This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
In this course, we will experiment with different approaches to narrating trauma, keeping in mind that each traumatic experience suggests a variety of different stories, and may be narrated in a variety of different ways. Do we tell the story of the traumatic event itself, or its aftermath, or how we could not find words to tell the story, or how we were silenced? Do we narrate these events as a poem, a short story, a novel, a memoir – or a hybrid form that combines different narrative approaches?
Our approaches will be based on short excerpts from work by Sylvia Plath, Brian Teare, Ocean Vuong, Mary Karr, Eimear McBride, and other creative writers, as well as ideas from trauma narrative theorists and researchers, including Cathy Caruth and Bessel van der Kolk.
about the instructor
THOMAS MCNEELY, an East Side Houston native, has published short stories and non-fiction in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies including Best American Mystery Stories and Algonquin Books’ Best of the South. He has received National Endowment for the Arts, Wallace Slenger, and McDowell Colony fellowships for his fiction. His first book, Ghost Horse, won the Gival Press Novel Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize in Writing.
By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration policies. If this workshop is full when you try to register, please sign up on the waiting list here so you receive priority registration the next time this class is offered. For details and a schedule of all the current workshop offerings, click here.
