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Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Essay (10 weeks)
If you have a story to tell, if you're fairly confessional and believe that truth is stranger than fiction, then the creative nonfiction, personal essay writing class is for you.
Creative nonfiction and personal essay are powerhouses in the story-telling genre. They're the volcanic marriage of real life and fiction, and a chance to deliver our stories with sass, color and voice. By using a variety of techniques such as dialogue, melody and narrative, creative non-fiction and personal essay breathe new life into the ordinary telling of our tales.
Anything is fodder for creative nonfiction; the fight you had with the supermarket check-out person, the time your brother ran you over with his bike, your first real kiss and the lessons you learned about yourself when you stopped to give change to the corner panhandler. By delving into our experiences we squeeze the marrow from our lives and explore our emotional territory, sharing and making meaning out of the events in our lives.
The ten-week class class will focus on finding our voice and discovering our stories, editing our material, and learning the non-fiction markets. There will be a weekly writing assignment and students will come away from class with at least four finished essays.
CLASS OUTLINE
Topics listed will be covered in emailed "mini-lectures." In addition, every other week, beginning with week two, participants will be asked to email drafts of specified parts of their work to the entire list, and to provide feedback on the work of others.
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Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Essay 2 (10 weeks)
Class will be ten weeks long and there will be five small lectures littered throughout the weeks. This is a great class for writers who are motivated to write each week, who can send us their work regularly and who want to work hard. Group critique and personal coaching from Laurie will be a regular weekly feature, especially during the weeks without a lecture.
Getting better at essay writing simply means writing a lot more essays. If this sounds good to you and you want your essays to go deeper and become more sophisticated, Personal Essay and Creative Non-Fiction 2 is for you. You'll need to have completed the first Personal Essay writing class with Laurie Wagner as a prerequisite. While Laurie will be in touch with students every week with either mini lectures or tips and stories related to writing, the emphasis in this class will be on critique and re-writing. That means that this class will appeal to the writer who is fairly independent and can see themselves working on their own without assignment and meeting weekly deadlines to turn in work. What you get in return is solid weekly feedback from Laurie as well as comments and critique from your fellow students.
The goals of the class are to:
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40 Days & 40 Nights: Deepening Our Practice (10 weeks)
10 weeks
40 writing assignments
With a focus on practice
The point is to write everyday. The point is not to worry yourself over questions like am I a writer? Does my stuff suck? But instead to ask the more important question; when will I write today?
Everyone dreams of writing and seeing a byline, but like everything else, the only way to get good at something is to practice, practice, practice.
Think of anything you've ever done in which you excelled. Chances are you didn't get great at that thing after a try or two. It was something you worked at and stuck with for a long time.
This class will have four writing assignments each week. Most will be short and direct and will take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to do. You can adjust assignments based on your time. The purpose won't be to make fine art every day but to sit down and dig in, one word at a time. At the end of the week there will be a chance to share a piece of
writing with the class and get feedback.
Good ideas and a sense of craft are things a writer needs. But it's my belief that the thing that will take a writer the farthest and make him or her the happiest is a sense of freedom and comfort in a relationship with writing. This class focuses on that relationship, which is why we'll write something new every day.
This is a class for people who can commit to this practice of writing much the same way someone might practice yoga or meditation. The more you practice the better you will get.
Each week there will be a list of assignments as well as mini-lectures on getting going and finding a way into the writing.
After 10 weeks and 40 assignments you will see a difference in your work.
You will: feel more comfortable writing; find a looseness in your voice; take more chances, more risks; develop a relationship with writing that is comfortable and familiar. You might even get to know the sound of your own voice.
This is especially good for writers who experience writers block and who freeze when they sit down to write. If you can let go of the product in this class, if you can give way to process and creativity and to sitting down four times a week to follow a writing assignment that can take you as little as 30 minutes and or as much time as you want to put into it, this class is for you.
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40 Days & 40 Nights Part Two: The Journey Continues (10 weeks)
Like the original class, this class will support writers in creating a daily writing practice, as well as a more intimate relationship with their instinctual voice. To that end, during the first five weeks Laurie will provide writers with 20 new writing prompts, as well as writing samples and short lectures on various aspects of writing. For the remaining five weeks of class writers will focus on crafting, building and finishing at least three of the pieces that they had created during the first half of the class. Students need to have taken the original 40 Days and 40 Nights class to join this one.
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The Lyric Essay (10 weeks)
With Laurie Wagner & Gretchen Clark
Meet the lyric essay, the beautiful wild child of personal essay meets poetry, meets your grocery list. The lyric essay is the girl with the literary lime streak in her hair who refuses to conform. Limits. Restrictions. Rules. These boundaries do not exist in the world of the lyric. Imagine instead, telling the story of your first true love through the wisdom of fortune cookies. Consider telling a tale about motherhood using song titles or street signs.
Through this fascinating writing genre that draws on all forms of nonfiction and poetical elements, we will push past preconceived literary boundaries and break out of self-constructed writing confines.
