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narrative non-fiction. summer 2010.

Master Narrative Non-Fiction

10 Wednesdays, 6:00-9:00pm at Newtonville Books. Begins September 15th.

Are you in the midst of writing a memoir or essay collection or a proposal for such a book? Do you want substantial feedback and thoughtful advice on this meaningful project? This small-group 10-week course will focus on intense workshopping of your material and will offer a round-table approach to "thinking collectively toward possible solutions" for each other (as William Zinsser says). An actively-acquiring agent or journal editor will also visit the class and read a submission from each writer. Space is limited to 9 students. To submit to this class, please send 10-12 pages of your narrative non-fiction along with a brief description of any workshop or class experience you’ve had to chip@grubstreet.org by noon on Friday, September 3rd. (Cost: $555/$530 members.)

Instructor: Michelle Seaton: Michelle Seaton's book The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in an Age of Unfair Expectations, Diagnoses and Pills, co-authored with psychologist Dr. Anthony Rao, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August, 2009, and her essay "How to Work a Locker room" has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart. The essay is based on Seaton's experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. In addition to writing The Way of Boys, Seaton has also edited Living and Moving in 2021, a book about how aging Baby Boomers will change the way we travel, which is being published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. Seaton's previous book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, which she co-authored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, the Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. She has been a memoir instructor with Grub Street since 2000, and most recently created "Six Weeks, Six Essays." Seaton is the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has traveled to nine neighborhoods in Boston; its two anthologies are Born Before Plastic and My Legacy is Simply This. Seaton is a former associate editor for Yankee Magazine and a former senior contributor to Worth magazine. Her stories also have appeared in Robb Report, Bostonia, and other magazines.

Level: Master
Type: Full-length Workshop
Registration Deadline: Thursday, September 09, 2010

Narrative Non-Fiction I

10 Wednesdays, 7:00-10:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins September 15th.

This course is an introduction to the craft of writing compelling narrative non-fiction, with the focus on the constraints and liberties offered by the memoir and personal essay genre. Topics discussed include voice, detail, perspective, and use of language. We will also consider the challenge of which details to choose from a jumble of memories by having students pitch ideas to the class and work together to find the most compelling scenes/topics to write. By the end of ten weeks, you will practice your writing style, learn the process of workshopping what you’re written, and maybe even look at the world around you a little differently. In the meantime, you will complete and receive feedback on a number of short exercises that can be built into longer pieces.

Instructor: Christopher Boginski: Christopher Boginski is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the University of Washington, where he taught creative writing and English as a second language and where he was a research assistant for David Shields. He lives in Boston and is in the process of finishing his first book, a memoir that explores the influence of the past upon the present in everyone from himself to Camus.

Level: Beginner
Type: Full-length Workshop
Registration Deadline: Thursday, September 09, 2010

Sorry, this class is sold out. Please email chip@grubstreet.org to be put on a waiting list.

Finding Your Book

6 Tuesdays, 7:00pm-10:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins September 14th.

Back by popular demand! Go on a six-week journey with literary agent Joanne Wyckoff of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency and find your (non-fiction) book. Too many people waste time crafting non-fiction book proposals before they’ve done the right kind of rigorous thinking about the fundamentals of their book. In this workshop, you’ll be guided through the market research, the hard critical thinking, and the positioning that goes into really honing a marketable non-fiction book concept. You’ll gain an understanding of what goes into writing a winning non-fiction book proposal as well. Led by an instructor who has worked extensively as both a literary agent and an editor.

Instructor: Joanne Wyckoff: Joanne Wyckoff is an agent in the Boston office of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Before becoming an agent, she worked as Senior Editor at the Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, and as Executive Editor at Beacon Press. As an agent, Joanne represents nonfiction and fiction. She has a particular love of the memoir and is always looking for exciting new voices in this genre. Her nonfiction list includes books in narrative nonfiction, psychology, women’s issues, education, health and wellness, serious self-help, natural history and anything about animals, biography, religion and spirituality, and African-American issues. In fiction, her interests run to literary and commercial women’s fiction, novels that evoke a strong sense of place, and historical novels. Some notable recent publications include The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life by NPR commentator Lauretta Hannon (Gotham), Becoming a Life Change Artist by highly regarded life planning expert Fred Mandell, Ph.D., and organizational psychologist, Kathleen Jordan, Ph.D.(Avery), and My Green Manifesto: A Rallying Cry for the Rest of Us by well known nature writer David Gessner (Milkweed, forthcoming).

