Writing Life: Exploring Memoir and Personal Essay (starting at $129)
Now more than ever, memoir and personal essay allows us to speak of our own experiences on our terms. Unlike autobiography or biography, which are often preoccupied with the facts of an event, or when things take place on a timeline, memoir can instead focus on the feelings and senses of a memory’s architecture, and the unique ways our memories connect to one another. In this generative six-week workshop, we will study and discuss techniques used by a variety of memoirists and poets who have written their own stories and experiences in interesting ways. Each student will also draft one piece in a form of their choice (prose or poetry) each week that experiments with sharing a memory or experience and receive weekly feedback from me and their classmates. At the close of the course, each student will have up to six new drafts that share or explore memory. Each student will also be encouraged to choose one draft they are most proud of to share with the class during our final Zoom session as part of a celebratory reading.
Lauren Brazeal Garza is a disabled author and Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Texas at Dallas with an MFA in writing from Bennington College. Her published poetry collections include Gutter (YesYes Books, 2018), a memoir-in-verse which chronicles her homelessness as a teenager. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry and flash fiction, most recently Santa Muerte Santa Muerte: I was Here Release Me (Tram Editions, 2023), which features fictional interviews with ghosts. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and Verse Daily among many other journals.