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.
Help Kati celebrate Lightning Flowers’ 4th birthday with a reading, conversation, and cake at Secret World Books in Highland Park, 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.
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.
Join Kati and the Teton Science Schools for a book talk and conversation on the iconic porch of conservationist Mardy Murie’s cabin on the historic Murie Ranch.
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.
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.
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.
Take advantage of Kati’s trauma writing doula experience in a lower-cost, asynchronous format. Over six weeks on WetInk, you’ll assess what’s getting in the way of your writing, connect with the resources you need to move forward, and find a narrative toehold in your project—ultimately stepping forward into your necessary writing transformation with power and momentum.
Join Kati at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, where she’ll deliver the Nonfiction Keynote, teach a workshop, and consult on manuscripts. For nearly three decades, the Jackson Hole Writers Conference has brought together writers of all levels from all walks of life to share ideas, hone craft, and form community.
At this panel at #AWP22 in Philadelphia and online, nonfiction writers Aggie Stewart, Grace Talusan, Katherine Standefer, and Alden Jones offer strategies for pacing emotionally-charged material in trauma memoirs.
Join current University of Arizona MFA Director Susan Briante and program graduates Katherine Standefer, Justin St. Germain and Sophia Terazawa to discuss their work ... and the 50th anniversary of the program.
A year after a strange virus appeared in China, ripped through New York, and shut down the world, our lives are marked. In this 10-week class, we’ll tell the story of what we lived. Moving intentionally through different levels of our pandemic experience, week by week we’ll turn experiences into wisdom—examining changes in our parenting, career, partnerships, and friendships, as well as our experiences of politics, social justice, the environment, and our bodies. We’ll arrive, at the end, with the beginnings of writing that can minister to us all.
How can crowdfunding launch, advance, and sustain writing careers? In this three-hour virtual workshop through Seattle’s Hugo House, writers learn the differences between platforms and explore how to build strong campaigns, the emotional tangle of asking for money, the pressure of being accountable to an audience, and the ways crowdfunding can bolster literary community.
In this 90-minute gathering, writers have the opportunity to ask Kati their questions— whether craft questions about writing trauma, illness, and sexuality; the way a writing life intersects spiritual invitations; or what it means to put our work in the world at this moment.
Telling our stories of trauma can be excruciating, and the process—if not undertaken carefully—can further damage our nervous systems. But for some of us the task is spiritually mandatory, demanding that we lean forward into a process not just of drafting, but of transforming. In this two-day online workshop, we’ll explore what it looks like to surrender to a writing process that is operating on multiple planes, while digging into the specifics of crafting inventive and powerful art from difficult stories.
Join Kati and debut author Maggie Downs in a fierce and smart conversation hosted by UC Riverside and moderated by local Portland writer Jenny O'Connell about the journey they knew they must take, and the process of not only doing it, but writing a book about it.
In this 90-minute virtual workshop through Jackson Hole Writers, participants will explore how the big questions of our time inhabit the stories of our lives, digging into how our research paths, lines of inquiry, and attention to obsession might open even exquisitely personal stories into larger narratives.
Join Kati and debut author Maggie Downs in a fierce and smart conversation-- moderated by local Portland writer Jenny O'Connell-- about the journey they knew they must take, and the process of not only doing it, but writing a book about it.
What happens when you’re living one life, and you suddenly receive clear spiritual instructions to live another? In this 75-minute conversation facilitated by poet and bone-thrower Kim Stoll, author Kati Standefer, brewery owner/founder Julie Vernon, and Ninth House owner/founder Melisa Doran Cole discuss their experiences being told there was a thing they must do, and becoming the person who could do it.
Join Kati for a virtual reading at Elk River Books of Livingston, Montana, one of the communities where she worked on Lightning Flowers. The free event will stream live on Elk River Books’ Facebook page.
Telling our stories of trauma can be excruciating, and the process—if not undertaken carefully—can damage our nervous systems. But for some of us the task is spiritually mandatory. In this 1 hour workshop as part of The Yoga Seed Collective's Roots to Resilience Summit, we’ll explore what it looks like to surrender to a writing process that is operating on multiple planes.
Join Kati as she reads from her new book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, as part of the Visiting Writers Series at The Colorado College, her alma mater.
Join Kati and Kelly Sundberg in conversation about the road from the essay to the book, hosted by The Essay Daily as part of its new Salon series.
Join Kati for a reading and conversation on Colorado’s Front Range, where much of Lightning Flowers takes place.
In this 90-minute virtual workshop through Jackson Hole Writers, participants will explore how the big questions of our time inhabit the stories of our lives, digging into how our research paths, lines of inquiry, and attention to obsession might open even exquisitely personal stories into larger narratives.
Join author Katherine E. Standefer—who grew up in Arlington Heights--for a reading and Q&A from her debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life.
Join Kati for a reading and conversation with one of the beloved communities where Lightning Flowers: My Journey To Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life takes place.
Join Kati in conversation with Philosophy and Medical Humanities Professor Dr. Joseph McCaffrey about her new book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life. This event is hosted by the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Medical Humanities program.
We did not choose these times. But we live in them all the same. In this six-week asynchronous workshop, we’ll use writing as an anchor for exploring how we might live through this moment with as much presence, bravery, and beauty as possible. Through writing our COVID-19 origin story, digging into the strange beauty of repetition, connecting with natural allies, identifying our lineage of loss and bravery, exploring our relationships to death, noticing our own transformation, building writing community, and optionally building and workshopping an essay, we’ll lean into the mythic nature of what we are experiencing, emerging braver and more alive.
**This class is sadly cancelled. ** How can crowdfunding launch, advance, and sustain writing careers? In this three-hour class, writers learn the differences between platforms and explore how to build strong campaigns, the emotional tangle of asking for money, the pressure of being accountable to an audience, and the ways crowdfunding can bolster literary community.
