4-Week: I, the Storm—Creating Complex First-Person Narrators in Fiction and Nonfiction

This course is a craft analysis and discussion of the work of women creating bold first-person narrators. When crafting her Living Autobiographies, Deborah Levy said, “I wanted to write … in the storm of life, when stuff, big stuff, is happening. So, the first person is a good tense for that. I found that I could really drill down in the first person and get into some quieter feelings and find a calm voice.” In this four-week workshop, we’ll do some close reading of the work of women writers using the I in bold, dynamic ways. We’ll study the craft and style of Marguerite Duras, Alexandra Fuller, Ayşegül Savaş, Jo Ann Beard, and others and will create, craft, and share a series of four vignettes, writing into the storm of life.