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.