Writing Workshops

Closer to the Truth: Translating Memory Into Fiction with Debra Jo Immergut (Sold Out)

$395

6 sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 6:00 pm EST - 8:00 pm EST January 12 to February 16, 2023

Online via Zoom

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This workshop has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Randy Winston at [email protected].

Fiction is an extraordinary machine for distilling deeply personal experience into art. In this generative workshop, participants will examine how writers of stories and novels can most effectively harness that machine’s power.

Keeping in mind Joan Didion’s observations about the differences between truth and fact—“How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth”—we will explore ways to mine our lives for powerful raw material while avoiding overexposure. We’ll consider when it’s best to hew close to “real life” and when it’s better to recast, reshape, or simply lie about everything for greater narrative drive and resonance.

Each meeting will focus on a different element of story construction, providing a theme for readings from current and classic fiction and for in-class writing sessions. Participants will generate new pieces and have multiple opportunities for sharing their work. They will read each other’s drafts and respond with insight and compassion. The course’s underlying lesson is this: every life can yield ample and gorgeous material for fiction.

Course Outline:

Session 1: The Senses
Session 2: Summoning Characters
Session 3: What Makes a Story
Session 4: Building a Narrative
Session 5: Moving Toward Resolution
Session 6: The Words & The Well

Capacity: 12

Led By

Debra Jo Immergut

Debra Jo Immergut

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the novels You Again, named a New York Times Best of the Year and shortlisted for the 2021 Gotham Book Prize, and The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author and published in over a dozen countries. She has also published a collection of short fiction, Private Property. Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, the New York Times, PANK, and elsewhere. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

By Debra Jo Immergut

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You Again

By Debra Jo Immergut

Published by HarperCollins

PURCHASE

Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age twenty-two—right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now forty-six and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more explosive and life-altering?

As weeks go by, Abby continues to spot her double around her old New York haunts—and soon, despite her better instincts, Abby finds herself tailing her look-alike. She is dogged by a nagging suspicion that there is a deeper mystery to figure out, one rooted far in her past. All the while, Abby’s life starts to slip from her control: her marriage hits major turbulence, her teenage son drifts into a radical movement that portends a dark coming era. When her elusive double presents her with a dangerous proposition, Abby must decide how much she values the life she’s built, and how deeply she knows herself.

You Again is an audaciously constructed novel, an unboxing of memory, desire, and regret—and an electrifying portrait of a woman hurtling toward a key crossroads in her life, where a secret lies buried like an undetonated bomb.
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The Captives

By Debra Jo Immergut

Published by HarperCollins

PURCHASE

As an inmate psychologist at a state prison, Frank Lundquist has had his fair share of surprises. But nothing could possibly prepare him for the day in which his high school object of desire, Miranda Greene, walks into his office for an appointment. Still reeling from the scandal that cost him his Manhattan private practice and landed him in his unglamorous job at Milford Basin Correctional Facility in the first place, Frank knows he has an ethical duty to reassign Miranda’s case. But Miranda is just as beguiling as ever, and he’s insatiably curious: how did a beautiful high school sprinter and the promising daughter of a congressman end up incarcerated for a shocking crime? Even more compelling: though Frank remembers every word Miranda ever spoke to him, she gives no indication of having any idea who he is.

Inside the prison walls, Miranda is desperate and despairing, haunted by memories of a childhood tragedy, grappling with a family legacy of dodgy moral and political choices, and still trying to unwind the disastrous love that led to her downfall. And yet she is also grittily determined to retain some control over her fate. Frank quickly becomes a potent hope for her absolution—and maybe even her escape.

Propulsive and psychologically astute, The Captives is an intimate and gripping meditation on freedom and risk, male and female power, and the urges toward both corruption and redemption that dwell in us all.

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About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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