In our ten-weeks together we will create fresh new essays that look and sound like nothing you've written before. This course is for anyone who has been searching for something more, something different, something outside the mainstream. Our time together promises to be a completely different, super creative and totally freeing approach to essay writing. We will embrace experimentation, foster individual perspective and encourage the growth of your creativity through weekly lectures, drawing on interviews from established lyric essay writers as well as sample essays on the limitless style of the lyric. A fun and imaginative menu of assignments will also be provided weekly. Join us.
Lecture 1: She Of The Lime Green Streaks
In this first class we will meet the lyric essay and appreciate what makes it one of the most imaginative and creative writing genres around. We will talk about the ingredients of a good lyric essay, and what writers will need to leave at the classroom door before they enter this hall of abandon. We will talk about form, because the lyric is all about finding a lyrical swerve to our stories, and telling them in new and unusual ways. Students will also draft a list of stories they want to explore over the 10-weeks.
Lecture 2: What My Grocery List Will Tell You About My Mother-In-Law
Since the lyric is all about playful form, we will explore a number of different lyric shapes including the braided essay and the hermit crab essay, as well as read examples of what other lyric essayists have experimented with. Writers will look at their own stories and begin to get a sense for their shape and what lyric forms would compliment and enhance each piece.
Lecture 3: Jail Break
Because the lyric essay demands that we move away from formality and the old way of telling our stories, we will want to have as much access as possible to our more intuitive, creative and instinctual voices. We'll want to think outside of the box, in fact, let's run away from that box and break free from all of our previously learned literary limits to find ourselves in an entirely new and wide open writing territory. This week we will talk about how to write and think without a box and we'll focus on exercises that will help us to tap into our creative imagination. We will talk about how dreams, bits of overheard conversations, billboards, yogurt labels and song jingles can inform our stories and make them more interesting.
Lecture 4: On Fire
Choosing the kinds of stories we want to write about is important for two reasons. One, if you're writing for an audience your stories must offer the reader something and not just be an exercise that you alone appreciate. And two, the easiest stories to write are the ones that are burning up inside of us, the ones that want to come out, the ones that are teetering on some edge. So it's important to ask ourselves what we care about and what's worth writing about. In this lecture we will also talk about the tenets of a good story; showing not telling, and the importance of scene, dialog, and character detail.
Lecture 5: Ruby Slippers
The lyric can have a magical, out of this world quality. It wants to come alive in a melodic, expressive and energetic way. There are many ways to pull the melody out of our writings and so this week we'll talk about poetic expression, elements like rhythm, white space, line break, assonance, and inversion, that will lift and push our pieces past the mundane and toward that magic.
Lecture 6: It's My Party
A story should be a journey the writer takes the reader on and there needs to be a pact between reader and writer such that if you read my work you will come away with something. I'm not here to play with myself, but actually have something you might need. And so there is this obligation to the reader that the writer must be aware of, and which can make us more thoughtful and developed writers. We will also talk about the importance of meaning in our work and why the lyric isn't just a word salad that doesn't come together.
Lecture 7: TNT, It's Dynamite
At this point in the class students will have had access to at least 28 different writing assignments they can pick and choose from. We will spend this week uncovering even more of the lyric form to play with, as well as introducing the liberating concept of detonating that comfortable but oh-so-predictable linear narrative line which we've previously constructed our essays around.
Lecture 8: From Diving Boards to Ding Dongs
In more traditional essay writing we make a big deal out of transitions and logical steps that take the reader from one thoughtful paragraph to the next. Not so with the lyric. This week we will play with associative leaps; making connections that are inspired from the intuition as well as from the form. We will also talk about the difference between delivering ideas to readers verses posing questions, which can be equally triggering.
Lecture 9: Drop a Heart, Break a Name
These past few weeks have been about experimenting and getting comfortable with the lyric form. We've used a variety of pure nonfiction templates like recipes, CD catalogs and bumper stickers to get you rolling on the lyric road. This week the training wheels come off. We are going to get really broken and jagged and more than a little distorted in our writing this week because the lyric just doesn't look different, it FEELS different. We will introduce the mosaic and collage-like nature of the lyric, and by building our essays with diverse elements and focusing on fragmentation we will move into creating pieces that are raw and more emotionally authentic.
Lecture 10: A Day in the Life of the Lyric
During our last week we'll send writers out into the world to compile stories from their own lyrical landscapes. While classes can be a wonderful jumping off place, it's essential that writers remember that MAKING ART doesn't just happen when you clean off your desk and sit down to think. We want writers to get in the habit of writing even when they're not writing; when they're walking the street, when they're driving carpool, or standing in the grocery line. Writers can even write when they're dreaming. Everything is material for porous creatures who are hungry to capture the nuance of a moment. This week reminds students to act spontaneously, trust their instinct as they assemble the bits and pieces, the detritus that land along the path of one simple day.
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