Writing Workshops

Closer to the Truth: Translating Memory Into Fiction with Debra Jo Immergut (August 2024)

$150

2 Sessions

Out of stock

Saturday & Sunday 2:00 pm EDT - 5:00 pm EDT August 10 to August 11, 2024

Online via Zoom

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Fiction is an extraordinary machine for distilling deeply personal experience into art. In this weekend intensive, 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 or reshape for greater resonance. We’ll work on strategies for evoking setting, summoning characters, and shaping our narratives.

Our meetings will consist of illustrated lecture, generative writing sessions, and discussion of stellar examples from published work, plus one short story to be read in advance. If time and interest exist, we may share bits of our writing, but the main goal of this course is to pick up new tools for storytelling and to make new work. The course’s underlying lesson is this: every life can yield ample and gorgeous material for fiction.

Course Outline

Session I
- Senses & Sensibilities
- Summoning Characters
Session II
- Building a Narrative
- Finding Resolution
- The Words & The Well

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 Gotham Book Prize, and The Captives, an Edgar Award finalist 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, Hobart, and elsewhere. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in western Massachusetts, where she works at Smith College.

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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