Do you want to write essays that speak to larger societal issues and learn how your personal narrative can speak to the cultural moment? 

for Creative Nonfiction

Powerful, of-the-moment creative nonfiction weaves our personal experience, as both subjects and witnesses, with larger issues to convey important themes and messages of social justice and advocacy. Our writing can speak against injustices occurring in the world around us and help question the status quo. But what skills do we need as writers to speak out on topics we are passionate about? 

Join Amy Shea, author of Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins, to explore the idea of the essay as activism. Learn craft techniques to combine your interior experience with wider themes to create effective messaging that readers will emotionally connect with. Develop your command of rhetoric, structure, and conveying meaning to lend a critical eye to the standards and norms held before us.

We will do close reading of some short examples from published essays, reviewing not only how but also what the author is doing. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in some writing prompts and practice toward writing or revising their own culturally relevant essays.

Can’t make it live? No worries—a replay will be available to all registrants.

In this webinar, you will:

• CLOSE READ examples to understand the choices authors make to convey meaning
• CONSIDER how to connect personal experience to collective importance
• PRACTICE using form and structure to explore larger themes
• EXPLORE different rhetorical devices/craft elements that can do the heavy lifting in meaning-making

This webinar is ideal for beginning and intermediate writers …

• looking to expand beyond the personal essay
• who want to learn how craft elements create effective messaging
• who want to use their craft for advocacy
• considering writing “memoir-plus,” who want to know how to weave the personal with the universal 
• who want to explore more experimental styles of essay writing

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

Amy Shea is an essayist with an MFA and a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and is the author of Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Portland Review, The Massachusetts Review, the Journal of Sociology of Health & Illness, among others. She works as the writing program director for Mount Tamalpais College, a free community college for the incarcerated people of San Quentin. Learn more about her work at https://amysshea.com.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

FULL REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

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