Your Life is Your Story

I just finished up a 6-week course through Story Studio Chicago designed to help participants to get off their butt. Yup! When I looked over the offerings at the end of 2021, after finishing the novel-in-a-year course with James Klise I started to think: What next?

I’ve done just about everything—except an MFA.

Conferences

Workshops

Critique groups

Book festivals

Pitch Wars

All meant to keep me writing, engaged in the process, and hopefully, open up networking opportunities. Yes and no. The odds at Las Vegas craps tables are better than someone breaking into the writing world. Meaning: can make a living from writing their novels, short stories, etc.

Most writers I know have to at least supplement their writing by taking on editing, teaching, freelance projects. Some become writing coaches—again, a side-hustle. And, why not parlay a bit of name recognition into a niche business? It’s become standard practice.

Sheree our instructor did an excellent job. She teaches a few different workshops and is in demand as a speaker. One of her classes is about writing about trauma in memoir. That sounds rough. I mean, it’s about more than inspiring someone to write, but about working toward healing.

Thus, I’ve been thinking about offering a workshop about flash memoir. With the onset of the pandemic and everyone turning to Zoom and other online meeting apps, the possibilities are endless. I would be able to reach people interested in this interesting form, perhaps applying it to their creative process in order to actually produce, to simply get thoughts down on the page.

So the next few weeks I’ll be consulting with various folks about what they’d be interested in seeing , willing to pay to learn through a single session approach. Your Life is Your Story.