What are you planning for your writing in 2019? How are you feeding your creative life? How are you getting yourself closer to completing that essay and/or that memoir? Why not start off the year with Writing Our Lives?

When: January 19, 12pm-5pm

Where: West Village, NYC

How much: By Donation

How to register: By application

You want to write the stories of your life but don’t know where to start. 

You’ve wondered: How do I write these stories that haunt me? What do I need to write them? How do I decide what to write?  

Personal essays are everywhere. Some say their heyday is over but their popularity hasn’t abated. Still, there’s much more to writing a personal essay than chronicling a wild or salacious experience. The best personal essays invite the reader in and show how an experience changed the author through vivid sensory details, engaging scenes and well-developed characters. In this class, we’ll break down the specific elements that make an essay great, we’ll read model essays, and we’ll do a ton of writing.

This class is also for you hoping-to-be memoir writers. My approach is to focus on the micro (the personal essay) because you can take these tools into the writing of a longer piece, i.e. a memoir, essay collection, etc.

A few things:

* This class is capped at 20 students.

* The class is by application only. How to apply: Send an email to writingourlivesworkshop@gmail.com with “Writing Our Lives One Day Personal Essay Intensive” in the subject line. In the email, answer the following questions honestly and concisely. (Please keep your answers brief.):
1. Why are you interested in taking this class?
2. What do you hope to take from the class? 
3. This is a POC centered space. What do you think this means and how do you feel about it?
4. Share anything else you want me to know about you.

You will receive notification by January 12th. 

If you are accepted, you are expected to: be on time and do the homework that will be sent to you in advance.

About the facilitator: 

Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer, educator and writing coach. She is currently completing her memoir, A Dim Capacity for Wings, and chronicles the journey at vanessamartir.blog. A five-time VONA/Voices and two-time Tin House fellow, Vanessa’s work has been widely published, including in The Rumpus, Bitch Magazine, The Toast, the VONA/Voices Anthology, Dismantle, and the NYTimes Bestseller Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. Vanessa is the founder of the #52essays2017 challenge, and creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop, which she teaches in NYC and online. She has served as guest editor of Aster(ix) and The James Franco Review. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can find Vanessa either on a dance floor, in a gym punching a bag or in the woods hiking and talking to birds.

For more on Vanessa, check out her video on why she created Writing Our Lives, what’s different about her teaching style, and future plans for WOL.