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Claiming Our Stories: Working with the Power of Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction (10 weeks)
This 10 week course is for writers of both memoir/creative nonfiction and fiction at all levels of experience.
How do you tell the story of your life? How do you convey your truths in stories that may include, and yet go beyond, the specificity of facts and dates? Are you aiming for autobiographical accuracy? Would you rather use your experience and history, your gut knowledge, to transform your life stories into fiction? Or will you find your story truths in creative nonfiction? Whether you have wanted for some time to tell your own story, or are drawn to embody your truths in fictions peopled by your inventions, there are ways of working with your experiences to bring forward stories with a powerful truth at their core. This class journeys in many directions to develop ways to use your own life as the rich material of story.
Through a series of grounded lectures and discussions, expansive writing explorations, memory and sensory exercises, focused and open-ended freewrites, with a look at evocative writers whose work suggests a spectrum of approaches, you will draw on what is deepest in you to write the stories you have always wanted to write, locate the narrators of your life, flesh out some of the 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 workshop can propel your writing forward. It will also support your work with memory and what it reveals, and develop strategies to keep your memory activated. And if you are working to create a narrator compelling enough to hold a reader's attention throughout a full-length book, and "large" enough to hold the story you want to tell, the attention we pay to narrative voice will illuminate this complex aspect of writing memoir and autobiographical fiction.
Weekly individual critiques structured according to class size will have the goals of helping you locate your story and its beginning, its powerful images, potent moments and metaphors, and underlying meaning, as well as assist you to further develop the narrative voice that is best able to tell your story.
Our work together will always be challenging, and the atmosphere, always supportive. Expect to take some great steps in the process of writing story, from opening and revealing the work, to developing and crystallizing it, through creative exploration that uses the truth of your experience.
Recommended (not required) texts:
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (Make sure it is the edition that includes the anthology.)
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
Short stories by Alan Sillitoe, Alice Munro, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz
CLASS OUTLINE
Week One:
Introductory discussion of plot, the discovery of meaning, story truth, and the interconnection of memory and imagination, and of fiction and nonfiction. Further discussion of memory and the freeing of memory, and microscopic truthfulness. Writing exploration. Presentation by each participant of a brief discussion of their project, and addressing their questions about this work.
Week Two:
Discussion of the shut down and illumination or reactivation of memory. Locating and writing potent memories, the necessity of testimony, and ways to work with difficult memories. Narrative voice and its movement in time; the relationship of distance from memory and narrative voice. Writing explorations. Workshopping participants' writing.
Week Three:
Locating and developing the storyteller of your life: the narrators of your memoir and/or autobiographical fiction. Exploring the selves within. Expanding point of view through a look at cultural memory. Working with imagination and historical events. Writing explorations that put this into practice. Workshopping.
Week Four:
Discussion of ways to discover the real beginning of your story or stories or chapters. Working with time, compression and expansion, based on the kinds of experiences you write about. Further discussion of the structure of story and the experience of time and how it affects the larger work. Thematic focus. Racial memory, social restrictions, and their effects on the structure of your narrative. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Five:
Further discussion of the structuring of your narrative, with strategies for both drawing the story out and organizing it. Down with outlines, up with maps: the map in the head. Show and tell; emotional memory; resistance; healing; the public secret and the secret in your story. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Six:
Memory and the necessity of the imagination. Carrying the truth of your life into fiction; the "creative" in nonfiction. Speculation or extending beyond the truth of the known for the fulfillment of story. Stories embedded in the crossings. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Seven:
Tapping into the specificity of familial, cultural, regional, and individual language. The autobiographical voice in fiction. Representative scenes in nonfiction and fiction. Tapping into the daily life and the subterranean life of family for developing story and for understanding the stories you develop. Discuss the journey into knowledge of the underlying themes in creative nonfiction and fiction. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Eight:
Discovering the shape of your story. Building on what we have gathered about the thematic power of the entry point of your story, and representative scenes, with new discussion on forms of chronologies and narrative structures, including an introduction to working with concentric circles and with the story next to the story. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Nine:
Simultaneity and juxtaposition. The familial, social and historical back story. Fuller use of the narrator as observer and recorder. Examining the relationship of your narrator to the other characters in your story, and to the events of the story. Working with research materials in an organic, associative way. A further look at the emerging shape of your story. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Ten:
Working to locate the organizing intention of your story. Investigating the organizing power of image and metaphor. Metaphor and your [your narrator's] deepest desires. The work of memory over time, and its representation in your story. Next steps. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
About Anya Achtenberg
Student Comments
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Claiming Our Stories: Part Two (10 weeks)
*Registration is open to writers who have taken Part One of this series online; writers who have taken Part One of this series with me in private classes or workshops; and writers I have worked with individually. If we have not worked together, but you have strong reasons for wanting to participate in Part Two (Part One is also being given during this same time period), please email me through my website e-mail address.
This 10 week course is for writers of both memoir/creative nonfiction and fiction, at various levels of experience. It will be particularly helpful to writers who are in the midst of a longer work, or figuring out the larger context of the writing they are doing.
