FINDING YOUR VOICE THROUGH THE ANECDOTE

Service Description

The blank page can feel like a glass wall we’re required to scale. We might wonder where to begin, what to include, and how we’ll ever find our voices. We are adept at narrativizing our own lives—even the dullest, most dreadful experiences become fodder for a good barstool story—and yet, when confronted with a blank page, our skill and our joy too often abandon us. In this class, we’ll consider how our rich experience as veteran storytellers is key to unlocking our voices and our narratives. The goal of this course will be to translate our stories to the page, to mine our memories for sensual details, and to find new meanings in the stories we keep telling. This course is for poets or prose writers who want to write about their lives but don’t know where or how to begin. JESSICA ALEXANDER’S novella, "None of This Is an Invitation" (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) was published by Astrophil Press in summer 2023. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her collaborative project That Woman Could Be You came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her novel, Agnes, We’re Not Murderers is forthcoming from Clash Books.

Contact Details

• 1019 E Washington St, Iowa City, Iowa, USA

  colvillejen@hotmail.com