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Claiming Our Stories: Working with the Power of Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction (10 weeks)
This 10 week course is for writers of both memoir/creative nonfiction and fiction at all levels of experience.
How do you tell the story of your life? How do you convey your truths in stories that may include, and yet go beyond, the specificity of facts and dates? Are you aiming for autobiographical accuracy? Would you rather use your experience and history, your gut knowledge, to transform your life stories into fiction? Or will you find your story truths in creative nonfiction? Whether you have wanted for some time to tell your own story, or are drawn to embody your truths in fictions peopled by your inventions, there are ways of working with your experiences to bring forward stories with a powerful truth at their core. This class journeys in many directions to develop ways to use your own life as the rich material of story.
Through a series of grounded lectures and discussions, expansive writing explorations, memory and sensory exercises, focused and open-ended freewrites, with a look at evocative writers whose work suggests a spectrum of approaches, you will draw on what is deepest in you to write the stories you have always wanted to write, locate the narrators of your life, flesh out some of the other voices that inhabit your memory and imagination, and find the structure of your telling. Whether you are straining to find a way into your material, or trying to "re-vision" your work to bring forward its meaning and thematic coherence, this workshop can propel your writing forward. It will also support your work with memory and what it reveals, and develop strategies to keep your memory activated. And if you are working to create a narrator compelling enough to hold a reader's attention throughout a full-length book, and "large" enough to hold the story you want to tell, the attention we pay to narrative voice will illuminate this complex aspect of writing memoir and autobiographical fiction.
Weekly individual critiques structured according to class size will have the goals of helping you locate your story and its beginning, its powerful images, potent moments and metaphors, and underlying meaning, as well as assist you to further develop the narrative voice that is best able to tell your story.
Our work together will always be challenging, and the atmosphere, always supportive. Expect to take some great steps in the process of writing story, from opening and revealing the work, to developing and crystallizing it, through creative exploration that uses the truth of your experience.
Recommended (not required) texts:
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (Make sure it is the edition that includes the anthology.)
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
Short stories by Alan Sillitoe, Alice Munro, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz
CLASS OUTLINE
Week One:
Introductory discussion of plot, the discovery of meaning, story truth, and the interconnection of memory and imagination, and of fiction and nonfiction. Further discussion of memory and the freeing of memory, and microscopic truthfulness. Writing exploration. Presentation by each participant of a brief discussion of their project, and addressing their questions about this work.
Week Two:
Discussion of the shut down and illumination or reactivation of memory. Locating and writing potent memories, the necessity of testimony, and ways to work with difficult memories. Narrative voice and its movement in time; the relationship of distance from memory and narrative voice. Writing explorations. Workshopping participants' writing.
Week Three:
Locating and developing the storyteller of your life: the narrators of your memoir and/or autobiographical fiction. Exploring the selves within. Expanding point of view through a look at cultural memory. Working with imagination and historical events. Writing explorations that put this into practice. Workshopping.
Week Four:
Discussion of ways to discover the real beginning of your story or stories or chapters. Working with time, compression and expansion, based on the kinds of experiences you write about. Further discussion of the structure of story and the experience of time and how it affects the larger work. Thematic focus. Racial memory, social restrictions, and their effects on the structure of your narrative. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Five:
Further discussion of the structuring of your narrative, with strategies for both drawing the story out and organizing it. Down with outlines, up with maps: the map in the head. Show and tell; emotional memory; resistance; healing; the public secret and the secret in your story. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Six:
Memory and the necessity of the imagination. Carrying the truth of your life into fiction; the "creative" in nonfiction. Speculation or extending beyond the truth of the known for the fulfillment of story. Stories embedded in the crossings. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Seven:
Tapping into the specificity of familial, cultural, regional, and individual language. The autobiographical voice in fiction. Representative scenes in nonfiction and fiction. Tapping into the daily life and the subterranean life of family for developing story and for understanding the stories you develop. Discuss the journey into knowledge of the underlying themes in creative nonfiction and fiction. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Eight:
Discovering the shape of your story. Building on what we have gathered about the thematic power of the entry point of your story, and representative scenes, with new discussion on forms of chronologies and narrative structures, including an introduction to working with concentric circles and with the story next to the story. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Nine:
Simultaneity and juxtaposition. The familial, social and historical back story. Fuller use of the narrator as observer and recorder. Examining the relationship of your narrator to the other characters in your story, and to the events of the story. Working with research materials in an organic, associative way. A further look at the emerging shape of your story. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Ten:
Working to locate the organizing intention of your story. Investigating the organizing power of image and metaphor. Metaphor and your [your narrator's] deepest desires. The work of memory over time, and its representation in your story. Next steps. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
About Anya Achtenberg
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Claiming Our Stories: Part Two (10 weeks)
*Registration is open to writers who have taken Part One of this series online; writers who have taken Part One of this series with me in private classes or workshops; and writers I have worked with individually. If we have not worked together, but you have strong reasons for wanting to participate in Part Two (Part One is also being given during this same time period), please email me through my website e-mail address.
