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Every family has
at least as many stories as there are people in it, and yet the stories we tell
about our families or
about ourselves inside them tend to become highly stylized, repetitive, and
restricted in perspective. What if we began to approach our own family stories
as imaginative creations subject to some of the discipline - and spin - and
craft - of real
stories? What happens when we take a radically new point of view on a situation
that feels, now, predestined, inevitable - perhaps the view of a child, not
necessarily ourselves, of five (or ten)? What if we were to give voice to
perceptions we have never shared? What if we allow others, safely within the
confines of a story, to do the same? Will chaos or catharsis ensue? What happens
if all the actions stay the same, but we shift tone, from comic to tragic or
the other way around? This six week
on-line course uses writing to help us explore
our own family dramas from multiple perspectives.
Writing
assignments will be shared and commented on each week and participants will
have two individual phone or Skype video conferences during the course period. We will
use various excerpts from Families: The Frontline of Pluralism as discussion
texts. The price of the book is included in the course cost.
Course offered on both an individual and a
group basis. Group courses offered on a rolling basis as enough
students
enroll. Minimal enrollment of 4 maximum of 8. $220
FACILITATORS:
Heather
Tosteson, Ph.D., writer, visual artist, and spiritual director is the co-founder, with Charles Brockett, of
Universal Table/Wising Up Press. She is the author of The Sanctity of the Moment, God Speaks
My Language, Can You?, Visible
Signs, and Hearts as
Big as Fists, and
co-editor and illustrator of the Wising Up Anthologies Illness & Grace:
Terror & Transformation, Families: The Frontline of Pluralism, Love After 70, and Double Lives, Reinvention and
Those We Leave Behind.
Kerry
Langan is the author of Only Beautiful & Other Stories. Her short fiction has appeared in more
than 40 literary journals published in the United States, Canada, and Asia. She
is grateful to have been published in Other Voices, StoryQuarterly, American Literary Review, The Antigonish Review, Rosebud, Thema, The Seattle Review, The Cimarron Review, Fireweed, Yuan Yang, and the many other small presses.
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