Writing the Extra-Ordinary: How to Craft Personal Essays from Everyday Life
Four Sessions with Instructor Sarah Leavens
Saturdays
March 26 – April 16
11:00am – 12:00pm
via Zoom
What’s significant about everyday life? Anything, if you approach it like a writer! In this four-part workshop on crafting the creative nonfiction essay, we’ll explore writing about “ordinary” subjects. Workshop sessions will be instructive and generative: our goal is to get you thinking and writing. We’ll cover strategies from brainstorming and framing a topic to using style and craft to make it come alive. We’ll also consider the essay as a process of discovery, in the spirit of this statement by Annie Dillard: “The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illuminates the path just before its fragile tip.” This workshop is offered through the Creative Nonfiction Foundation in conjunction with our Community Read 2022, but you needn’t have read the book in order to participate. All levels of writing experience are welcome!
Please register by filling out the form below
and we’ll send you a link to join us!
About Sarah LeavensSarah Leavens is writer, teacher, and artist residing in Pittsburgh, PA. A Lecturer in English at the University of Pittsburgh, she also works as a teaching artist specializing in bookbinding, drawing, painting, creative writing, and intersections thereof. She has taught with The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, PA Arts in Education, Creative Nonfiction magazine, and the Pittsburgh Office of Public Art, among others. Leavens received an MFA in poetry and nonfiction from Chatham University in 2012, and she was the 2012-2013 Out of the Forge Writer-in-Residence in Braddock, PA. Her writing has appeared in The Diverse Arts Press, Corium, and So to Speak, among other places, and is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction’s Sunday Short Reads series.
