Nonfiction
October 18 to December 10, 2021
Open to All
Tiered Tuition
Reserve My Spot This offering is not currently available for registration. Please check back or email Jennifer Jean at jjean@fawc.org for any questions.
About the Offering
ASYNCHRONOUS with OPTIONAL LIVE ELEMENTS
What begins with “I have a story to tell” can soon feel unwieldy in terms of structuring a narrative, creating scenes, and adding factual depth. This class helps you create an action plan for getting your memoir or memoir-in-essays written, resulting in an annotated outline that can be used both in querying agents and to guide future drafting. We also ask the big questions about developing your voice on the page.
Week by week, we’ll discuss the key elements such as where to begin and end, identifying core conflicts, developing characters, and incorporating research. We’ll read inspiring exemplars from successful memoirs. Participants can opt to take part in brief generative writings, using prompts provided by the instructor; they can also submit one substantive portion of the book-in-progress for feedback. Get serious about your creative nonfiction with this fun, immersive workshop.
OPTIONAL LIVE ELEMENTS: a weekly “visiting hour” accessible via Zoom. Enrolled students are welcome to use this time for socializing or asking general questions.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Sandra Beasley’s newest book is Made to Explode, which won the 2022 Housatonic Book Award for poetry. Her disability memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a cultural history of food allergy, received wide media coverage and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award in 2011. She has published three other poetry collections (including winners of the Barnard Women Poets Prize and the New Issues Poetry Prize) and edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Newspapers and magazines that have featured her work include the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, The Nation, and more.
Honors for Beasley’s work include a 2015 NEA Artist Fellowship and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowships. She has held visiting writer professorships at Davidson College, University College Cork, American University, Wichita State University, Cornell College, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and the University of Mississippi. Beasley has also taught with low-residency MFA programs at Hood College, the University of Nebraska Omaha, and the University of Tampa. Beasley is the poetry editor for Blair, a literary press based in Durham, North Carolina, and Gravy, the quarterly journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Southwest Washington, DC.
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