We will continue the work of the first course in this series - to inspire you to write the stories you have always wanted to write, locate the narrators of your life, flesh out the voices that inhabit your memory and imagination, and find the structure of your telling. We will work through a series of grounded lectures and discussions, expansive and focused writing explorations, memory and sensory exercises, and with a look at evocative writings. We will explore further the role of memory in this work, as well as its disruption and its ways into expression.
However, Part Two will emphasize the deep work needed to bring forward the underlying meaning and thematic coherence of your writing. Central to our work is freeing and developing a powerful narrator with personality, with the ability to not only unfold the events of the story but to reflect upon it; to move seamlessly through time; to include and exclude detail; and to shape structure. We will work to locate and use the power of metaphor in your stories, in your characters' searches and struggles, and again in the exploration needed to discover the larger structures of your writing. We will explore the deeper connections of writers to their characters, in order to mine the writer's experience and arrive at greater truth in the characters. And we will apply what we gain from the great writing of others to our own explorations, in surprising, nonlinear ways.
Weekly individual critiques structured according to class size will focus on these central issues: 1. how your narrator works; 2. how your narrator and your story move through time; 3. how a larger work is structured; 4. what subtext or underlying meaning is revealed in your writing; and 5. what metaphors are coming forward that will further reveal the structure and meaning of your larger project.
There will be opportunity to ask questions about these aspects of writing, and puzzle through, in community and with feedback, the challenges of writing a long work and developing a narrator who can carry it.
Our work together will always be challenging, and the atmosphere, always supportive. Expect to take some great steps in the development of a book-length work that uses the truth of your experience, whether in nonfiction or fiction.
Please note that although our interactions are weekly, and there are suggested writing explorations in every lesson, it is not necessary to keep producing new work every week unless you want to. You are also welcome and encouraged to use the lessons and suggestions to do deep revisions, deep thinking about the structure and organization of your book, or about developing your narrator, etc. One week you may prefer gathering in the answers to your questions, or various perspectives on something you may be struggling with. Another week you may want to throw out ideas about your narrator or your organization of a larger work and give a bit of a revised scene to show how your new ideas or thinking on structure might be working. This is flexible. Remember, the goal is not to produce on demand but to let a larger work grow and cohere, and find deep levels of organization, and a narrator and a movement in time that work to bring forward your project.
Recommended (not required) texts:
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola (Make sure it is the edition that includes the anthology.)
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
Drown by Junot Diaz
In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country by Kim Barnes
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser
Note: These texts are recommended, not required. I do my best in the body of the lessons I post to present what is most needed in these works, and sometimes find the works online, and can share those links with you. I do think that reading, for instance, the Gornick book, provides a coherence to our work in a very smart way, and helps to organize our thinking and writing on deep levels. Tell it Slant, in the edition with the anthology, provides an extraordinary collection of memoir excerpts and personal essays, some of which we will use -- again, I try to give what is necessary from the work in my lessons. Zinsser also has very useful essays, some of which we will take a look at. I strongly encourage participants to read Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, and Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; both offer powerful examples of seamless ways of moving in time, and moving among the real, the imagined, the remembered, and reflection. I can provide examples or indications of this, but, in full, the books teach in a deep way. It is not necessary for the course to read any of these, but what they add is irreplaceable.
CLASS OUTLINE
Week One:
Discussion of how stories function; the difficulties and disruptions of story, and how that affects the making of story. I will ask for a brief presentation of each participant's project and where you are with it, currently. Specifics on the focus of our feedback to participants engaged in long-term projects. The dance between development of your story, and focus and organization of it. Entering and developing the meaning and themes of your story. Writing explorations. Invitation to participants for questions about their work.
Week Two:
Narrators and characters in memoir and in autobiographical fiction. Retrospection. Memory, imagination, emotional truth, and form. Static and active aspects of form. "Cultures of shame and guilt". What holds back story. Self-presentation and freedom from self-presentation. Writing explorations. Addressing participants' questions about their work. Workshopping.
Week Three:
Mobile narrators; moving in time, space, perspective. Using the full powers of the narrative voice. Potent events, images, moments, shifts. Freedom from tyrant of time in how story is told. Ability of narrative voice to be simultaneously in more than one time period. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Four:
Discussion of crossings that open the story to its fuller context and power. Work with forgetting. Inner dialogue; public context. How we enter the world: context and mystery. Questioning as fuel for story. Checking in on your narrators. Locating them in time and space. How do they work in time and how do they burst through chronology? How does your narrator's relationship to time, shape the telling and the complexity of the truth you tell? Participants update on their projects, and questions on long term goals. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Five:
Crossings, connections, speculation. The powerful range of experience story is open to; curse / prayer / war stories / miracles. Participant feedback on discussions and how these issues specifically pertain to your
projects/stories. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Six:
More on time, and on tense-jumping within your story. The relationship of the narrator to time, and the shaping and organizing of your stories. Study of examples of narrative voices that are mobile in time. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Seven:
Participants' questions and thoughts on issues of time and tense in your work. The unexpected in the story; keeping the unexpected, the surprise, for the narrator and for the writer. Ways of "wandering" in story; reasons for it; mirroring the processes of consciousness; the power of digression; relationship to discovery of metaphor and theme in story. Writing
explorations. Workshopping.
