THURSDAYS, August 20th - September 10th
This four-week class focuses on beginnings and sticky places in a piece of writing. Whether you’re struggling to start a new memoir, feeling stalled midway through a personal narrative or short story, or trying to regain momentum on a longer project, this generative workshop will help you reconnect with both your writing practice and your work-in-progress through a supportive community of fellow writers.
Together, we’ll explore ways to generate fresh material and cultivate a sustainable writing habit through guided prompts, discussion of published examples, and practical strategies for overcoming creative blocks. During class, you’ll write in response to prompts and experiment with techniques drawn from fiction, memoir, and personal narrative while developing tools you can return to long after the course ends.
Rather than focusing on completing a single piece, this class is designed to help writers make meaningful progress on existing projects and generate new material. You might draft a new chapter of a memoir, discover the opening of a novel, create a series of flash-fiction pieces, or uncover an unexpected direction in a larger work.
Participants are welcome, but never required, to share their work and receive feedback from peers and the instructor. Writers at all levels are welcome. Come with a notebook and a project, or simply the desire to start one. You’ll leave with new pages, renewed creative energy, and a clearer path forward. No homework required!
Kristen Cosby is a freelance writer, editor, educator, and performer. Her work has received support from the Jan Michalski Foundation (Switzerland), Can Serrat (Spain), the Corporation of Yaddo (USA), the MacDowell Artist Colony (USA), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (USA). In addition, her essays have won the Normal Prize in Nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. Other works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Normal School, The Normal School Online, Kenyon Review Online, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Pitt Med Magazine, Proto, and Lodestars Anthology, as well as been anthologized in The Pleasure Principle, The Moment, and The Spirit of Disruption. Kristen has performed work as a storyteller at The Moth, Redwood Nights, the Naked Truth, the Marsh Theater, and Stage Werx’s Solo Sundays, and as part of La Cocina’s Voices from the Kitchen.