Inventing Life: Memoir & Storytelling from memory, present moment & play

Join us for this active workshop that will focus on mining imagination and memory for those stories, characters, crossroads and enduring images that animate our personal narratives most vividly. This is an opportunity to begin a written memoir or simply “play” with the material of your own life, and to shape old stories into new points of view. We will generate and collect material by engaging in a wide range of creative modes -- from fast and furious writing prompts to calm, meditative walking reflections; from theatrical improvisational exercises to drawing and collaging. We will listen to one another with care as we learn to share our stories -- on the page and in person -- with narrative clarity, singing truth and a voice all one’s own.

Dates: July 17, 24, 31 and August 7

2-4pm

Listen to Heather on NPR

Listen to Heather on the Leonard Lopate Show

About the Instructor:

Heather Harpham is a writer, teacher and theater artist whose fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in Slate, Parents, More, Water~Stone Review and Red Magazine in the UK. Her memoir, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After, was released in 2017 and selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Series as well as being an Indie Next pick. Harpham’s writing for the stage includes six solo plays, the most recent of which, Happiness and BURNING, toured nationally and were produced in Kathmandu, Nepal. Harpham’s work has been recognized with the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize, a Marin Arts Council Independent Artist Grant, support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, and a New York Innovative Theater Award nomination. Harpham has taught as a guest artist at colleges and universities throughout the US and in Europe. Originally from the northern California, she now lives in New York, a short walk from the Hudson River, with her family.

Learn more about Heather: https://heatherharpham.com