Adult Education Courses
WINTER/SPRING SESSION 2010
The First-Person Voice: Weekend Intensive
Dates: Saturday, February 20 and Sunday, February 21
Times: 12-4PM both days
Location: First Person Offices, 1 South Broad Street, 17th floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Led by August Tarrier (bio below)
If you’re interested in putting true-life experience on the page, this weekend workshop can help you discover new tools for crafting and recording that experience. For four hours on Saturday and four hours on Sunday: come and explore, find your voice, deepen your connection to your stories. We’ll use the elements of history, biography, poetry and fiction to create an authentic self on the page. The workshop will help you to deepen your connection to your material, find ways to craft memorable and original prose, and plumb the depths of your experience in order to find your own voice. Your creative spirit will be sparked via in-class writing exercises and discussions of classic personal essays.
If you have a personal essay or memoir in progress, please bring an excerpt to class.
The First-Person Voice
Dates: Six weeks, Thursday evenings, March 11 - April 15
Time: 6-8PM
Location: First Person Offices, 1 South Broad Street, 17th floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Led by August Tarrier (bio below)
“A fiction writer has no reason to lie. A memoirist has an illusion to protect.”—John Dufresne
We’ll spend time exploring that illusion, bringing ourselves round to the conventions of the personal essay and memoir. What techniques do writers use to tell “true” stories? What are the fundamental tenets of constructing an authentic self on the page?
The workshop will help you to deepen your connection to your material, find ways to craft memorable and original prose, and plumb the depths of your experience in order to find your own voice. We’ll explore the elements of the first person voice to create personal essays and/or chapters of memoirs. Your creative spirit will be sparked via in-class writing exercises and discussions of classic personal essays. We’ll also be workshopping participants’ essays or memoir excerpts.
The workshop will provide you with the following tools:
How to deal with the vagaries of memory (e.g., what if I don’t remember exactly what happened or precisely what someone said?)
How to signal to readers that your story is “true”
How to heighten dramatic tension in your essay or memoir
How to use the elements of fiction (e.g., scene, character, dialogue, etc.) to craft nonfiction
Workshop Leader August Tarrier works as an editor and writing consultant, specializing in developing memoirs, novels and scholarly and academic projects. She has led writing workshops with community members, high school students, and Philadelphia secondary-school English teachers. August earned a Ph.D. in contemporary literature from Temple University and taught creative writing at Villanova University, Temple University, the University of Baltimore, and the Camden High School for the Creative Arts. She has won several national awards for her short stories, including the Zoetrope Prize, and is currently at work on a novel.
[...] of sitting down to chat with August Tarrier. An educator and award winning writer, she is also leading a workshop this coming weekend on memoir writing. We got a little into what she’s been up to, as well [...]
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