Write your story of medical, physical, or psychological challenges and trauma. Guided by an acclaimed writer on health and trauma join a safe space to talk and write about your personal experiences.

There are no available registration dates at this time.

Nonfiction writing about challenges both personal and global will be the focus of this five-day workshop led by Melanie Brooks who has long addressed health and trauma in the writing of her own forthcoming memoir, a craft book on tackling hard stories on the page, and 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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Melanie Brooks

Instructor: Melanie Brooks

Melanie Brooks is the author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches Creative Nonfiction in the MFA program at Bay Path University and professional writing at Northeastern University in Massachusetts and creative writing at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire. She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program. Her interviews and essays have been published in Psychology Today, the HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, The Writer Magazine, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. Her forthcoming memoir, A Hard Silence, about living with the ten-year secret of her father’s HIV, will be published in September 2023. Though her Canadian roots run deep, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college), and two Labs.

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