Come see me!
Ghost Hunting: Excavating What Haunts Your Memoir with Gayle Brandeis and Laraine Herring
Ghost Hunting: Excavating What Haunts Your Memoir is an immersive workshop blending generative, process, and craft experiences.
Times below are Pacific time:
9 - 9:50 - Gayle Brandeis: Generative Workshop: Breaking Deep Silence
10 - 10:50 - Laraine Herring: Process Workshop: Meeting Your Ghosts Meditation
11 - 11:50 - Gayle Brandeis: Craft Talk: Form (and Formal Play) in Memoir
12 - 12:50 - Laraine Herring: Craft Talk: Speculative Elements in Memoir
1 - 1:50 - Gayle Brandeis: Process Workshop: Evanescence: Capturing Sensory Ghosts
2 - 2:50 - Laraine Herring: Generative Workshop: Into the Shadows Into the Light
Final Q & A
There will be time for questions and for brief sharing after each workshop. Please plan to attend the entire day, as it is being prepared as an imersive experience.
Your Presenters:
Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis (Beacon Press), and the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns (Black Lawrence Press.) Earlier books include the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press), the craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne) and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement judged by Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt BYR), which was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin.
Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been widely published in places such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Rumpus, Salon, Longreads, and more, and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2016, 2019, and 2020, the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award and the 2018 Multi Genre Maverick Writer Award. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014 and currently teaches at Sierra Nevada University and Antioch University Los Angeles. Find out more at gaylebrandeis.com.
Laraine Herring, founder of Fierce Monkey Tribe, is a writer, professor, and grief therapist. Her books include Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice (Shambhala); The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice (Shambhala); On Being Stuck: Tapping into the Creative Power of Writer's Block (Shambhala); Lost Fathers: How Women Can Heal From Adolescent Father Loss (Hazelden); the novels Ghost Swamp Blues (White River Press); Into the Garden of Gethsemane, Georgia (Concentrium); and Gathering Lights: A Novel of San Francisco (Concentrium). She is the author and illustrator of The Grief Forest: a book we don't talk about (White River Press), and her memoir, A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens will be released in October 2021 from Regal House. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Manifest-Station, K'in, Tiferet, The Arizona Republic, and has been widely anthologized. She won the Barbara Deming Award for Women for her fiction, and her nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
She has been on the Arizona Artist's Roster, and she has taught nationally at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, the Omega Institute, the Antioch Writer's Workshop, ASU's Desert Nights Rising Stars, and the Tucson Book Festival. She has worked at Hospice of the Valley, the New Song Center for Grieving Children, Camp Paz, a grief camp for kids, and has received grants to bring writing and grief workshops to women in transitional housing and women in addiction recovery. She is the founder and editor-in-chief for Hags on Fire, an online zine dedicated to women's writing on perimenopause, menopause, and aging. She is a tenured professor of psychology and creative writing at Yavapai College in Prescott, AZ, and is also a private book coach. She has lived with many, many cats. Find out more at laraineherring.com.
Tickets are $75 available on Eventbrite.
Breath, Blood, Bones & Bodies: A multi-genre generative writing class
Whether we knew them, loved them, hated them, or it’s complicated, our ancestors are carried in our cells, and their stories and experiences have impacted ours. Epigenetic studies are revealing that stressful events can leave a chemical mark on our genes, which can then be passed down to future generations. This mark doesn’t cause a genetic mutation, but it does alter the mechanism by which the gene is expressed. This alteration is not genetic, but epigenetic. In other words, our ancestors’ traumas can still be impacting our behavior today. In nematode worm studies, these trauma-based mutations span up to twelve generations.
That’s a lot of stories!
That’s a lot of ghosts!
This generative class explores our ancestors’ stories and inherited stories through gentle, connected prompts rooted in our own bodies. You don’t have to know your blood family to connect to your stories. We begin with our own breath, blood, bones, and bodies. Together, let’s write our ancestors home.
