Master Class with Debra Gwartney 

May 04, 2019  10:00am-5:00pm

“I’ve heard it said that the reader of a personal narrative comes to the story with two questions: Where are we going? And, Who’s going to take me there? In this workshop, we’ll concentrate some on the “where” and a lot on the “who.”
When we’re writing about our own lives, it’s easy to get deceptively fooled into thinking that “I” is a fairly simple and straightforward teller of the tale, but in fact the “I” of memoir and/or personal essay is a tremendously complex and intricate force, and the more you know about the intricacy, the more you can deftly handle the narration.
The unreliable character “I” is the person who’s smack in the middle of the action—her perception is often extremely narrowed, wonky even. Can we trust her? Not really, and not often. It’s the narrator “I” who is able to step in, offer perspective, a modicum of wisdom, a heap of willingness to look at herself honestly, to explore her own role in a complicated dynamic. Artfully, with nuance and subtlety, she wends her way through the prose.
In this workshop, we’ll study the dual-I, character and narrator, and the ways it can work potently on the page. It’s the relationship between the two selves, the then-self and the now-self, that holds the most provocative conflict, and which most engages the reader, who knows well, you can bet, this tug-of-war of self.

This daylong retreat will be held in a private home in Moss Landing, CA. 

Moss Landing is small seaside village located between Santa Cruz and Monterey and a forty-five minute drive from Silicon Valley.

About Debra Gwartney

Born in Salmon, Idaho, a fifth generation Idahoan, Debra Gwartney is the winner of the 2018 RiverTeeth Nonfiction Prize, judged by Gretel Ehrlich. Her hybrid memoir-history, called I Am a Stranger Here Myself, will be published in March of 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press.

Debra's first book is a memoir, Live Through This, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Oregon Book Award.
Debra has published widely, with work included in such journals as Granta, Tin House, American Scholar, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square Review, Kenyon Review, Salon, Triquarterly Review, the NYT "Modern Love" column, among others. She is the 2018 winner of the Real Simple essay contest. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers magazine and in 2015 won the Crab Orchard Review prize for nonfiction. 
Debra Gwartney has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Playa, UCross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation.