Braiding Private and Public History writing workshop with Catina Bacote, April 28

Press release from Flatiron Writers Room:

Creative Nonfiction: Braiding Private and Public History with Catina Bacote

How does your ordinary life reflect a larger human narrative?

In this one-day creative nonfiction workshop we will consider how our own experiences have been shaped by social, cultural, and political dynamics, and the ways our writing can affirm or disrupt well-established accounts.

We will explore how to handle memory, archival documents, diaries, letters, photographs, and oral history (you will be asked to bring in specific material). Writing prompts will help you transform traditional and unconventional research into vibrant prose and offer both introspection and an outward gaze in your work.

This will be a hands-on workshop where you will generate new writing, share your work, and respond to the writing of others.

To guide our discussions and writing, we will read short essays by innovative authors such as Patricia Smith, Bernard Cooper, Kiese Laymon, and Peggy Shumaker, to see how these writers transform broad events into compelling and intimate narratives.

As an add-on, students may purchase individual coaching sessions with the instructor on Sunday morning, April 29, 2018. To register by check instead of via Eventbrite, mail your check to Flatiron Writers Room, LLC, 5 Covington Street, Asheville, NC 28806. You will be registered when we receive your payment, space permitting.

Catina Bacote is an essayist and memoirist. She contributed an essay to the new anthology This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home that was selected as an editor’s choice for the New York Times Book Review. Her nonfiction has also appeared in the Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Common, The Sun, the Southern California Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Ann Cox Chambers Long-form Journalism Fellowship from MacDowell Colony and the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship from Radgale. She holds a MA from Teachers College, Columbia University and a MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was admitted as a Dean’s Fellow and subsequently served as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

At 6pm April 28, 2018, at the Flatiron Writers Room, Catina Bacote and co-contributors Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas and Naima Coster will host a free public reading from the anthology This Is The Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press 2017).

Sat, April 28, 2018
10:00 AM – 3:00 PM

Tickets: $75 early bird/$85 general/$45 for an individual 30-minute coaching session

Flatiron Writers Room
5 Covington Street
Asheville, NC 28806