Level: For Everyone
Type: Full-length Workshop
Registration Deadline: Thursday, September 09, 2010

There are 5 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Writing Columns and Personal Essays for Publication

10 Tuesdays, 7:00pm-10:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins September 14th.

This intensive class is geared specifically for students wishing to write and get personal essays and columns published. Each week, we will examine work that appears in both local and national newspapers, magazines, websites and other media outlets (such as the New York Times' "Modern Love"; the Globe and Huffington Post; NPR commentaries; parenting, cooking, and outdoors magazines, etc). Then, we write a personal essay or column that adheres as closely to that publication's format and style. Depending on class size, we will either workshop each student's assignment each week, or take turns on a rotating schedule. We will do a few in-class exercises, and will also spend time learning how to pitch essays and columns to editors --- how to find the right market, write a cover letter, and position the writer as an "expert" in their chosen topic or angle. The goal: by the end of the course, students will write and revise at least three personal essays or columns and send them out for publication.

Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf: Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the travel memoir/pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, named a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. A poet, teacher, critic and journalist, Gilsdorf has worked as a freelance correspondent, guidebook writer, and film, book and restaurant reviewer in Paris as well as the U.S. Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, and has been published in dozens of other magazines, newspapers and guidebooks worldwide, including National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Australian Financial Review, USA Today, and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe and the film columnist for Art New England. His blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com, and he also blogs for Boston.com's Globetrotting, Tor.com and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and leads creative writing workshops in journalism, travel and essay writing, and poetry, as well as book promotion and writing career planning workshops, at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro. He speaks frequently at conventions, universities, and book festivals nationwide. Follow Ethan’s adventures at http://www.ethangilsdorf.com.

Level: Advanced
Type: Full-length Workshop
Registration Deadline: Thursday, September 09, 2010

Sorry, this class is sold out. Please email chip@grubstreet.org to be put on a waiting list.

6 Weeks, 6 Essays - Level I

6 Mondays, 7:00pm-10:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins October 18th.

Memoir writing doesn’t have to be just about relating trauma; it’s about spinning out compelling and entertaining stories. Find those stories in your experience with these writing exercises. In this class you will write five personal essays – which may or may not be part of a longer work – between 500 and 1000 words and revise one for submission. You’ll generate a lot of material, refine your editing skills and take a fresh look at your life experience. By working in a shorter format, you’ll also find ways to tighten your prose and heighten your storytelling skills.

Instructor: Christopher Boginski: Christopher Boginski is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the University of Washington, where he taught creative writing and English as a second language and where he was a research assistant for David Shields. He lives in Boston and is in the process of finishing his first book, a memoir that explores the influence of the past upon the present in everyone from himself to Camus.

Level: Intermediate
Type: Full-length Workshop
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, October 13, 2010

There are 9 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Writing From Real Life

6 Mondays, 7:00pm-10:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins October 18th.

Writers are observers, continually examining our lives and the lives of others. For memoir writers, and for those who write in other genres, our life experiences become the raw material of our creative work. In this six-week workshop, we will focus on the key challenges in our lives today, and other hurdles we’ve overcome – in other words, difficult circumstances that might become the rich “raw material” for new work. We will discuss strategies for developing this material in a way that avoids the sentimental and general, and look at a number of short examples of how other writers (i.e. Didion, Ehrenreich, Sedaris) use essays as a way of making meaning of difficult circumstances. By the end of the course, you will have worked through a topic and be well on your way to writing about it (and potentially others) in a thoughtful and critical way.

