Starts Thursday, June 6th, 2024

Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays, 6:30PM CST - 8:30PM CST.

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Taught by Jeneé Skinner, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate who also went to the University of Oxford to study Renaissance Literature and the Italian Renaissance. Her work has appeared in the Catapult, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Additionally, she won Michigan Quarterly Review’s Jesmyn Ward Prize. She has received fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop and Kimbilio Writers Retreat. Jeneé is an assistant memoir editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her interests include swamps, haunted houses, folklore, family sagas, epics, and poetic prose.

While there’s more literature and conversations happening around mental illness, it’s still a very isolating and unique experience. There are illnesses passed down through families, caused by trauma, or that seemingly lack reason.

Whether it be seeing people who aren’t there, mood swings, or the desire to harm others or oneself, reality functions differently and must be approached with nuance in these circumstances.

Stories create room for understanding what happened and why and accepting what can’t change. Illness is often further complicated by intersections of class, gender, race, and other identities. There’s density in the chaos and humanity of characters’ inner battles that we as readers, writers, and human beings can learn from.

In this course, we’ll discuss researching and documenting illness, considering the spectrum of “normal” for each character, and how to handle the murkiness of trauma and memory.

We’ll read excerpts from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin, The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, among others.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Tactics for Researching medical illness or documentation.
• Defining what is "normal" for characters.
• Handling trauma and memory.
• Figuring out what brings peace, chaos, and relapse.
• Writing believable secondary characters who witness or take advantage of the mental illness journey.
  

COURSE SKELETON:

• Week 1: Introductions & Research
• Week 2: Workshop
• Week 3: Normal/Abnormal in Worldbuilding
• Week 4: Workshop
• Week 5: Working through Trauma/Memory
• Week 6: Workshop
• Week 7: Secondary Characters/Witnesses
• Week 8: Workshop
  

Instructor Jeneé Skinner is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and went abroad to the University of Oxford to study Renaissance Literature and the Italian Renaissance. Her work has appeared in the Catapult, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Additionally, she won Michigan Quarterly Review’s Jesmyn Ward Prize. She has received fellowships from Tin House Summer Workshop and Kimbilio Writers Retreat. Jeneé is an assistant memoir editor at Split Lip Magazine. Her interests include swamps, haunted houses, folklore, family sagas, epics, and poetic prose.