WRITE
ATTEND
READ
SUPPORT
Meet THe Team
Use code EARLYBIRD through September 10 for 10% off! Members, check your email for your special 20% off limited-time discount code.
Are you fascinated by your family’s stories of the times before you lived? Do feuds or asylums or secret children swirl just under the surface of conversations at family reunions or Thanksgiving dinners? Or are there deep family silences that you fill with wondering?
This class is for anyone who is interested in family history as a rich source for explorations of self and society. With an understanding that we must engage both facts and imagination to write engagingly about the past, we will explore threads of your own families’ histories to find rich archival material, startling images, and compelling stories. Poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid work welcome.
Class readings by such authors as Lauren Russell, Catherine Sasanov, C. D. Wright, Kiki Petrosini, Tyree Davis, Layli Long Soldier, Martha Collins, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Victoria Chang, Nicole Krauss. Generative writing and sample readings will be part of every class, and students will be invited to share and comment on each other’s work.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium
• Homework: Optional
• Workshopping Drafts: Optional
Lisa Roney spent twenty years on the creative writing faculty at the University of Central Florida and five years as editor of The Florida Review. She has published a memoir, Sweet Invisible Body; a collection of poems, The Best Possible Bad Luck; and a craft book, Serious Daring, as well as short work in numerous journals, most recently Salvation South and Commonplace: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Life. She is currently working toward her certification as a genealogist and is hot on the trail of her three-times great-grandfather, who disappeared from Chapel Hill, Tennessee, on the Natchez Trace in 1834.
“Lisa was a pleasure to work with; she treated us as equals in the world of writing.”
“Professor Roney is unarguably one of the best instructors I have ever had the privilege of working with. She is an enormous student advocate, an excellent speaker, and a wise, wise woman. She has shaped the face of my writing, which has improved tenfold in the time I have known her.”
“Thank you for such a wonderful experience. At the start of the class, I worried about being the odd man out, … but I have felt at home.”