Instructor: Judah Leblang: Judah Leblang is a Boston-based writer, teacher and storyteller. His radio essays have appeared on 160 NPR and ABC-network stations around the US, and on several college and community radio stations. His column, "Life in the Slow Lane," appears regularly in Bay Windows, a Boston-area newspaper.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Full-length Workshop
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, October 13, 2010

There are 10 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Jumpstart Your Memoir, Section A

6 Mondays, 11:00am-2:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins September 20th.

This daytime version of one of our most popular courses has a very clear mission: to get you started on your memoir. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of memoir writing: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, understanding point of view, and finding your voice. We will discuss the process of writing and the strengths and weaknesses of the work we produce in class. We may read and discuss some short published texts in regards to craft, then write exercises inspired by the texts. A supportive and generative experience for both new and practicing writers. Limited to 15 students.

Instructor: Grace Talusan: Grace Talusan lives in Somerville and teaches writing at Tufts University. She has published essays and stories in Creative Nonfiction, The Boston Globe, Brevity, Buran, Tufts Magazine, Colorlines, and other publications. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a Massachusetts Artist Grant in Fiction.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Daytime Class
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, September 15, 2010

There are 5 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Jumpstart Your Memoir, Section B

6 Thursdays, 11:00am-2:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins September 23rd.

Instructor: Michelle Seaton: Michelle Seaton's book The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in an Age of Unfair Expectations, Diagnoses and Pills, co-authored with psychologist Dr. Anthony Rao, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August, 2009, and her essay "How to Work a Locker room" has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart. The essay is based on Seaton's experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. In addition to writing The Way of Boys, Seaton has also edited Living and Moving in 2021, a book about how aging Baby Boomers will change the way we travel, which is being published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. Seaton's previous book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, which she co-authored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, the Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. She has been a memoir instructor with Grub Street since 2000, and most recently created "Six Weeks, Six Essays." Seaton is the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has traveled to nine neighborhoods in Boston; its two anthologies are Born Before Plastic and My Legacy is Simply This. Seaton is a former associate editor for Yankee Magazine and a former senior contributor to Worth magazine. Her stories also have appeared in Robb Report, Bostonia, and other magazines.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Daytime Class
Registration Deadline: Thursday, September 16, 2010

There are 14 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Writing Your Legacy

Monday-Thursday, November 1-4th, 11:00am-1:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

Most of us take great pains to ensure that our loved ones will inherit our material wealth; few of us are as deliberate about ensuring that our stories and values will live on. An “ethical will” is a document that will guarantee just that. Often described as a “kind of love letter” to those we will leave behind—be they children, grandchildren, friends or colleagues, it is a way to create a spiritual legacy. Whether we are young or old, a serious writer or a complete beginner, we can create that legacy and, in the process, become more intimate with ourselves.

In this four-session workshop we will write from prompts, i.e; This is the world I come from... or These are the causes I have fought for... or This is one of the experiences that had the most impact on who I became... Come with a laptop or notebook and a willingness to dig deep. Sharing is entirely optional.

Instructor: Leslie Lawrence

Bio coming!

Level: For Everyone
Type: Daytime Class
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, October 27, 2010

There are 12 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Our Lives in the Middle Ages

Sunday, October 17th, 9:00am-4:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.

This is a workshop for writers of a certain (middle) age, according to their own definition. Based partly on James Atlas’ book My Life in the Middle Ages, and partly on the instructor’s own experience in facing ‘50’ and beyond, this session will explore how we can use the universal themes of aging—letting go, dealing with physical illness, the earning of hard-earned wisdom, and laughing at our own foibles—as the raw material for personal essays, memoir vignettes, radio commentaries, etc. In this day-long session, we will examine the work of writers such as Nora Ephron, David Sedaris and others, and then write on a series of prompts, which touch on themes of growing older and (hopefully) wiser. We will share ideas to strengthen and further develop these drafts. Finally, we’ll share ideas about getting our work ‘out there’ through publication in various media, including literary journals, newspapers, and on-line publications.