This 10 week course is for writers of both memoir/creative nonfiction and fiction, at various levels of experience. It will be particularly helpful to writers who are in the midst of a longer work, or figuring out the larger context of the writing they are doing.
We will continue the work of the first course in this series - to inspire you to write the stories you have always wanted to write, locate the narrators of your life, flesh out the voices that inhabit your memory and imagination, and find the structure of your telling. We will work through a series of grounded lectures and discussions, expansive and focused writing explorations, memory and sensory exercises, and with a look at evocative writings. We will explore further the role of memory in this work, as well as its disruption and its ways into expression.
However, Part Two will emphasize the deep work needed to bring forward the underlying meaning and thematic coherence of your writing. Central to our work is freeing and developing a powerful narrator with personality, with the ability to not only unfold the events of the story but to reflect upon it; to move seamlessly through time; to include and exclude detail; and to shape structure. We will work to locate and use the power of metaphor in your stories, in your characters' searches and struggles, and again in the exploration needed to discover the larger structures of your writing. We will explore the deeper connections of writers to their characters, in order to mine the writer's experience and arrive at greater truth in the characters. And we will apply what we gain from the great writing of others to our own explorations, in surprising, nonlinear ways.
Weekly individual critiques structured according to class size will focus on these central issues: 1. how your narrator works; 2. how your narrator and your story move through time; 3. how a larger work is structured; 4. what subtext or underlying meaning is revealed in your writing; and 5. what metaphors are coming forward that will further reveal the structure and meaning of your larger project.
There will be opportunity to ask questions about these aspects of writing, and puzzle through, in community and with feedback, the challenges of writing a long work and developing a narrator who can carry it.
Our work together will always be challenging, and the atmosphere, always supportive. Expect to take some great steps in the development of a book-length work that uses the truth of your experience, whether in nonfiction or fiction.
Please note that although our interactions are weekly, and there are suggested writing explorations in every lesson, it is not necessary to keep producing new work every week unless you want to. You are also welcome and encouraged to use the lessons and suggestions to do deep revisions, deep thinking about the structure and organization of your book, or about developing your narrator, etc. One week you may prefer gathering in the answers to your questions, or various perspectives on something you may be struggling with. Another week you may want to throw out ideas about your narrator or your organization of a larger work and give a bit of a revised scene to show how your new ideas or thinking on structure might be working. This is flexible. Remember, the goal is not to produce on demand but to let a larger work grow and cohere, and find deep levels of organization, and a narrator and a movement in time that work to bring forward your project.
Recommended (not required) texts:
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (Make sure it is the edition that includes the anthology.)
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
Drown by Junot Diaz
In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country by Kim Barnes
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser
Note: These texts are recommended, not required. I do my best in the body of the lessons I post to present what is most needed in these works, and sometimes find the works online, and can share those links with you. I do think that reading, for instance, the Gornick book, provides a coherence to our work in a very smart way, and helps to organize our thinking and writing on deep levels. Tell it Slant, in the edition with the anthology, provides an extraordinary collection of memoir excerpts and personal essays, some of which we will use -- again, I try to give what is necessary from the work in my lessons. Zinsser also has very useful essays, some of which we will take a look at. I strongly encourage participants to read Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, and Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; both offer powerful examples of seamless ways of moving in time, and moving among the real, the imagined, the remembered, and reflection. I can provide examples or indications of this, but, in full, the books teach in a deep way. It is not necessary for the course to read any of these, but what they add is irreplaceable.
CLASS OUTLINE
Week One:
Discussion of how stories function; the difficulties and disruptions of story, and how that affects the making of story. I will ask for a brief presentation of each participant's project and where you are with it, currently. Specifics on the focus of our feedback to participants engaged in long-term projects. The dance between development of your story, and focus and organization of it. Entering and developing the meaning and themes of your story. Writing explorations. Invitation to participants for questions about their work.
Week Two:
Narrators and characters in memoir and in autobiographical fiction. Retrospection. Memory, imagination, emotional truth, and form. Static and active aspects of form. "Cultures of shame and guilt". What holds back story. Self-presentation and freedom from self-presentation. Writing explorations. Addressing participants' questions about their work. Workshopping.
Week Three:
Mobile narrators; moving in time, space, perspective. Using the full powers of the narrative voice. Potent events, images, moments, shifts. Freedom from tyrant of time in how story is told. Ability of narrative voice to be simultaneously in more than one time period. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Four:
Discussion of crossings that open the story to its fuller context and power. Work with forgetting. Inner dialogue; public context. How we enter the world: context and mystery. Questioning as fuel for story. Checking in on your narrators. Locating them in time and space. How do they work in time and how do they burst through chronology? How does your narrator's relationship to time, shape the telling and the complexity of the truth you tell? Participants update on their projects, and questions on long term goals. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Five:
Crossings, connections, speculation. The powerful range of experience story is open to; curse / prayer / war stories / miracles. Participant feedback on discussions and how these issues specifically pertain to your
projects/stories. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Six:
More on time, and on tense-jumping within your story. The relationship of the narrator to time, and the shaping and organizing of your stories. Study of examples of narrative voices that are mobile in time. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Seven:
Participants' questions and thoughts on issues of time and tense in your work. The unexpected in the story; keeping the unexpected, the surprise, for the narrator and for the writer. Ways of "wandering" in story; reasons for it; mirroring the processes of consciousness; the power of digression; relationship to discovery of metaphor and theme in story. Writing
explorations. Workshopping.
