About Anya Achtenberg
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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 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
Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, and is also currently turning to nonfiction as she writes a book that will turn her national multigenre workshops on Writing for Social Change - Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/Borders and Crossing; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life - into a moveable workshop, great for guiding writers' groups or individuals.
Her recently completed novel, Floor Plan of Paradise, was excerpted in Harvard Review, and her autobiographical novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl, first released on CD in 2003, will soon be available through her website. Her second book of poetry, The Stone of Language, was published in 2004 by West End Press after being finalist in 5 poetry competitions. Her stories have received awards from Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope:All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Writers Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest and others. She is at work on a novel centering in the experience of a Cambodian woman born of an African American father at the moment the bombing of Cambodia began; an interview on this work can be found in the cultural section, Fiesta, of Foreign Policy in Focus at www.fpif.org .
She 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 teaches workshops and classes throughout the country on the essential elements of story in fiction and memoir; deepening characterization; autobiography and autobiographical fiction; and Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World. She also offers manuscript consultations for fiction writers, poets, essayists and memoirists.
You can get more information at Anya's website, www.anyaachtenberg.com - which includes discussions about writing and suggestions for writing explorations.
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