upcoming classes & events
Keep moving downstream on your memoir project. In this five-month container, you’ll meet twice monthly in a small group to work on your book, receive craft and process support in community, and benefit from master-level mentorship.
Join Kati for 45 minutes of writing prompts and community-connecting conversation at the Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation Conference hosted at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.
Join Kati at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference to learn about craft, generate material, make new writing friends, and pick up publishing tips over a magical fall weekend in Jackson Hole.
All humans die. To focus on this fundamental truth can be macabre-- yet death exists hand in hand with some of our most powerful, precious, and beautiful experiences. In this 6-week nonfiction class, we'll explore the craft of writing about death, noticing the narrative structures and syntax that effectively hold brutal experiences.
What’s going on when gorgeous timely writing repeatedly comes close, yet fails to be accepted? In this one-session class, explore how your subconscious beliefs impact the way your writing goes into the world, and create a plan for shifting your energetics.
Although writing can be healing, crafting and publishing our most difficult stories can make trauma worse. In this 3-week workshop hosted over Zoom, learn how the physiological processes of trauma and shame interact with a writing process and use tools adapted from clinical practice to begin safely generating your own work.
How can a memoirist build vibrant scenes from foggy memories? In this 2-session class hosted at Jackson’s Center for the Arts, identify the types of research necessary for your project, complete generative challenges intended to recover material from your life, and learn strategies for turning this material into rich, riveting prose. You'll leave the class with a grounded sense of how to move forward in telling your story.
In this 8-month incubator for nonfiction writers, go from lit mag newbie to submitter extraordinaire. You’ll learn how to find literary magazines, assess your work for readiness, submit to the right publications, and use short-form publishing to build momentum for your writing. Along the way you’ll get to know the Best American Essays series, see drafts of BAE-included essays, benefit from the accountability of supportive community, hear from guest speakers from the lit mag world, and explore your spiritual relationship to the vulnerability of being seen.
All humans die. To focus on this fundamental truth can be macabre-- yet death exists hand in hand with some of our most powerful, precious, and beautiful experiences. In this 6-week nonfiction class, we'll explore the craft of writing about death, noticing the narrative structures and syntax that effectively hold brutal experiences.
Although writing can be healing, crafting and publishing our most difficult stories can make trauma worse. In this 4-hour workshop hosted over Zoom, learn how the physiological processes of trauma and shame interact with a writing process and use tools adapted from clinical practice to begin safely generating your own work.
Have you been working on a memoir seemingly forever without much forward progress? (Or not working on your memoir and beating yourself up for it?) Commit to this 11-week momentum-generating intensive container, where we’ll figure out what your next steps need to be and support you in making them happen.
The creative writing classroom is not an explicitly healing space—yet writers regularly bring their stories of trauma into workshops. In this 4-hour intensive, learn when writing heals and harms, discuss best practices, and assess your own self-regulation skills.
In this 9-hour virtual intensive, learn tools for drafting activating trauma scenes, break down the micro-level craft choices essential to writing about rape or molestation, and get clear on what it means to you to add your voice to the cultural conversation, all with the support of an intimate community of like-minded survivors.
In this eight-week asynchronous class for prose writers, we’ll dive into how scenes work and what they accomplish, exploring how scenes develop characters, seed tension, establish place and time, facilitate flashbacks, soften research, and build deeper themes in a story/essay.
The first fifty pages of a memoir have the power to snag (or lose!) the attention of agents, editors, and readers. In this 6-week workshop, we'll read the first 50 pages of four published memoirs, excavating the ways authors set up their primary tensions, structures, and voice, coming to understand the craft choices that build propulsivity, and channeling this into your work-in-progress.
Have you been working on a memoir seemingly forever without much forward progress? (Or not working on your memoir and beating yourself up for it?) Commit to this 11-week momentum-generating intensive container, where we’ll figure out what your next steps need to be and support you in making them happen.
Although writing can be healing, crafting and publishing our most difficult stories can make trauma worse. In this 4-hour workshop hosted over Zoom, learn how the physiological processes of trauma and shame interact with a writing process and use tools adapted from clinical practice to begin safely generating your own work.
