Hi all Sioux City-ers,

I will be teaching a 5-week Storytelling Workshop.  Here is the flyer.

Write the Stories of Your Life Workshop

“Why do we misremember things in certain ways? ... Looking back, we do not recall a steady, seamless flow of events in time. Instead, our mind breaks the flow of time into related chunks and stores them as scenes and anecdotes and episodes.” Frank Bures

Storytelling has come to mean a lot of things to writers. It can be more connected with children’s play, or it can be an oral tradition. We can think of it as sitting around a fire, a scraped down root hoisting one’s marshmallow, a camper’s baritone overcompensating for the pops of wood with a scary tale. We might also associate storytelling with a grandfather recounting a tale when he first came to the American West, a plot of land and a handful of seeds his only possessions. Whichever association we may have, storytelling means we let the flow of time reveal its episodes to us, we let our layered selves un-peel, and we reconnect with the past chunks and scenes of our lives.

In this five week?? workshop Write the Stories of Your Life, you don’t have to be a writer. You also don’t have to have any experience with writing. If you do, you’ll jump into a spot you’ve always wanted to explore but didn’t have the time or the tools. It doesn’t have to be narrative, personal, or prescriptive. Bring a pen and a pad of paper and that’s all you’ll need to start on the path of writing your story.

You’ll be able to remember snippets or whole episodes to unearth new truths. You’ll respond to prompts and free-write; you’ll also work on a final piece with intent to polish it for publishing or to at least have at the ready for family and friends. Some prompts will reflect on place, specifically the Missouri river. Some will encompass an “explorer’s heart.” Everyone has a story to tell and Write the Stories of Your Life will help you chart your course, back in time, or further down the road, to let that story out into the world.

• Where:  Activity Room of the Betty Strong Encounter Center
• When: at 2 p.m. on five consecutive Thursdays: March 7, 14, 21, 28 & April 4
• Bring: yourself (no fees)
• Questions: comment here with questions