Instructor: Judah Leblang: Judah Leblang is a Boston-based writer, teacher and storyteller. His radio essays have appeared on 160 NPR and ABC-network stations around the US, and on several college and community radio stations. His column, "Life in the Slow Lane," appears regularly in Bay Windows, a Boston-area newspaper.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Weekend Workshop
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, October 13, 2010

There are 10 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Jumpstart Your Writing

Sunday, December 5th, 9:00am-4:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

This one-day weekend version of one of our most popular courses has a very clear mission: spend the day writing. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of fiction and some non-fiction: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, understanding point of view, and finding your voice. We will discuss the process of writing and the strengths and weaknesses of the work we produce in class. We will read and discuss published stories in regards to craft, then write exercises inspired by the stories. A supportive and generative experience for both new and practicing writers. Limited to 15 students.

Instructor: Grace Talusan: Grace Talusan lives in Somerville and teaches writing at Tufts University. She has published essays and stories in Creative Nonfiction, The Boston Globe, Brevity, Buran, Tufts Magazine, Colorlines, and other publications. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine and a Massachusetts Artist Grant in Fiction.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Weekend Workshop
Registration Deadline: Tuesday, November 30, 2010

There are 14 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

From Blog Post to Personal Essay

Monday, September 20th, 7:00-10:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

The personal blog is an incredibly popular and effective way for a writer to find his or her voice—but how do you move beyond blog posts to rich, complex, publishable personal essays? With the current cultural focus on personal writing, the essay, too, is “hot” right now—but where do ideas that go beyond navel-gazing come from? In the blog you write (or the blog you’ve imagined) you already have a record of the ideas you find most interesting. The next step is to develop them into fully realized literary explorations, and in this one-night seminar we’ll discuss how to do just that. Appropriate for the blogger and the aspiring essayist alike, the seminar will cover the narrative techniques established essayists like Didion, Lopate, and Dillard use to, in the words of Aldous Huxley, “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description." We’ll discuss strategies for identifying those potential keyholes and how to use different structural models to produce writing with the simultaneous acuity and complexity that characterizes great personal essays. A reading packet will be distributed, containing both how-to craft articles and examples of the form both classic and modern.

Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich received her MFA from Emerson College and her JD from Harvard Law School. She is currently writing a memoir about a Louisiana death penalty case, adapted excerpts from which appear in Bellingham Review (as the winner of the 2009 Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction) and Fourth Genre. Her fiction appears in Connecticut Review and Minnetonka Review, among other journals. She received the 2010 Alice Hayes Fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation and has been awarded residency fellowships to the Millay Colony for the Arts and I-Park.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, September 15, 2010

There are 3 seats available for this course.

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Provoking Thought: The Art of Science Writing

Monday, October 4th, 7:00-10:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

One of the most commercially successful science writers is Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers. One of the most intellectually acclaimed science writers is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Blank Slate. Though both authors write books about ideas, their literary techniques couldn't be more different. In this seminar, we'll discover how Gladwell and Pinker represent two opposing sides of a set of choices that every writer must make when communicating ideas from science, technology, or medicine to a mainstream audience. We'll read and discuss passages from several recent nonfiction books to learn about the benefits and pitfalls of each literary choice. You'll also take a shot at writing a short piece in both a Gladwell-style and in a Pinker-style. The goal? To help you find the best approach for writing your own nonfiction book of ideas. We'll also cover state-of-the-art topics like getting a science-savvy agent, writing a science book proposal, managing web controversy, leveraging Amazon.com, and the unprecedented opportunities of e-books.

Instructor: Ogi Ogas: Dr. Ogi Ogas received his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Boston University and was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow. He's interested in helping readers understand their everyday behaviors in a surprising new light. His science nonfiction book A Billion Wicked Brains will be published by Penguin in May, 2011. The book combines online data mining with neuroscience to paint a fascinating vision of human desire. His next book, A Billion Brawling Brains, uses a similar approach to explore why and how we fight. He has been published in the Boston Globe and Seed Magazine online, and was a regular contributor to the Baltimore CityPaper. In a previous life, he sold a screenplay to Scout Productions and wrote screenplay coverage for a Hollywood distributor.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Wednesday, September 29, 2010

There are 4 seats available for this course.

