URGENCY AND THE PERSONAL ESSAY
Taught by Megan Stielstra

$60 a la carte single recorded workshop
This lightning-bolt session begins with the gut. What you need to tell; the memories, fascinations, and questions that live not in your head but your bones. Then: craft—how to tell our personal stories in ways that are equally urgent to an audience. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we’ll engage in activities (adapted for Zoom!) to get our experiences out of the body and onto the page, encouraging risk and discovery and examining literary craft in new ways. How does telling a story aloud heighten our understanding of its structure? How does the presence of an immediate audience influence the rewriting process? What does it mean to build an individual writing process that will sustain us without the support of a class?
Writers and storytellers at all levels are welcome. The work we’ll do is useful both in generating new material and digging deeper into stories you’ve been wrestling with for years. Need to jumpstart an ongoing project? Need to finalize a manuscript for submission/publication? Need to get this story out of your body so you don't have to carry it anymore? Let’s make it happen.



 

 

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, the Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in the BET American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Longreads, Guernica, LitHub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Steppenwolf Theatre, and regularly with the Paper Machete live news magazine at the Green Mill. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an editor-at-large with Northwestern University Press.