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Beyond the What: Swapping Art for Plot in Memoir, with Lidia Yuknavitch
July 24, 2021 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
$150WHAT: A three-hour online webgasm with Lidia Yuknavitch and at least one special guest. (With a 15-minute intermission.)
WHEN: Saturday, July 24th 1PM-4PM Pacific (4PM-7PM Eastern)
WHERE: ZOOM. Meeting ID will be provided ahead of time. (Interested in this event but unable to join it live? All registered attendees will receive a link to a recording of it that will be viewable for one week afterwards.)
HOW MUCH: $150. Payment plans are available, contact Daniel Elder at registration@corporealwriting.com
SCHOLARSHIPS: Scholarships are always available. Click here to apply.
(Note: This offering is available as part of a three-webinar bundle along with Unlikeable on Purpose and Revivify: Breathing Life into Dead Matter. Each webinar is $150, but you can sign up for all 3 for $395. Just choose the BUNDLE option from the drop-down menu when adding this to your cart.)
The Heart and Guts of Memoir, OR, How to Let Go of Plot and Get Artful with Your Lifestory
The two most frequent concerns I get when I work with people writing nonfiction or memoir books are: what if everyone I know and love hates me for what I have written, and why would anyone care about this thing that happened to me. It’s that second concern I’d like to put into play. Writing nonfiction is not a play-by-play of your life, or if it is, you may be engaged in journalism or reportage, both fine pursuits. But if it’s a memoir you want to conjure, you have a deeper challenge than representing the PLOT of what happened to you. You have to find the art and heart of the matter. You have to conjure artful modes of telling. In this three hour webinar we will look at some epic examples and then go over six strategies for clearing away summary and amplifying artful modes of storytelling to AMP your nonfiction so that a reader will not only care about what happened to you, by why it matters.
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author the short story collection Verge (Riverhead Books), the novels The Book of Joan (Harper Books), The Small Backs of Children (Harper Books), and Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books), and the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books). Her TED Talk “On the Beauty of Being a Misfit” has received over 3 million views, and spawned The Misfit Manifesto (TED Books/Simon and Schuster). She lives and collaborates in Portland, Oregon at Corporeal Writing. She is a very good swimmer.