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Find Your Memoir

Tuesday, December 7th, 7:00-10:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

Finding the heart of your memoir can be vexing. What story do you want to tell? How do you tell it? How can you make your reader care about your life? This seminar will help writers who are beginning to write a memoir (or want to write a memoir) find a shape and form for their story. We will discuss how to narrow and frame your life experiences in memoir, and examine some common structures for telling the story, with the goal of ultimately helping you find the heart of what story to tell. Quick exercises will help you "map" your memoir's scope --- the time frame, theme, plot, character arc, and key moments. We will discuss chronological time vs. narrative time, and dilemmas of "truth" and memory as it relates to recovering and recreating the past. Please bring a brief and rough (under 300 word) summary of a real or potential memoir project.

Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf: Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the travel memoir/pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, named a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. A poet, teacher, critic and journalist, Gilsdorf has worked as a freelance correspondent, guidebook writer, and film, book and restaurant reviewer in Paris as well as the U.S. Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, and has been published in dozens of other magazines, newspapers and guidebooks worldwide, including National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Australian Financial Review, USA Today, and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe and the film columnist for Art New England. His blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com, and he also blogs for Boston.com's Globetrotting, Tor.com and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and leads creative writing workshops in journalism, travel and essay writing, and poetry, as well as book promotion and writing career planning workshops, at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro. He speaks frequently at conventions, universities, and book festivals nationwide. Follow Ethan’s adventures at http://www.ethangilsdorf.com.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Thursday, December 02, 2010

There are 7 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Question Every Word: The Art of Micro-Editing

Monday, August 23rd, 7:00-10:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.

Before an editor evaluates your manuscript’s themes, plot, characters, or voice, he or she judges its sentences. The best way to impress any reader is to write clear and efficient prose. Good sentence-level editing can increase the pace, enhance the description, and deepen the mood of your work. In short, it can make your writing more compelling. In this workshop, we will take apart and reassemble sentences and paragraphs from both fiction and nonfiction drafts. You will learn to read like an editor, to question every word and remove abstraction in order to take your writing to the next level.

Instructor: Michelle Seaton: Michelle Seaton's book The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in an Age of Unfair Expectations, Diagnoses and Pills, co-authored with psychologist Dr. Anthony Rao, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in August, 2009, and her essay "How to Work a Locker room" has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart. The essay is based on Seaton's experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. In addition to writing The Way of Boys, Seaton has also edited Living and Moving in 2021, a book about how aging Baby Boomers will change the way we travel, which is being published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. Seaton's previous book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, which she co-authored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, the Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. She has been a memoir instructor with Grub Street since 2000, and most recently created "Six Weeks, Six Essays." Seaton is the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has traveled to nine neighborhoods in Boston; its two anthologies are Born Before Plastic and My Legacy is Simply This. Seaton is a former associate editor for Yankee Magazine and a former senior contributor to Worth magazine. Her stories also have appeared in Robb Report, Bostonia, and other magazines.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Monday, August 23, 2010

There are 2 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Childhood Firsts

Tuesday, December 7th, 7:00-10:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

Our earliest memories are often the most enduring and revealing. Whether we want to write poetry, fiction or nonfiction, these memories—of joy, triumph, shame, terror, betrayal, discovery—can lead us to the most resonant themes of a lifetime, themes that can give focus and shape to longer projects. Flannery O’Connor famously said: “If you’ve survived your childhood, you have enough material to write about for the rest of your life.” In this seminar we will write with courage and exuberance to plumb these memories, hear them sing, and see how they connect and reverberate. Students working in different genres are encouraged to attend.

Instructor: Leslie Lawrence

Bio coming!

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Thursday, December 02, 2010

There are 12 seats available for this course.

