Saturday, September 27th, 10:00AM - 12:00PM
Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. General registration will open on Tuesday, August 19th at 10:00AM.
In this two-hour course, participants will craft a story based on a recent unpleasant encounter with a stranger. Students will write about these experiences, which we'll call Garden Variety Aggravation Incidents, as a practice template for eventually addressing other, more deeply traumatic stories. Students will practice and learn narrative and comedic techniques by writing their Garden Variety Aggravation Incident stories in a safe classroom environment.
Together, we will define the role of agency not only in traditional story structure but in the therapeutic re-telling of stories. Students will discover their motivation as protagonists in their stories: what they wanted during these tense moments and the actions they took. Next, we'll look at the role of humor in making emotionally-fraught stories easier to tell. We'll use the comedic techniques of nicknaming, roasting, and self-effacing irony.
Ultimately, we'll learn tools for cooling off those too-hot-to-handle emotional moments in our past, so that we can write well about hard times. We'll learn techniques for maintaining the emotional resonance of a trauma story without being overwhelmed by its pain. Students will leave the class with a 5-10 minute story they can tell to an audience or an 800-1200 word written narrative to submit for publication.