I’m excited to announce my own little summer writing camp for young adults, taking place over four weeks in June and July at the Ashbery Resource Center in downtown Hudson. Exploring voice and form in creative nonfiction with young writers is the sort of teaching I love best, and I’ve been dreaming of finding a way back to it since I left my post at The New School. The class is capped at ten. We’ll do lots of experiments. It will be fun, I hope. Thankful to the Flow Chart Foundation for use of the space. Details below :)

The Boundless Essay: An Exploration of Poetry, Story, and Form in Personal Narrative

a summer workshop for young adult writers, with Nina Boutsikaris

Thursdays, 11am–1pm, June 22nd–July 13th @ the Ashbery Resource Center (348 Warren Street, right door – 2nd Floor, in downtown Hudson, NY)

What makes a personal essay? What can a personal essay do? As David Lazar writes in “Queering the Essay,” “To read through the history of essays on the essay is to a large and fascinating extent to see practitioners of the form struggling to articulate what the form is and refusing to keep the form stable, refusing to narrow its sense of possible performative and formal dimensions...” In this 4-week workshop for college-aged writers and advanced teens, we will borrow craft techniques and creative modes from across genres in order to experiment with the boundlessness of the personal narrative — from lyric, hybrid, and collage, to shell forms, and visual essays. We’ll ask how such a boundless, liquid genre can both embody and uncover truths and identities. Students will expand their repertoire of styles, forms, and techniques for personal narrative, explore their own unique voice(s) and uncover their own powerful stories, to craft compelling, creative essays from real life.

Class meetings will include prompts and writing time, feedback opportunities, and examinations of a variety of texts. We will look at sample work from essayists such as T Fleischmann, Aisha Sabitini Sloan, Maggie Nelson, Terese Marie Mailhot, Renee Gladman, Sarah Minor, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kristen Radtke, and Eileen Myles. We will also examine creative work that is maybe beyond the scope of the essay, or the personal.

Workshop Fee: $150 (includes all reading materials)

To Apply: Send a short creative writing sample (any genre), between 500–1000 words, to nina@flowchartfoundation.org with the Subject: Young Adult Workshop. Upon acceptance you will receive a welcome email with instructions on how to submit payment and register.

Limited Enrollment — accepting applications until June 1st or until class is filled