicate this to your readers? We’ll talk about what Vivian Gornick calls “the situation and the story,” and we’ll discuss structure and organization (especially beginnings and endings), concrete detail (and omission!), and the role of memory in writing. We’ll read several short pieces together and use in-class writing exercises as a way to build towards larger projects.
Susan’s essays have appeared in venues including The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Roads & Kingdoms, Literary Hub, The Common, Racked, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Bitter Southerner, and Public Books. Her book Luggage (Bloomsbury, 2018) takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. She also writes satire for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Billfold, Avidly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Hairpin, The Belladonna, Janice, and The Establishment, and her humor book Decorating a Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, Ishmael, and Other Literary Notables was published by Abrams last October. She teaches English literature and creative nonfiction at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.
Photo by Sarah Torretta Klock.
This event runs from 14h00-16h00 on Saturday 30 November and requires advance registration. It is open to Library members (15 euros) and non-members (25 euros). Sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdfffzyP8W0lyxf0fmBw-HzDuOG6vWOCerzpnQqqHkWewVjtg/viewform?usp=sf_link
Susan will also be speaking at the Library on Tuesday 26 November (no advance registration required): https://americanlibraryinparis.org/event/an-evening-with-susan-harlan/
