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Instructor: Elissa Altman
Monday - Thursday
August 19 - 22
9am - 12pm
4 sessions

As children, we hear this refrain all the time: Who do you think you are? As writers and makers of art, we still hear it: Who are we to tell our story? Must we ask permission to tell the truth? We are the story-telling species, and the human compulsion to create narrative art from experience makes us who we are. The act of crafting our stories into engaging memoir and creative non-fiction elevates them beyond the abstract. But the writing of memoir often begins with daunting questions of permission and truth-telling, which together can keep the memoirist from moving into a place where voice and story are free to emerge. In this workshop, we will explore the creation of engaging personal narrative and focus on bigger craft issues, enabling the new memoirist to move beyond the constraints of fear to a place of clarity. Please come with the memoir or essay you are working on, a willingness to unravel process and permission, and an acknowledgement that the impulse to tell one’s story must be honored. 

Elissa Altman is the author of the upcoming On Permission: A Manifesto for Writers, Artists, and Dreamers (Godine Books, 2024) and the critically-acclaimed, award-winning author of three memoirs: Motherland: A Memoir of Life, Loathing, and Longing; Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw; and Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking. The 2023 Barnswallow Writer-in-Residence and recipient of a 2023 Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency, Altman’s work has appeared everywhere from Orion to The Guardian, Tin House to O: The Oprah Magazine, Lion’s Roar, Krista Tippett’s On Being, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, where her column, Feeding My Mother, ran for a year. A finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir and the 2020 Maine Literary Award in Memoir, she teaches the craft of memoir widely and divides her time between Maine and Connecticut.