The Call Is Coming from Inside the House: A Personal Essay Workshop with Alysia Abbott

How do you evoke the past in ways that will feel alive and meaningful to readers? In this an instructor-facilitated, peer-driven workshop we'll explore the complexities of writing about family--the opportunities, the challenges, and the benefits.

Drawing on work by Grace Talusan, Justin Torres, Victoria Chang, Jonathan Letham, and others, we'll investigate how different writers achieve the distance necessary to bring themselves and family members to life while also making meaning out of these stories. Then we'll use a mix of generative exercises and on the spot feedback to write our own. The two-hour course meets once a week for three weeks and is designed both for those who are just beginning to write nonfiction and those who have drafts they want to deepen.

Note: This is a 3-week series. Please plan to attend all 3 sessions.

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner, a winner of the Madame Figaro Prix Heroine, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. In 2022, she was awarded an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She grew up in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott. As a journalist, essayist, and critic, she's written for The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, TheAtlantic.com, TriQuarterly and Psychology Today, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from New School University and was a contributing producer at WNYC Radio.