Workshops
Write your story of medical, physical, or psychological challenges and trauma. Guided by acclaimed writers on health and trauma join a safe space to talk and write about your personal experiences.
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This five-day writing workshop, led by Melanie Brooks and Suzanne Strempek Shea, focuses on nonfiction writing that tackles personal and global challenges. Both instructors bring extensive experience in addressing health and trauma in their work, including memoirs, a craft book on writing hard stories, and various essays and op-eds.
Pre-workshop reading and writing assignments, daily writing time, and lectures on related writings and craft issues will help writers interested in or working on stories of medical, physical, and/or psychological challenges and trauma. Whether they’re writing stories of their (or others’) healing from cancer, recovering from addictions, surviving abuse, healing from grief, or reckoning with the real-world issues of navigating the world as a woman, person of color and/or member of the LGBTQ community – or whatever their life or interests lead you to on paper – writers will find this workshop a safe space for exploration, and fertile ground for making progress toward the stories they want the world to read. Those with moderate writing experience, and any life experience, are welcome.
A special invitation is extended to those with backgrounds in social work, medicine, teaching, counseling, first response or other related medical and service fields.
Header image by Dave Bell.
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Instructor: Melanie Brooks
Melanie Brooks is the author of the memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all (Vine Leaves Press, 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches creative nonfiction in the M.F.A. program at Bay Path University and professional writing at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program and a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She has had numerous interviews and essays on topics ranging from loss and grief to parenting and aging published in The Boston Globe, HuffPost, Psychology Today, Yankee Magazine, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college), and two Labs.
Instructor: Suzanne Strempek Shea
Suzanne Strempek Shea holds a bachelor's degree in photography from Maine College of Art and has worked as a newspaper and wedding photographer. She is the author of six novels, three memoirs, and three nonfiction works, with a new memoir — Composition: A Memoir in 42 Essays by 1 Kid on Her 8 Years in Catholic School, Handed in 60 Years Late — due out in September. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, Yankee, and ESPN the Magazine, and she has been featured on NBC's Today, NPR, and Voice of America. Suzanne has taught in MFA programs at the University of Southern Maine, Bay Path University, and the University of South Florida, and co-directs the Dingle Writers' Workshop in Ireland and the Iota Short Forms Writing program in Maine.
