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Inquiry as Narrative w/ Lilly Dancyger
October 12, 2021 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
$150Tuesday, October 12th, 5-8pm Pacific
Cost: $150 payment plans available, email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com
Where: Corporeal Center, 510 SW 3rd Avenue, suite 101, Portland, Or. 97204
Description:
There’s often so much emphasis on plot and narrative, but there are other ways to move a story forward. Sometimes the most interesting thing isn’t what happened, and then what happened next, and then what happened next—but what we have to say about what happened, and how our perspective on a single event can shift and change over time. How the very process of writing about an experience—and the research and inquiry that goes into writing about our own lives—can change our relationship to the thing we’re writing about.
In this session, we’ll talk about how to shape a personal essay—or even a book-length memoir—around how you think and feel about an experience, and what you’re able to learn about it after the fact, as opposed to relying so heavily on the chronological order of events to create momentum in a story. We’ll focus on the internal arc (perspective, emotion, how our relationship to a formative experience changes over time), discussing examples and writing together.
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press. Lilly is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).