Claiming Our Stories, Part One
The Power of Writing Memoir & Autobiographical Fiction
(Photo by Brigitta Schneiter on Unsplash)
In this course, you will:
- Learn approaches to expand and deepen your creativity, bringing forward powerful images and potent moments in your story.
- Learn to access memories difficult or painful to recall, through story craft, sensory exercises, and writing explorations.
- Learn to work with details of description that do more than one job, as they should.
- Find the narrator of your life, or of your fictional story.
- Learn to flesh out other voices that inhabit your memory and imagination, making them surprising, complex, and able to move your story forward.
Whether you have wanted to tell your own life story, or are drawn to embody your truths in fiction peopled by your own invention, we will explore ways of working with your experience to bring forward stories with powerful truth at their core.
Through the eye-opening lectures and generative writing explorations of this course you can expect to take great steps in the process of writing story, from opening and revealing the work, to developing and crystallizing it, using both the truth of your experience and the brilliance of your imagination.
You’ll dive deep through a series of grounded lectures, expansive writing explorations, memory and sensory exercises, and focused and open-ended freewrites; with help from the work of evocative writers using a vast spectrum of approaches.
You will draw on what is deepest in you to write the stories you have always wanted to tell, locate the narrators of your life, flesh out other voices that inhabit your memory and imagination, and find the structure of your telling.
Whether you are straining to find a way into your material, or trying to “re-vision” your work to bring forward its meaning and thematic coherence, this course can propel your writing forward. It will support your work with memory and what it reveals, develop strategies to keep your memory activated, and create a compelling narrator able to tell your story.
The lectures and writing explorations work to expand and deepen your creativity; bring forward powerful images, potent moments, metaphors, and underlying meaning; and help you weave the parts of your story together into one.
Get started now!
Testimonials
"The lessons are works of art in themselves. The writing explorations/suggestions are like little miracles that bring together your brimming content with the stirring up of expansive craft." - Rochelle Natt
"Anya has been a delightful surprise- I can't believe I have this connection to such wisdom on the internet. I found the lessons brilliant- very full, astonishingly creative, robust material, so much packed in. The lessons stretched me, challenged me, gave me glorious permission to proceed boldly. I found her ability to hear and see and sense beyond the average just stunning, always spot-on. How does she do this? So much depth." - Rose Blanchard
Course Curriculum
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StartLesson #1: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Story? Or, at least a few.
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StartLesson #2: Organic form; the realm of the forgotten; the story truth
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StartLesson #3A: A Quick Discussion of Plot, in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
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StartLesson #3B: Writing Explorations for Discovering Plot, in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
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StartLesson #4: Truth and “Lies” / Fiction and Nonfiction
Is this course for me?
This course is open to writers of memoir and fiction at all levels of experience
You will need to bring a desire to expand the range and depth of your creativity, your connection to your characters, and your understanding of story forms.
You will also need to a willingness to do the writing explorations and to be amazed by your growth as a writer in the range of your content, the effectiveness of your story forms, and the flow of language and ideas in your new work.
Your Instructor
ANYA ACHTENBERG is the award-winning author of the novel Blue Earth, and novella The Stories of Devil-Girl (both with Modern History Press); and poetry books, The Stone of Language (West End Press); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew (Holy Cow! Press).
Frequently Asked Questions
Whether you are straining to find a way into your material, or trying to “re-vision” your work to bring forward its meaning and thematic coherence, this course can propel your writing forward. It will support your work with memory and what it reveals, develop strategies to keep your memory activated, and create a compelling narrator able to tell your story.