Finding Confidence in the Braided Essay: 8 Session Workshop starting June 11
Tuesdays, 6-7:30pm Pacific Time, starting June 11
Many writers come to the page with the desire to write about their own experiences—to tell their own story. And yet, telling the truth about ourselves can be one of the most challenging asks for a writer. We are culturally conditioned to keep certain aspects of our lives private, to quiet our voices, to let others speak for us. Self-doubt and self-censorship often come up. For many writers of personal narrative, finding the agency to access your own voice is the key to putting words on the page.
This workshop will guide you through how to write a braided essay, using both your own experiences and material that you’ll develop throughout the course. Some of the most successful braided essays utilize multiple modalities of nonfiction writing, from memoir and personal narrative to immersion journalism, cultural criticism, science writing, and academic and literary research, so with the goal of equipping you with as many tools as you need to write your essay with agency and authority, this course will explore the form and craft several of these modalities: memoir, immersion research, and cultural criticism.
In the eight weeks of the workshop, you will gain and deepen your familiarity with the form of the braided essay, using personal narrative to inform and resonate with outward-looking work. We will explore content and craft and will spend time researching and generating braids of memoir, experiential research, and secondary research/cultural criticism. Throughout the course, you will work with the desire to write the self, and explore how to use the self as your unique lens through which to write about whatever you are interested in. Through craft practices, empowerment exercises, and a broad reframing of what personal narrative can do, the class will build toward writing a braided essay that puts your story on the page.
This is an 8 week course. We meet on Zoom, Tuesdays, 6-7:30pm Pacific Time, starting June 11. Enrollment is $615.