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Meet THe Team
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Writing memoir and personal essays can help us make sense of our past and share vital memories with future generations. It can also create discomfort, even conflict, between us and the people we love. This class will explore ways to tell our deepest, truest stories while navigating the ethical and emotional challenges of writing about family. We’ll explore the works of Kiese Laymon, Sarah Broom, Xujun Eberlein, and Harrison Scott Key, among others, in order to develop strategies for characterization, theme, and narrative arc. We’ll also learn from the experiences of these and other authors as we craft our own stories with authenticity and empathy. Generative writing will be a feature of each session, and students will be invited to workshop their pieces.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium
• Homework: Optional
• Workshopping Drafts: Optional
Whitney Bryant holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work is forthcoming in Shenandoah and has also appeared in The Georgia Review, One Story, and Chapter 16, and she is the fiction co-editor of the online journal Atlas + Alice: A Magazine of Intersections. In order to support her writing habit, she has taught literature and writing to high school students in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia over the past fifteen years. She has recently completed a novel in stories. She enjoys exploring Nashville's arts scene and outdoor activities.
"Whitney was the perfect blend of encourager and teacher! She is also so skilled in bringing a class together."
"Whitney was fantastic at adapting to all of the different story ideas everyone had. Our group had a wide variety of genres and experience levels and she deftly found a link between every one of them and what we happened to be discussing at the time."
"I really loved Whitney's class! We were constantly encouraged to lead with curiosity, which I'll take with me outside of my creative practice."