Recommended Reading: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
Any required readings will be provided.
Start 4 stories/poems/essays/hybrids in 4 weeks!
The full tuition for this workshop is $275
Asynchronous – no Zoom component.
Work at your own pace. Assignments and readings uploaded weekly.
June 13 – July 11, 2021
A $55 deposit saves your spot. Pay through PayPal at the link below.
Visit the sales page at the Literary Kitchen for more information and to pay deposit.
Fierce Monkey Writes Quarter 1 Workshop: Underneath
This generative, multi-genre writing workshop will explore what lives underneath the surfaces of our stories, poems, essays and hybrids. We will discuss fear, vulnerability, and hiding, and through gentle body-based exercises and multi-genre prompts, meet the stories living underneath the layers of protection we’ve cultivated. There will be time for discussion and optional sharing.
In Conversation: Reading with Laraine Herring
WOMEN READING ALOUD hosts a new virtual "IN CONVERSATION" series. Join us for author readings & personal interviews about the writing life.
Tickets are $8 and are available through Eventbrite.
**Time listed on website is ARIZONA time (MST)
Grieving into Life: Writing Raw in the Time of the Pandemic
Grief is cumulative. It is the normal and natural response to a loss of any kind. We grieve the deaths of those we love—human, animal, plant, earth, and we also grieve the selves we used to be, the jobs we’ve left, the houses we’ve loved. We grieve roads not taken and missed opportunities. We grieve what might have been and what was. For many of us, especially women, grief is anger’s sister, their bond forged generations ago. The story of our grief can trap us, but it can also cleanse and release. The United States is grief-phobic, with few opportunities to learn to work with the energy of grief in a healthy way. The chronic stress that is part of COVID-19 is not only creating new losses and new griefs, but it is opening up older, unresolved griefs—personally, intergenerationally, and collectively.
This class is a safe environment in which to explore the language of grief. It’s generative and process-oriented, with feedback framed as “witnessing” rather than critiquing. Each week will have a “touchstone” prompt that will help you gather material and an “immersion” prompt where you will do a deep dive into the theme of the week. There will also be instructor-provided supplemental texts. The class is not intended as a substitute for therapy, and therapy will not be provided.
4-week ONLINE class.
No synchronous component required.
Tuition: $230
A $55 deposit saves your spot. You can pay it right here:
http://literarykitchen.net/grieving-into-life-writing-raw-in-the-time-of-the-pandemic/
Magic, Metaphor and Story: How to Use Magical Realism and Unexpected Structures to Tell Your Unique Story: CANCELED FOR COVID-19 PRECAUTIONS. WILL RESCHEDULE.
In this generative workshop, we will play with magic, metaphor, and unusual structures to bring out the heart of your story. Elements of magic and effective use of metaphor can dramatize what we have no direct language for--love, loss, grief, joy. A story's structure is its container. It's the house in which your story lives, and its shape informs the reader's experience. Break free from the familiar ways of storytelling and dare to write the story hiding in your bones! Be prepared to write during the workshop.
FREE
Write Now! CANCELED FOR COVID-19 PRECAUTIONS.
Join the Yavapai College Creative Writing Program faculty for a series of free short writing workshops. Presenters include Laraine Herring, Kristen Kauffman, and Zachary Jernigan.
FREE
Cancer's Ghosts: The Psychological Costs for Survivors and Caregivers - CANCELED COVID-19. RESCHEDULE FOR FALL.
A cancer diagnosis brings an avalanche of emotions for both the patient and their caregiver. However, once a patient is released from heavily monitored treatment, there are often lingering anxieties, such as scan(xiety), fear of recurrence and treatment side effects. Come learn ways to support yourself or your loved one through cancer's emotional roller coaster.
FREE
The Shape of Your Story: Exploring Personal Essay and Memoir Structures
In this generative workshop, we will discuss and practice a variety of ways we can tell our stories that move beyond the linear paradigm. Try something new and see what happens! Be prepared to write during the workshop.
FREE