Week Eight:
Workings of memory. "Butterfly hearing", as in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Weighing in on memoir "versus" autobiographical fiction; responses of participants on your path, your deep reasons, and how your choices are working. Passions and obsessions. Taboos. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Nine:
*
Writing experience of connection; writing experience of difference. Writing of community; writing of constriction. Writing your story in the context of your world view. Writing from your deepest truths. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
Week Ten:
Dead language. Live language. Relationship of language to narrator; relationship of language to time in the story. Language, and experiences that seem to have no words. Contradictions. Freeing your writing all over again. Update and feedback on your projects; next steps. Writing explorations. Workshopping.
About Anya Achtenberg
Student Comments
Complete List of Writers.com Classes
Power, Possibility, and Polish: An ongoing workshop in memoir and autobiographical fiction (10 weeks)
This is a continuation of Anya Achtenberg's 2-part course, Claiming Our Stories: Working with the Power of Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction
This is an ongoing advanced writers' workshop open to anyone who has taken Part One, or both parts, of Anya's class OR is writing a full-length memoir or work of fiction (Anya's approval required). The workshop focuses on your work-in-progress rather than weekly lessons and assigned writing explorations. Although there are no prepared lessons posted for each class as in Parts One and Two, you are free to ask questions as ever, which will be addressed in relationship to your work. This intensive critique class will respond to each individual's needs as they continue to develop and revise their work toward the completion of a memoir, novel, collection of short stories, or collection of memoiristic essays. And while it may be helpful for fiction writers in the class to have some autobiographical connection to their work, this connection may be subtle, internal, or roundabout.
This course means hard work, and following your own strong impulses and direction with helpful, extensive feedback.
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Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, and is also currently turning to nonfiction as she writes a book that will turn her national multigenre workshops on Writing for Social Change - Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/Borders and Crossing; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life - into a moveable workshop, great for guiding writers' groups or individuals.
Prairie Angel, her almost completed novel, was excerpted in Harvard Review as More Than The Wind, and her autobiographical novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl, has recently been published by Modern History Press and is also available as an audiofile through her website. Her second book of poetry, The Stone of Language, was published in 2004 by West End Press after being finalist in 5 poetry competitions. Her stories have received awards from Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope:All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Writers Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest and others. She received a 2008 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board to continue her work on History Artist, a novel centering in the experience of a Cambodian woman born of an African American father at the moment the bombing of Cambodia began; an interview on this novel-in-progress can be found in the cultural section, Fiesta, of Foreign Policy in Focus at www.fpif.org .
She has taught creative writing widely, including at New York University, School of Visual Arts in NY, Springfield College Boston, Hamline University, the University of Minnesota's Split Rock Arts Program, the University of New Mexico's Honors Program and their Taos Summer Conference, the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences; for organizations such as The International Women's Writing Guild, the Center for Contemporary Arts and for Word Harvest in Santa Fe, The Leaven Center in Michigan, Intermedia Arts' Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, and The Loft, in Minnesota; and with drop-out youth, working adults, and in residency in Minnesota and New York public schools. She teaches workshops and classes throughout the country on the essential elements of story in fiction and memoir; deepening characterization; autobiography and autobiographical fiction; and Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World. She also offers manuscript consultations for fiction writers, poets, essayists and memoirists.
You can get more information at Anya's website, www.anyaachtenberg.com - which includes discussions about writing and suggestions for writing explorations.
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"Loved Anya's tutorials. She used her intuitive teaching skills to present relevant material, posed directional questions regarding our work and was always there for us. Anya is a great guide. I love her professional and impish ways. I recommend you guys everywhere I go. I love writers.com and yes I'll take many more classes!"
Susan McLaughlin
"Anya was great. She always gave generous, detailed and smart feedback... Her lessons actually exceeded my expectations in their knowledge of the subject and her use of other texts as examples. I also benefited from the recommended readings."
Tony Valenzuela
"I would absolutely recommend taking Anya's class to a friend. This was my first Internet writing class. I knew Anya from the International Women's Writing Guild and it was she who drew me to your site. I had a positive experience and would consider other teachers as well."
Leslie Neustadt
"Generally, the class was more than I expected in quality. I was happy with the class content - the lessons and the assignments. The teacher is fabulous; will take her workshops and classes whenever I can; well read, experienced and clear, thorough communicator. I will definitely recommend your classes to friends...assumption is that all classes are as good as this one (!)"
Claire Winker
"It was apparent that Anya prepared well for our class. She was responsive but not invasive. She led us but never tried to sway our writing. (She worked) to get us to express everything we were trying to say. I really enjoyed the class and the responses from the other students. I would sign up again. Maybe even for this very same class! High value for the money. Thanks for keeping your prices low so people like me on a strict budget can attend."
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