Lafayette Writers' Studio

Anyone who preorders The Perils of Girlhood from an indie bookstore or Bookshop.org or from ANY bookseller, is invited to join me for a free online memoir class. Just upload the receipt number or a photo of your receipt and you'll receive a Zoom invitation. (Want a signed copy and live in the U.S.? Order from Second Flight Books. 

We’ll start the masterclass with a short reading from The Perils of Girlhood followed by a mini craft talk that will dive into the process of writing a memoir and then we will go through a few generative writing exercises to help you get the beginnings of your own memoir on the page. There will be time at the end of the session for Q&A, so be sure to bring your questions!

As writers of fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, we have stories we want to tell. Maybe it’s about a unique character, or a fantastic series of events, or an incredible locale. But our stories need a transformative arc — a message that will move readers on deeper levels. As writer / teacher Vivan Gornick says: "The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say." Sometimes the real story can elude us for many drafts and years. In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore tools and prompts for finding our “why” for telling and excavating the meaning from our stories.

For many girls, the end of childhood marks the moment we begin to minimize our wants and curtail our feelings. It is when we begin to alienate our bodies, even our minds. This generative workshop for writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, will offer a space to define girlhood for yourself and shed a light on your own experience as female or female identifying. We’ll work to peel back the layers on what it meant to be female in the past, while also reflecting on this current moment in time. Exceptional works of literature around girlhood will guide our conversation including excerpts by Melissa Febos, Maya Angelou, Jo Ann Beard, Nicole Graev Lipson and Michelle Herman.

What these writers share is a commitment to discovering on the page what they think and feel and believe. Such examples will inspire our writing as we work to bring our own experience of girlhood and womanhood to the forefront.