Description
Dates:
June 7, 14, 21, 28
July 12, 19
Time: 1-3 PM Eastern, Virtual
15 Spots Left
OVERVIEW
It’s received wisdom, handed down from generations of writing teachers and texts: “write what you know.” But what does that even mean, and how do we do it—particularly when we’re writing narrative, which often requires us to make stuff up? This is a generative workshop designed to help you answer those questions for yourself. In the process, we’ll read and discuss some exemplary texts (Zadie Smith, John D’Agata, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee, etc), but our main drive will be to aid and abet one another in the mad alchemy of transubstantiating life as we know it into new narrative material (of any genre) that lives and breathes on terms of its own.
OBJECTIVE
What follows is an adapted and shortened version of a ten-week program I call The Write Mindfulness Project. The standard program of that project focuses on writing narrative nonfiction. We’ll do some of that to start out, but we’ll also be finding ways to turn the lives we live and the thoughts we think into fiction. There’s nothing magic about these prompts or this program. It’s designed to get you to engage your Creative Spirit, with a certain measure of faith that this engagement might end up helping you produce things you want to polish (etc). In the fourth week, we’ll have a chance to do just that: revise (wholly re-see) something we’ve written for the workshop. All along the way, we’ll be reading and discussing some exemplary texts to augment our overall conversation.
WEEKLY SCHEDULE
Come to the workshop having completed that week’s reading and your weekly “30 Things I Love Right Now” list. During the first four sessions, we’ll start with some pre-writing activities using that week’s 30 Things list, then we’ll discuss the reading for the week, and then we’ll engage in some generative prompts based on the readings and your pre-writing that session. The final two weeks of the course will be largely devoted to reading and responding informally (supportively, constructively) to workshop members’ prompts-in-progress.
TJ Beitelman is a writer, teacher, and editor. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections: In Order to Form a More Perfect Union (2012); Americana (2015); and This Is the Story of His Life (2018). In 2008, his poetry chapbooks Pilgrims: A Love Story and Thirteen Curses (and Other Love Poems) won the Black River Chapbook Competition and the Dream Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, respectively. His books of prose include a novel, John the Revelator (2013); a story collection, Communion (2016); and two books of nonfiction: Self-Helpless: A Misfit’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (2012); and, with Sam Tenenbaum, The Unmasked Tenor: The Life and Times of a Singing Wrestler (2015). His individual poems, stories, and essays have appeared widely in literary magazines and garnered artist’s fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and Create Birmingham (formerly the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham). He lives in central Alabama with his wife and son.
