The Literature of Parenthood: An Online Writing Workshop

Anyone who has parented a child knows that parenting is one of life's most exhilarating, awesome, maddening, humbling, crazymaking, joyful and wrenching experiences--which is what also makes it excellent inspiration for writing. Recent years have shown an explosion in "Parent-Lit," or the literature of parenthood, in all forms: creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction.

This workshop is for anyone who wants to tap that rich vein in their writing. It's for new parents, prospective parents, grandparents, stepparents, adoptive and foster parents and birth parents. It's for people all over who want to come together and share their stories and their words, to learn something about the craft of writing.

It's not easy for some parents who want to write to get to a writing workshop. This class will allow parents to participate while breastfeeding, sitting at home in a robe and pajamas, hanging out at the playground (with wireless internet, that is), sitting on the sidelines at the soccer field, in the coffee break room at work, or in the wee hours of the morning.

About the class:

The class will run for 10 weeks, starting September 15th, 2009. Fee for the class is $375 (some special discounts available; contact instructor). Participants will learn the fundamentals of both creative nonfiction and fiction writing, using parenthood as a theme. We will read and discuss published examples of great parent-lit, and write some of our own. Assignments will consist of a combination of regular short exercises and more developed projects. Class size is limited to ten.

Workshop topics will include (more to come, based on class requests):

* Turning Life Into Fiction
* The Many Faces of Creative Nonfiction
* Writing Columns and Blogs: the Slice of Life
* Taking a Stand: Writing Op-Ed and Opinion Pieces
* Flash Fiction: writing short-shorts
* My Family, My Material: How to be intimate, yet not invasive when writing about relatives
* Fun with Research
* Breaking Into Publishing

About the instructor:

Susan Ito is the creative nonfiction editor of Literary Mama, an online literary zine by mothers, about parenting. She also writes a column for Literary Mama, called "Life in the Sandwich." She co-edited the anthology A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Essential Hip Mama: Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting, Growing Up Asian American, Making More Waves and many other journals and anthologies. She is the mother of two teenaged daughters.

Email susan@susanito.com for more detailed information, or to enroll.

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