This workshop was offered in 2024. Sign up for our email list to receive updates for this year’s conference.
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Tell It Slant: A Memoir Workshop
Writing Workshop in New Jersey
January 12-15, 2024
Led by John Cotter
How do we keep fresh the stories we’ve told a hundred times? In this workshop, we’ll steal strategies from writers like Anna Deavere Smith, Maxine Hong Kingston and John Berger, who used a little fiction or a lot of art writing true stories. We will try out writing exercises based on their examples and spend time sharing our own drafts. With kindness and humor we will dig deeper into the meaning of our lives to build books out of our stories. Bring a few pages of something that’s been giving you trouble, or start something brand new.
*Limited to just 10 participants.*
“I came into the getaway not knowing what to expect and left counting down the days until I could come back. It was easy to take risks and attempt something new with such a wonderful community of writers who all expressed such support and encouragement. It was something that I did not realize I was missing in my life until I experienced it. Thank you!”
~ Trista, Toms River, NJ
John Cotter
John Cotter is the author of the memoir Losing Music and the novel Under the Small Lights. He has contributed essays, theater pieces and fiction to the New England Review, Raritan, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, Commonweal, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. His personal essays receive frequent notable mention in Best American Essays. He’s been a resident artist at SPACE Gallery in Portland, ME and the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. Read an essay by John and visit his website.
