Through inspirational writing exercises and guidance from Beth Ann Fennelly, learn how to start small to tell your big story in this interactive memoir workshop.

What should we do when we have the urge to write our stories, but we can’t figure out how or where to start? This series of all-levels, interactive craft classes and workshops will provide strategies for those seeking to answer this question. Our main strategy will be this: start small. 

Our spirit animal for this class will be the hummingbird. The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly forward, backward, sideways, and, for short distances, upside down. Precisely because they are so small, hummingbirds can do things other birds can’t do. In this class, we’ll look at tiny texts and study the things that they can do because they are small. How can attention to the tiniest literary creations challenge and inspire us?  How can writing small trick us into writing our big stories?

Hummingbird hovering over a book - By Dave Bell
Through inspirational writing exercises and guidance from Beth Ann Fennelly, learn how to start small to tell your big story.

Every day we will focus on a different short form and/or technique, such as micro-memoirs, zuihitsu, hermit crab essays, and others. In today’s increasingly heterogeneous landscape, cross-genre works that blend inheritances from multiple literary parents have a new urgency and popularity. These hybrid forms are also unusually user-friendly, especially for writers who feel overwhelmed or intimidated when faced with telling their truths.

Beth Ann Fennelly will begin each day with a craft talk and share favorite examples and tips, then give students a writing prompt and time to compose. Next, when we come back together, you’ll have the opportunity to share your work and receive constructive feedback. And the last part of the workshop day will be time for questions and individual consultations.

Instructor, Beth Ann Fennely’s TEDx Talk on how literature can help us develop empathy:

 

Excerpt: Reading fiction can educate us emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, says Beth Ann Fennelly, creative writing professor and poet laureate of Mississippi. She makes the case for why we humans — and the world — continue to need literature.

Images by Dave Bell.

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Instructor: Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Beth Ann has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. She is also the author of 3 books of prose: Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays; The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin; and Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2018)—a celebratory book that combines the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys.

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