How do you give voice to the body, expressing the gap between “what I feel” and “what I feel I am allowed to say,” a gap that can widen and deepen in culture? How do you write about physical and mental suffering without it becoming melodramatic, full of self-pity and romantic sadness? How do you write about pain, the blunt fact of it, but also the thorny anguish of its memory? How do you describe psychic distress, the invisible rift that no one else can see? How do you negotiate the difference between illness and disease, between “what happens to my body” and “what happens to my life”? How do you write about the body of the other: the partner, the parent, the lover, the neighbor, the glimpsed, the imagined? How do you write about the intimacy and wonder of the body, the active pleasures of being a self in the world? 

In this class we will consider these questions and others; read essays by such writers as Leslie Jamison, Virginia Woolf, Barry Lopez, Yiyun Li, and Jo Ann Beard; and do exercises (both in and outside of class), acting as witnesses to the body’s concerns, both its mayhem and delight. Each of you will present one narrative (at least 5 pages) to be workshopped in class and will meet in conference with me about a second essay you’ve begun.    

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.