Tuesday Jan. 17th, 7:30-9:30pm
Tuesday Jan. 31st, 7:30-9:30pm
Sunday Feb. 19th, 7:30-9:30pm
Tuesday Feb. 28th, 7:30-9:30pm
Hosted by Sarah Heston
Free

Nonfiction workshops and scholarship focuses on writing ‘the self,’ but this model often excludes influential works by writers who women. In this course we will read some canonical nonfiction work from 3rd C. A.D. to the present that shows women’s important contribution to co-writing memoir as a means to disrupt established power structures. Our discussions will focus on themes of literacy, martyrdom, slavery, feminisms, spirituality, and the narrative structures co-struggle works take on. This background will lead us to some writing exercises of our own. You will leave this workshop with a sense of the history, themes, accomplishments, and failures of women’s co-written memoirs of struggle, and with the start to a piece of writing that you can add to this incredibly rich tradition. You might wish to purchase texts not available online rather than loan from the library, which shouldn’t be more than $20-30. I will make copies available to students to borrow.

Email [email protected] for the reading list

Sarah Heston founded and moderates the Your Feminist Group Sucks Facebook group and is a member of the LAAC Women’s League, which partners with the DWC for volunteer and charity work. She has a PhD and MFA in writing, and focuses on women’s memoir. Sarah’s work on/in women’s nonfiction is in LARB, The Iowa Review, American Literary Review, Entropy and elsewhere.