2023 Summer Conference
Ten Tips: An Intensive Workshop on
Writing Your Personal Story
This advanced workshop is limited to ten participants, assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.
Submission Deadline: June 23, 2022. Once you have received notice that you are registered, please submit electronically no more than five double-spaced pages of personal narrative to lydiaiwwg@gmail.com, Use the subject line: Submission for Memoir Intensive. Work can be taken from a single long piece or several shorter, stand-alone pieces Be sure to include at least one of your opening paragraphs or pages and one of your closing sections. Please use Times New Roman, 12-point type and submit your work as a .doc so the instructor and other participants can add observations. Preference will be given to full-week registrants. Manuscripts will be distributed to all participants in advance of the conference.
Annie Dillard once said, “You have to take pains not to hang on the reader’s arms, like a drunk, and say ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting’.” What is it, exactly, that can make your personal narrative truly engaging? Not simply a recollection of your experience or an information dump. Working together we will be looking at how to find the kernel, the heart of your story, the image or concept that teems with life, even at its most deceptively subdued. Using this kernel, we will then explore and apply ten techniques useful for writing the openings, middles, and closings of your own personal essays, autobiographical short stories, and memoirs. Personal stories can be made to matter; this workshop demonstrates how. Participants are invited to submit ahead of time up to 5 pages of their own personal writing to foster collaboration and focus feedback.
Judith Huge has spent over thirty years developing innovative approaches to both learning and writing. As president of her own national consulting firm, teacher of both undergraduate and graduate-level college courses, and director of writing workshops across the country, she has made a difference in the way thousands of people find, craft, and promote their voices through writing. She currently teaches intensive writing workshops for the Osher Learning Center ( University of South Florida) and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill (Cape Cod, Massachusetts), among others She is a co-author of 101 Ways You Can Help: How to Offer Comfort and Support to Those Who Are Grieving (Sourcebook, 2009), as well as “A Middle Aged Woman and the Sea,” a tale of loss and transition (Women in the Wild, A Traveler’s Tale Anthology.)
