Cost: $265.50 Members, $295 Non-Members
Saturday, June 13 and Sunday, June 14 from 10-5 (includes 1 hour lunch break daily)
The problems of modern illness are the craft problems of illness narratives. Overly technical language, periods of disorientation, the inextricability of one ailment from the next, and the onerous play-by-plays of treatment can make drafts of illness narratives challenging to read and even more challenging to revise.
In this 2-day (12-hour) workshop at Hugo House in downtown Seattle, we’ll use published illness writing as our launching pad for exploring how to successfully manage the chronology, scope, and language of modern illness experiences. We’ll practice framing the same story in different ways, glimpsing how our individual stories might make meaning for readers. We’ll talk about the possibility of collage structures for the illness essay, seeking to widen the narrative lens through which we view our own experiences. We’ll practice upgrading medicalized language into poetry.
The class will also consider the established therapeutic value of writing about illness experiences, exploring the difference between writing that primarily seeks to heal and writing that seeks to reach literary audiences. And we’ll dig into the importance of illness essays in the culture: why these stories are so worth telling at this moment.
For full class description and registration information, click here.
About the instructor: Katherine E. Standefer is a writer, teacher and healer based out of Tucson, Arizona. Her writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. Her first book, Lightning Flowers, is forthcoming from Little, Brown Spark in 2020 and was shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at the University of Arizona and teaches at Ashland University's Low-Residency MFA. As an entrepreneur, she hosts intimate, electric classes across the country that help people write about their bodies, employing a unique embodied pedagogy that takes into account the physiological hurdles, social barriers, and craft challenges to telling these stories well. She draws on more than 30 hours of training from the Arizona Trauma Institute, Reiki II certification, and ten years as a sexuality educator.
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