This workshop was offered in 2024. Sign up for our email list to receive updates for this year’s conference.
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The World in a Grain of Sand:
Writing Creative Nonfiction
Writing Workshop in New Jersey
January 12-15, 2024
Led by Judy Copeland
Creative nonfiction often starts with a small lived experience: a remark overheard, a childhood memory, an image from the TV, even a stubbed toe. Through evocative writing prompts, this workshop will invite us to tap into these moments and practice writing work that resonates beyond ourselves. As we share and discuss our pieces in a positive, supportive community, we will look for the potential in each draft—themes, subtext, conflicts, what the story might want to become. Although the workshop’s focus will be on generating new writing of our own, we will also examine model essays to learn how authors use small moments to shed light on the meaning of our lives and their broader historical and cultural contexts. All forms of creative nonfiction are welcome—memoir, humor, travel stories, nature writing, narrative journalism, lyric essays and more. For beginning and experienced writers alike.
*Limited to just 10 participants.*
“The workshop leaders are talented and compassionate, pushing you to new levels. The atmosphere is charged with creativity and appreciation for the work of others. I travel from Chicago to attend and have not been disappointed.”
~ Donna, Willowbrook, IL
Judy Copeland
Judy Copeland was raised in Japan, the United States, and India. At age forty, she left a career as an international lawyer to backpack around Oceania, Asia and Africa, staying with families she met along the way. At age fifty, she began to write travel memoir, which led to an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa. Her nonfiction has appeared in Best American Travel Writing and has won prizes from Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, Malahat Review, Water~Stone Review and other journals. She recently retired from Stockton University, where she taught creative nonfiction workshops. Read an essay by Judy.
