Begins Monday, July 31st, 2023 Class will meet weekly on Monday nights via Zoom, 6PM - 8PM Eastern Standard Time.

Open to All writers!

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.

Taught by Sydney Hegele, the author of THE PUMP (Invisible Publishing 2021). Their essays on life with Dissociative Identity Disorder have appeared in Catapult and Electric Literature and featured by Lithub, the Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their novel BIRD SUIT is forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in Spring 2024, and their essay collection BAD KIDS is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2025.

How do we write about our traumas without becoming re-traumatized? In this course, we will use a variety of texts to establish a therapeutic framework for writing about our traumas and participate in holding space during writer-led workshops for personal essays and selections from memoir projects.

The authors we will draw upon for our framework include Alice Walker, Nicole Chung, Melissa Febos, and others. All text selections will be provided to students in accessible PDFs from the instructor.

Prepare for a variety of grounding exercises and group boundary-setting in our first session based on the needs of our particular group, and to complete the 8-week workshop with a polished essay or memoir selection.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• To understand craft not just as an art but as a healing practice and a way of processing.
• Complete the 8-week workshop with a polished essay or memoir selection.

COURSE TEXTS WILL INCLUDE:

• Alice Walker’s forward to Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston
• Nicole Chung, “How Can You Write About Pain Without Retraumatizing Yourself?", The Atlantic
• Melissa Febos, “In Praise of Navel-Gazing", Body Work
• Selections from What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma, Stephanie Foo

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class meets weekly via Zoom. Come prepared for an engaging course with live interaction on Zoom each week and plenty of writing, reading, and talking!

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

• Instructor: Sydney Hegele
• Class size limited to 10 writers
• Class Starts Monday, July 31st, 2023
• The class will meet weekly on Monday nights via Zoom, 6PM - 8PM Eastern Standard Time.
• Course is fully ONLINE.

Instructor Sydney Hegele is the author of THE PUMP (Invisible Publishing 2021), winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essays on life with Dissociative Identity Disorder have appeared in Catapult and Electric Literature, and have been featured by Lithub, the Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their novel BIRD SUIT is forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in Spring 2024, and their essay collection BAD KIDS is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2025. They live with their husband and French Bulldog on Treaty 13 Land (Toronto, Canada).