Stranger Than Fiction: Channeling Your Existential Anxiety into Craft

We’ve moved online! All workshops will be conducted through Zoom, an interactive platform that allows you to participate in exercises and contribute to group conversation in your workshops. The day before your workshop you’ll receive an email with a link to Zoom for your workshop session. 

Member Price: $65
Deadline to Register: June 6, 1 pm
Instructor: July Westhale

In this 2.5 hour workshop, we will utilize craft techniques to work within the framework of our existential processing during a global crisis. This workshop will focus on a three part structure: first, embracing and incorporating anxiety and uncertainty into the writing process. Second, utilizing the structures of form (braided narrative, among others) to enact the experience of crisis in writing, and third, generative practices for continuing to write in times of duress.

This is a workshop that uniquely combines self-soothing techniques with concrete writing practices and textual analysis. We will look at the work of D.A. Powell, Pamela Petro, and others as examples. There will be built-in writing and sharing time within the allotted time. Open to all genres.

July Westhale is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of five collections of poetry, including Trailer Trash,Occasionally Accurate Science, The Cavalcade, Quantifiable Data, and Via Negativa. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine. www.julywesthale.com