How do you tell the story of your life? How do you convey truths in stories whose exact details are forgotten? Where do you even begin?

In this five-week course, we will dive deep through a series of grounded lectures and discussions, expansive writing explorations, memory and sensory exercises, focused and open-ended freewrites, all with a look at evocative writers whose work suggests a spectrum of approaches. Then you will draw on what is deepest in you to write the stories you have always wanted to express, locate the narrators of your life, flesh out some of the other voices that inhabit your memory and imagination, and find the structure of your telling. Whether you are straining to find a way into your material or trying to “re-vision” your work to bring forward its meaning and thematic coherence, this workshop can propel your writing forward. It will also support your work with memory and what it reveals and develop strategies to keep your memory activated.

We pay special attention to voice, for those working to create a narrator compelling enough to carry a full-length book, and “large” enough to hold the story. We’ll illuminate this complex aspect of writing memoir and autobiographical fiction.

Our work together will always be challenging, and the atmosphere, always supportive. You will find that this class environment draws the work out of you—the writing explorations are remarkably generative. Expect to take some great steps in the process of writing a story, from opening and revealing the work, to developing and crystallizing it, through creative exploration that uses the truth of your experience.

Class size is limited. Access to Slack is encouraged.

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). She has forthcoming or published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Platform Review, Poetry Northwest, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, the Translations Editor for Broadsided Press, Non-Fiction Editor for High Desert Journal, and Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. She teaches in the low residency MFA Program at Western Colorado University and is the 2021-2023 Idaho Writer in Residence.  Read more at her website here. 

This class is a hybrid. It will be both on Zoom and in person.