Nonfiction
December 7-11, 2026
Tiered Tuition
$250-$600 Reserve My Spot
About the Offering
December 7th to 11th at 7pm to 9pm (Eastern)
It’s hard enough choosing to tell your story, but what about tackling the aspects of “your story” that resist being told? Typical roadblocks to completing a draft might include gaps in memory, unavailable factual information, or protecting family members or loved ones. In this class, we will talk frankly about encountering barriers and finding ways around and beyond them. Exemplar craft-based approaches include using conditioning language, speculative storytelling, drastic point of view choices, or forms that prize fragmentation or allow omission. We’ll look at powerful examples of authors navigating the same issues through readings that include Tomás Q. Morín, Kiese Laymon, Heather Christle, Jesmyn Ward, and more.
This intensive workshop meets for one week, two hours per day, and is designed for memoir writers looking for ways to unlock topics—or key aspects of a larger story—that resist being written. Each student will leave the class with some personal rules or techniques for how they can “truth tell” while still taking necessary creative freedoms, as well as prompted writing that may lead to new drafts and practical advice on a work-in-progress.
Please anticipate reading assignments going into each day, including a prep reading for the Monday (kick-off) class; these assignments will be 20 pages or less, resourceable online. For the Friday (closing) class, students have the opportunity to either read an excerpt of work aloud or talk through an emerging draft idea. All participants have the opportunity to submit one written piece to the workshop instructor (500-2000 words), which the instructor will respond to in a brief critique email.
NOTE: Although this class is intended for creative nonfiction writers, poets working from life experience may benefit from this class and are welcome to enroll; in this scenario, they may submit 2-3 poems instead of one prose piece.
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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