Our most powerful stories can be the most brutal to write, leaving us frustrated, emotionally activated, and stuck. What gets in the way? How can we push forward without damaging our mental and physical health? In this 4-hour workshop hosted in-person by Paonia Books in Paonia, Colorado, we'll build a toolbox for unlocking urgent stories that have so far resisted telling.
In powerful memoirs, the author doesn’t just give a play-by-play of events—they use their story to build an idea. In this 5-hour virtual workshop hosted by Seattle’s Hugo House, writers will identify the reckonings at the center of their books, write into the moments that evolved their views, and assess with whether their thinking is developed enough yet—leaving with a deeper relationship to the meaning-making process of memoir writing.
Although writing can be healing, crafting and publishing our most difficult stories can make trauma worse. In this 2-hour workshop hosted by the Deschutes Public Library, learn how the physiological processes of trauma and shame interact with a writing process.
How can a memoirist build vibrant scenes from foggy memories? In this 6-week workshop over Zoom through Hugo house, writers will complete generative challenges intended to help them recover material from previous periods of their lives, learning strategies for turning this material into rich, riveting prose.
Have you been working on a memoir seemingly forever without much forward progress? (Or not working on your memoir and beating yourself up for it?) Commit to this nine-week momentum-generating intensive container, where we’ll figure out what your next steps need to be and support you in making them happen.
How can we ethically write about other people—and what does it mean to do it well? In this 6-hour workshop, explore the craft of building nuanced characters, consider the legal or logistical implications of your storytelling, and reckon with owning your story’s difficult truths.
In this 6-hour intensive hosted by Seattle’s Hugo House, explore whether your story is best told as an essay collection or in a memoir by identifying potential "centers of gravity," considering the arc of your narrator’s change, reckoning with repetitive elements, discussing unifying features, pinpointing your work's central questions, and confronting whether shame, fear, or an aversion to the work of dismantling existing essays could be shaping your book.
Our most powerful stories can be the most brutal to write, leaving us frustrated, traumatized, and stuck. What gets in the way? How can we push forward without damaging our mental and physical health? In this 8-week nonfiction class online through Catapult, we’ll build a craft toolbox for unlocking urgent stories that have so far resisted telling.
In this three-hour seminar, you'll see how cutting changes the flow of a work, examine how adding intentional language steers readers into a book's questions, and practice line-level tightening on a sample from your own work, leaving class with a grounded sense of how to streamline and guide your own memoir-in-process.
Do the holidays tend to throw off your writing practice? Commit to writing in community over Zoom for four weeks this December and January. Generate new work, discuss craft components of published essays, and enjoy peer feedback on one short essay, gaining rather than losing writing momentum in the midst of cocktails, cookies, and in-laws.
How do the big questions of our time inhabit the stories of our lives? And what does it look like on the page to tell exquisitely personal stories in ways that gesture toward larger concerns? In this 90-minute workshop through Literary Arts as part of the Portland Book Festival, writers uncover big questions buried in their own narratives, identify research paths for further exploration, connect with their own potentially-transformative obsessions, and examine how the stories we choose to tell can change us.
In this 3-hour virtual memoir seminar hosted by Literary Arts and the Portland Book Festival, students will explore how the contradictions in their personalities—the gaps between dirty laundry and grace—are the most interesting space, and how careful and brave craft choices allow us to write into our most gorgeous, complex selves.
Research can enlarge and deepen the stories we tell. But how do we turn academic literature, interviews, and site visits into something compelling to read? In this 2 hour virtual workshop hosted by the StoryStudio Chicago, writers will discuss strategies for rich note-taking, quoting others, translating technical language, and deciding which research--and how much--to lace into a piece of writing.
All humans die. To focus on this fundamental truth can be macabre-- yet death exists hand in hand with some of our most powerful, precious, and beautiful experiences. In this 6-week nonfiction class, we'll explore the craft of writing about death, noticing the narrative structures and syntax that effectively hold brutal experiences.
