Our need to know ourselves and to be understood by others pushes us toward the page. But we can't just writing about our feelings and expect to be felt. Readers often need more than beautiful language and big ideas to make sense of what they're reading. By closely writing about a specific moment, your writing becomes less ambiguous and gives the reader something more concrete to grasp onto.
This four-part workshop will aid you in anchoring your emotions to your real-life experiences through readings, live discussions, and writing exercises designed to guide you in excavating your outrage, sadness, and joy for potent writing material. This workshop is ideal for anyone struggling to articulate their lived experiences in a meaningful way, academics or those who do more work-oriented writing interested in experimenting with creative nonfiction, and anyone trying to take their Facebook posts from a rant to a readable essay.
Minda Honey’s (she/her) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard, and Longreads. Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.”
Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time. She also sends out a weekly newsletter, MID., about being mid-life and mid-career.
"Minda is such a great teacher! The readings, discussions, and exercises were expertly crafted. Teaching and learning via Zoom isn’t easy, but Minda still created a warm and welcoming classroom feeling, even among a group of socially distanced Zoomers. This class was amazing and I hope to The Porch will offer many many more classes with Minda!"
"Minda Honey teaches you how to write about life from a place of healing--you become a better writer and a better human."
"Minda is super relatable while providing great content. I feel empowered to speak my truth. I think it is also important that she clearly approaches the subject matter through a black femme lens and is unapologetic about it."