Kick off your Southern Festival of Books weekend with The Porch on Friday, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from celebrated authors as they pass through Nashville before the festival officially begins! Stick around for the rest of the day to take more writing classes with Ruben Reyes Jr., Jeannie Vanasco, and Sheree Renée Thomas.

Autofiction tends to be a wildly personal, even voyeuristic genre, in which people often write about the most intimate, revealing, and private aspects of their lives. Indeed, it is not uncommon for writers to seek out this genre specifically, as a means of confession and confessing; of questioning the boundaries between personal and public; and of putting down on paper admissions they’ve never made aloud. To quote Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose chosen topic is herself and her sex life: “Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written—when only I can see them—from the moment when they will be read by other people… It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and be seen at the same time.”

This class, led by novelist Hannah Pittard, will use generative exercises and guided discussion to help writers explore how to shape personal experience into fiction, experiment with the porous boundary between truth and invention, and discover the artistic possibilities of the self as subject.

This class is open to writers of all levels working in fiction, nonfiction, or anywhere in between.