A Public Space is having me back for a Sunday afternoon workshop! This one will be four weeks, September 10-October 8, 2023, 3PM-5PM Eastern time. Course description below:

In “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” Jack Kerouac lists thirty enigmatic bits of advice for the creative process; among them: “Something that you feel will find its own form.” But how do we get from feeling to form? 

This workshop will explore that question, looking for areas of heat or feeling in the openings of stories and memoirs, then considering the possibilities for wholistic structure suggested by that feeling. We’ll consider narrative structure as a combination of framework, the outer architecture holding a piece together, and movement, the inner structure pulling readers through the framework. We’ll look at excerpts from participants’ works-in-progress as well as published works, and we’ll try in-class exercises and experiments designed to bring structure to the surface. Conversation likely to cover works by Jo Ann Beard, Michael Torres, Stephanie Vaughn, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Han Kang, David Sedaris, and Bryan Washington. Light reading and writing homework. Participants will read their work aloud in class.