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Become a Critical Creative: The Art of the Literary Review

Tuesday, December 7th, 7:00-10:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

Earning a living as a writer is notoriously difficult, especially without a diversified portfolio. Critical reviewing is an excellent way to build income and identity, all while maintaining a connection to one’s art. Taught by a veteran of the publishing industry and long-time book reviewer, Becoming a Critical Creative explores the development of a distinct perspective that writers can apply to the areas in which they work. The seminar evaluates key examples from leading critics and discusses the successful—or unsuccessful—methods of their approach. It covers the most common forms of reviewing—short form, long form, capsule, academic, pop—and the publications in which they appear. It also shares strategies for securing work as a reviewer and for creating the kind of voice that grabs a reader’s attention. Students are encouraged to submit review samples before class that the instructor and class can workshop.

Instructor: Marisa Pagano: Marisa Pagano began her publishing career in New York City at The Robbins Office, aiding in the promotion and representation of Joe Klein, David Remnick, Rebecca Mead, Frank Rich, Peter Singer, and Ron Rosenbaum, among other journalists and nonfiction writers. As an associate of the agent Bill Clegg, she handled and edited such novelists as Laura Zigman, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Heather McGowan, David Huddle, and Andrew Sean Greer, along with several poets, including Anne Carson and Mark Doty. In 2001, she joined with Bill Clegg and Sarah Burnes to establish Burnes and Clegg, Inc., a boutique literary agency representing Nicole Krauss, Nick Flynn, Susan Choi, and other critical talents. Assuming the duties of agent, editor, and contracts manager, she helped Burnes & Clegg become one of the industry's premier agencies in under a year. In 2002, Marisa moved to the Penguin Group, shadowing editorial director Jennifer Hershey and participating in the acquisition or editing of such titles as Kavita Daswani's For Matrimonial Purposes, Jilliane Hoffman's Retribution, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Queen of the South, and Sharon Pywell's What Happened to Henry. In 2003, she joined the editorial department at Bloomsbury USA, working with a range of genres -- fiction, memoir, humor, history, short stories, investigative journalism, and illustrated books -- and a diverse group of authors: Roz Chast, Alan Hollinghurst, Douglas Coupland, David Leavitt, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ben Schott, Robert Sullivan, Wendy Shanker, Sloane Tanen, and Edward Sorel, among others. She played an instrumental role in the acquisition and shaping of Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life, which has spent close to ninety weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Hoping to round out her experience, Marisa transitioned to academic publishing and Columbia University Press in 2005, where she has held the position of Senior Copywriter in the marketing and publicity departments. Concurrent with her employment, she acted as reader for the Bettina Schrewe Literary Scouting Agency and completed a MA in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also became a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Thursday, December 02, 2010

There are 12 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!

Epiphany and a Side Order of Meaning (or, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”)

Wednesday, December 15th, 7:00-10:00pm, at Grub Street headquarters.

If only it were that simple. Elevating our work from the personal to the universal—to some larger meaning that has your readers shaking their head in recognition and in amazement at your grand wisdom—can feel daunting. In this seminar geared toward writers of personal essay and memoir, we’ll examine the work of authors who do it well, such as Bernard Cooper, Joan Didion, Scott Russell Saunders and others. We’ll discuss ways of working and revising that can help you unlock your own personal truths and during the second half of the class, actually try our hand at different writing exercises designed to get you working in that direction.

Instructor: Amy Yelin: Amy Yelin has published essays and memoir in the Boston Globe, Globe Magazine, the Gettysburg Review, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her essay “Torn” (originally published in the Baltimore Review), was recognized as a notable essay of 2006 in the Best American Essays 2007. Excerpts from her interview with author Amy Krouse Rosenthal are included in the 826 Guide to Writing Your Memoir, and she has an essay in the forthcoming anthology Mamas and Papas. In 2008, she won the Skirt magazine and WEKU (an NPR station) “This We Believe” contest and recorded her piece “On Magic” for a radio special. She has been awarded scholarships from the Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony and the Prague Summer Writing Program. Amy completed her MFA in creative writing at Lesley University in 2005 and she has been mentoring students in the program ever since. Her website is yelinwords.wordpress.com and she blogs (occasionally) at ihadamindonce.blogspot.com.

Level: For Everyone
Type: Seminar
Registration Deadline: Thursday, December 09, 2010

There are 9 seats available for this course.

Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!