Deborah Jackson Taffa is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Winner of the PEN Jean Stein Grant, her memoir WHISKEY TENDER is forthcoming from Harper next year. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Tin House, A Public Space, the Ellen Meloy Foundation, and the Kranzberg Arts Center, she is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.
Workshop
Deborah Taffa
Online
Sundays, February 5–26, 2023
This class has already happened.
***This workshop is sold out. Please write megan@apublicspace.org if you would like to be added to the waitlist.***
The Essay Workshop
The essay—the most flexible, shapeshifting genre—has much to offer writers. This workshop is designed to explore the dynamic possibilities of creative nonfiction. How do we weave public histories into individual stories? What is the impact of emotional truth versus factual truth? How do we distinguish memoir from autobiography? The lyric essay from the traditional essay? And how do we use the form to enrich any type of material? We’ll look at a range of essays—from the historic to the modern—and seek to understand what defines these works in all their permutations. Explore how various writers have navigated its possibilities, and discuss ways to experiment with the typologies to create new directions for our own work.
This is a generative workshop, and each week a piece of writing will be created in conversation with the work we read.
Sundays, February 5–26, 2023
3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. ET
4 sessions
Online on Zoom
Where are the Master Classes and workshops located?
Currently, all Master Classes and workshops are held online on Zoom or Google Meet.
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Cancellation Policy
If you need to cancel your enrollment in an Academy class, please let us know as soon as possible. We can only offer full refunds if you cancel two weeks prior to the start of class. After that, before the start date of class, we can offer a 50% refund. We cannot refund day-of cancellations, and we cannot refund or partially refund tuition once the class has begun.