Writing the Past

Writing Family History Workshop

Perhaps you’ve come across a photo or a family heirloom that intrigues you. Maybe you’ve found your immigrant grandparents’ citizenship papers. Or perhaps you can’t stop thinking about the last time you saw Cousin Ellen at Aunt Helen’s funeral and the conversation did not go well. Maybe that story Uncle Irving told you about your great-grandparents still commands your attention. Or that cookbook your mother inherited that became the basis of holiday meals.

In each session, we’ll write to timed prompts to help you put your thoughts on the page. Family history can be preserved forever if someone, maybe you, writes it down.

Writing the Past Memoir Workshop

Memoirist Sue William Silverman writes in her craft book, Fearless Confessions, that memoir involves the connection between the voice of experience and the voice of innocence. We’ll write to a variety of prompts to bring these voices together with insight and respect. We’ll meet via Zoom for two hours each week in a four-week cycle.

Using Photographs to Craft Story

Using a unique set of prompts, deeply examine your own family photographs and develop new insights to craft story.

Short Shrift: Writing the Short Story

Explore the art of fiction by starting with a short story. In this six-week workshop, we’ll write to timed prompts to develop story, generate dynamic characters who overcome obstacles, craft powerful dialogue, apply sensory images, and more. Open to all levels. No experience necessary.

This workshop includes a 15-page manuscript critique by workshop facilitator Barbara Krasner. Barbara is a Pushcart-nominated writer of short fiction. Her short stories have been published in literary journals and anthologies, including Everywhere Stories II and Everywhere Stories III by Press 53, Lilith, Kelsey Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, Jewish Literary Journal, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, and others.

Holocaust Writing

When I was a fiction fellow in Prague a decade ago, our group visited sites of Jewish heritage, including the infamous ghetto/camp of Terezin, known in German as Theresienstadt. I found myself needing to express my feelings through writing. In fact, I wrote poetry and the resulting poems become some of my first to be published.

I am not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, but I’m still enormously impacted by the destruction and that’s why I pursued a doctorate in it. My creative writing explores prewar discrimination and the aftermath of trauma and despair.

Often in my workshops I have participants who are descendants of Holocaust survivors and survivors of other genocides and marginalizations. This workshop is for you.

We will write to timed prompts in this 2.5 hour session and honor those who were forced to endure terrible things.

Creating the Full First Draft | A Revision Workshop

Maybe you’re like me with loads of bits and pieces of writing that need to be knitted together into a whole, cohesive narrative. In this workshop, I’ll introduce some tools to help you:

• Week 1 – Organize
• Week 2 – Find the Arc
• Week 3 – Plot the Emotional Journey
• Week 4 – Transition

Using exercises of freewriting, storyboarding, and honest assessment, by the end of this workshop, you’ll have a collection of pages that now have flow and meaning.

Writing Family History Mini-Retreat

Sometimes a two-hour writing session is just not long enough to delve deeply into our families’ past. Join me in a specially-designed three-hour session with two options, morning or afternoon. We’ll be working with family photos, family objects, and family letters and diaries.