Week Eight:
Workings of memory. "Butterfly hearing", as in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Weighing in on memoir "versus" autobiographical fiction; responses of participants on your path, your deep reasons, and how your choices are working. Passions and obsessions. Taboos. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Nine:
*
Writing experience of connection; writing experience of difference. Writing of community; writing of constriction. Writing your story in the context of your world view. Writing from your deepest truths. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Ten:
Dead language. Live language. Relationship of language to narrator; relationship of language to time in the story. Language, and experiences that seem to have no words. Contradictions. Freeing your writing all over again. Update and feedback on your projects; next steps. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
About Anya Achtenberg
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Finding the Real Story: The Essential Elements of Story in Fiction and Memoir (10 weeks)
This course addresses some of the larger issues of writing story through a look at the essential elements of story.
We go beyond mechanical approaches to craft, and limited prescriptive definitions of each element of story, to bring in complexity, depth, and new thinking. This class strengthens the tools that you already have, and offers and encourages new ways of thinking and working to go deeper into your work; to make your work coherent at deeper levels; to find ways into the stubborn knots and potent concealed places in your stories; to develop characters that breathe and surprise and move the story; to find language that not only works, but amazes.
Each week we explore more of the essential elements of writing story for both fiction and creative nonfiction writers, and how to allow these elements to embody the deeper truths and powerful emotions which move us into writing.
We work on discovering narrator and point of view; the unfolding of plot; letting subtext work for the story; deepening characterization; context and simultaneity; dialogue; the music of prose; the story's metaphor; revision; and full development of your story, novel, or memoir. We work with the mystery of human behavior in story form, to deepen characterization and discover plot rather than be constricted by it.
We will tap into the power of the visions and voices of our narrators and characters, and the mix of truth and fiction that creates a world both imagined and real. A great deal of attention will be paid to the many possibilities for narration, and how to grow the best possible narrator for each story. We'll learn how to unveil and deepen the subtext of our stories, understand point of view, and use the power of metaphor. We will explore narrative summary, active scene and dialogue; begin new stories and discover ways to complete old ones.
I provide writing suggestions in every session for explorations that both free and deepen participants' writing, and work with each element of story. We share our work in an atmosphere supportive and challenging, tailored to the needs of each participant, with the aim of getting powerful and useful feedback.
For writers at all levels of experience (and their characters, too).
About Anya Achtenberg
Student Comments
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Roads into Writing: Opening New Terrain in Your Work (6 weeks)
Part One of a continuing series.
Write like mad, opening your writing with the infinite wake-up calls of reading brilliant books...and responding from your own writer's gift to the many writing explorations that the pleasure and challenge of these books bring forth.
This is no academic literature course, but a collection of fabulous roads into writing. Every 2 weeks we explore the world of an extraordinary writer and slog around in it, getting perhaps very dirty, having more fun/pleasure than we generally talk about. We will engage in conversation with the intimate and global perspectives of these writers; fill ourselves with the music of their language and the concerns of characters to help us further develop our own music, our writerly craft; to illuminate our own concerns; and to write, and write, and write!
Possible books to be explored include
Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
David Malouf's Remembering Babylon
Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
Gayl Jones' Corregidora
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
About Anya Achtenberg
Anya Achtenbergis an award-winning fiction writer and poet. Her publications include the novel Blue Earth, excerpted in Harvard Review, and autobiographical novella The Stories of Devil-Girl, both with Modern History Press; and poetry books, The Stone of Language, published by West End Press after being finalist in five poetry competitions, and I Know What the Small Girl Knew (Holy Cow! Press). Her short fiction has received awards from Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others; her poetry awards also include 1st prizes from Southern Poetry Review and Another Chicago Magazine.
She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in a Cambodian woman born of an African American father and Cambodian mother at the moment the U.S. bombing of Cambodia began. This work received a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and an excerpt has recently been accepted for publication in Gargoyle, a long-publishing D.C. area literary magazine. She is also writing a book of poetry and short prose, Matadors at the Crossing.
Anya has taught creative writing widely, including at New York University, School of Visual Arts in NY, Springfield College Boston, Hamline University, the University of Minnesota's Split Rock Arts Program, the University of New Mexico's Honors Program and their Taos Summer Conference, the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences; for organizations such as The International Women's Writing Guild, the Center for Contemporary Arts and for Word Harvest in Santa Fe, The Leaven Center in Michigan, Intermedia Arts' Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, and The Loft, in Minnesota; and with drop-out youth, working adults, and in residency in Minnesota and New York public schools. She has developed and teaches a series of multi-genre workshops on Writing for Social Change (Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/Borders and Crossings; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life), which she has started writing into a movable workshop.
As director of Arts Focus on Cuba, she organizes journeys to Cuba for writers, artists, filmmakers, educators, and others.
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