$495
8 Sessions
Out of stock
Once a week Mondays, 7:00 pm EDT - 9:00 pm EDT March 28 to May 16, 2022
Online via Zoom
If you can write grief as you truly experienced it, you can write anything. Over the course of this class, participants will have the opportunity to workshop a story of up to twelve pages in a warm and supportive space. We’ll explore entranceways into grief stories and ways to end them meaningfully, even if we haven’t found closure for similar experiences. We’ll also look at how sound and structure can be used to communicate feeling; what constitutes change in a grief story; consider new ideas on sentimentality and reader resistance; and learn ways to care for ourselves as we tell these important stories.
Capacity: 12
Led by
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Diane Zinna
Diane Zinna
Diane Zinna is the author of The All-Night Sun (Random House, 2020) which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Cabell First Novelist Award. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and was the longtime membership director for AWP, The Association of Writers & Writing Programs. There, she created the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, helping to match more than six hundred writers over twelve seasons. She is also the creator of Grief Writing Sundays, a popular writing class on telling difficult stories that has met every week since the start of the pandemic. Diane is the recipient of an ArtsFairfax Artist Grant, and beginning Fall 2022, she will be the Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with her husband, daughter, and doodle.
By Diane Zinna
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The All-Night Sun
By Diane Zinna
Published by Random House
Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, D.C. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that makes Lauren feel as though she is reclaiming her lost adolescence.
When Siri invites her on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: green, fresh, and new, everything just thawing out. But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic, brooding brother, Magnus. Siri is resentful, and Lauren starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, self-destructive, even cruel. On their last night together, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, a night when no one sleeps, boundaries blur, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn.
Ultimately, Lauren must acknowledge the truth of what happened with Siri and come to terms with her own tragic past in this gorgeously written, deeply felt debut about the transformative relationships that often come to us when things feel darkest.
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.