24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
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@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 award-winning author of the upcoming hybrid
craft memoir, On Permission (Godine, 2024) and 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. A
winner of the James Beard Award for narrative food writing, 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, Connecticut, and Maine Literary Awards.
She lives in Connecticut.
