Workshop: Your Life is Your Story

Your Life is a Story, 2.5 hour webinar, contact janehertenstein at gmail dot com

"With my writing workshops I attempt to capture the everyday, the ordinary, and turn it into prose poems. Flash is a minimalist form that can be applied to almost any genre. Whenever I recall a moment, a sudden memory, I jot it down into a flash memoir. Many of our best poets acted upon their own flashes, giving us verse that resonates even today. Often it is the simplest story that we come back to again and again. In my workshops, I encourage writers to discover and express that inner story."

Every life has a beginning, middle, and end—in more ways than one your life resembles a story. This workshop is about capturing small moments, even the mundane, and distilling them down into words on paper. Combining the form of Flash with the genre of Memoir, Jane teaches what she calls Flash Memoir. Small glimpses into one’s life. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when contemplating writing a whole life. Jane Hertenstein helps the writer take it in steps, in bite-size pieces.

Examples of authors successfully writing in this form are Booker Prize-nominated Deborah Levy, whose “living/working autobiographies” top many lists and Sigrid Nunez, whose experimental “meta” novels blur fiction and autobiography. Historically authors such as Dickens and Twain built careers on writing “sketches.”

In this 2.5 hour session Jane will take the group through a series of exercises to demonstrate how one builds upon these flashes in order to create a portfolio of life stories. Discussion includes the importance of writing every day, getting your work out there, how to submit, and where.

This workshop cab be adapted to one hour and 90-minutes classes and also customized for whatever the situation.

Churches, schools, senior centers

Libraries, book clubs, writing conferences

Jane Hertenstein is the author of numerous stories both macro and micro: fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise (Morrow Junior Books) and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (Cornerstone Press), which garnered national reviews. Jane is the recipient of grants from the Illinois Arts Council and city of Chicago. Her latest book is Cloud of Witnesses from Golden Alley Press. She teaches a workshop on Flash Memoir and can be found blogging at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/ Her website: janehertenstein.com Twitter: @memoirjane

Jane resides in the Michigan woods outside of Lansing.

You can also find her at Amazon and at Good Reads.





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