Class Meetings: Mondays and Wednesdays, November 27-December 13, from 6:00-8:00PM, in the Poetry Center Conference Room 207.

We are all accumulations of the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we’ve been told. We inherit family histories in fragments, and while family members may agree on the elements of a story, we sometimes construct different meanings and personal narratives around them. In this course, we’ll explore what responsibility we as writers owe to established family narratives, and when (and how, and why) we should diverge from them. Over six weeks, we will generate and workshop our writing. We will read personal essays and memoir excerpts by writers who document, rewrite, and deconstruct their own family histories, such as Mary Karr, Cheryl Strayed, Jeannette Walls, Melissa Febos, Mason Stokes, and David Sedaris.