Led by Kayla Min Andrews:
I used to think of myself as primarily a fiction writer. Then my life got crazy and I felt an urgent drive to focus on memoir/personal essays instead. At first, I approached creative nonfiction through narrative, as I had approached fiction. But I quickly learned to see creative nonfiction—especially memoir-istic writing—as full of rich possibilities that I hadn’t previously considered.
In this workshop, I’ll lead us through generative free-writing exercises and discussions of craft, with the goal of sharing lessons I’ve learned during my adventures in nonfiction-writing, and encouraging participants to share theirs as well. I’ll occasionally refer to excerpts from other writers' work and my own.
We’ll pay particular attention to strategies for sidestepping obstacles to writing (strategies including but not limited to cheekiness!) and for reframing received wisdom about what one “must” or “can’t” do on the page.
This workshop is free and open to all writers. No RSVP necessary.
About Kayla Min Andrews
Kayla Min Andrews is a biracial, Korean American writer living in New Orleans. She has a piece forthcoming from The Massachusetts Review and has been published in Lit Hub, Cagibi, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Asymptote. Her flash essay “Old Kleenex” was nominated for a Best of the Net 2020. Kayla assisted Putnam on the posthumous publication of her mother’s novel The Fetishist (January 2024), including editing the manuscript and writing the afterword. Kayla is an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph and is working on a novel.