Instructor: Joanne Furio
As Isabel Allende put it, “Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care.” In this in-person generative craft class we will be reading the work of women who, in effect, by “no longer caring” created groundbreaking memoirs that caused a stir – by bending genres, exploring sexuality, veering from gender roles, or otherwise challenging the status quo. Discussions on craft will be followed by in-class freewrites and short homework assignments. Some pieces will be workshopped.
The writers whose work we’ll examine include Grace Paley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lidia Yuknavitch, Abigail Thomas, Roxane Gay, and Melissa Febos. Craft-wise, we’ll analyze how these writers bucked traditional forms to turn their experiences into page-turners, the eternal debate between truth versus what David Sedaris calls “true-ish” details, and the pros and cons of sharing the most intimate details of one’s physical and mental lives versus a more distanced narrative approach. Students will leave class with a greater knowledge of new approaches they can apply to their own memoir-writing.
Joanne Furio is an award-winning journalist and writer of creative nonfiction whose genre-fluid work ranges from prose poetry to flash, memoir, and personal essay. Her work has appeared in such publications as La Piccoletta Barca, Juked, Panoply, Craft Literary, The Believer, and Catapult, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was the recipient of a teaching fellowship, and has taught creative writing at Saint Mary’s, the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, and Poets & Writers.