Through close reading of published works, and in-class exercises, we will explore how setting can also develop the tone of a piece, reveal character, lifestyle, and emotional point of view.

Through close reading of published works and in class writing exercises, we will explore the difference between round characters and flat characters, and discuss the importance of character arcs and the different forms these arcs can take.

When we think of memoir—literally, “a memory”—we often think of stories that take place in the distant past, that are concerned with what Sven Birkerts calls “getting hold of vanished experience.” But what happens when we’re trying to get hold of experience that isn’t vanished, but all too present? What about memoir that chronicles a more recent history, or that follows a writer through a moment in real time? How do we stay ahead of the story? And how do we separate life from art?

Join us in celebration of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019) edited by Jamie Townsend, with an afterword by Alysia Abbott. In this long awaited, first ever retrospective of Steve Abbott's work you'll find writing, illustrations, and comics by this Gay Liberation hero and foundational Bay Area underground writer.

For decades, Northern California has been Ground Zero for countercultural communities, rejecting conventional suburbia in favor of individualism and personal freedom. But what happens to children with this background, growing up amid such unorthodox family dynamics? Three Bay Area authors with recent memoirs meet on the summer solstice to discuss their experiences growing up in the shadow of the Summer of Love. Moderated by Ianthe Brautigan-Swensen.

Melanie Brooks, author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma in conversation with acclaimed memoirists Alysia Abbott (Fairyland), Garrard Conley (Boy Erased), and Richard Hoffman (Love & Fury). This event, presented in partnership with Grub Street, is free and open to the public.

You don’t need to endure extreme adventures or personal traumas to produce powerful, salable essays. Oftentimes the most resonant essays are those that are based in quiet, everyday moments, moments that we might pass by if we didn’t take the time to reflect on them. It is the work of the writer to pull the magic from such experiences, to draw on his or her personal insight, and personal history, to unpack “small” events in order to tell a larger story, ideally illustrating universal aspects of the human condition. In this six hour seminar we will read essays by writers including Virginia Woolf, Jesmyn Ward, John Hodgman, among others, and discuss why these essays work. Through a series of guided writing prompts students will also work on their own personal essays, which we will discuss in a workshop format. Students will leave the class with new material and a fresh perspective on old material.

In Fairyland, which won an ALA Stonewall Award, Abbott chronicles her Haight-Ashbury upbringing with an openly bisexual father who succumbed to AIDS. Wickersham’s The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, is a wise, moving, and often surprisingly humorous account of how she and her family endured in the aftermath of her gentle, affectionate father’s shocking suicide. The two authors will discuss their memoirs, their writing lives, and their other work.

As writers, we’re duty-bound to keep our readers turning the page. But how to do it? In this class we will look at the difference between surprise and suspense, and tools that we can employ to make our own writing more suspenseful, including “the ticking clock,” “small hooks,” and understanding the difference between positive and negative suspense. We will also review works by writers who build suspense effectively and try some of these techniques in class.

Leo Tolstoy said, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

One of the great challenges of writing personal memoirs and essays is being able to see yourself as a character in the story and not merely the person telling the story. 

One of the hardest aspects of writing a memoir is knowing where your story begins...