Writing the Self 3-Week Zoom Workshop, Starts Sunday, July 9th, 2023
Begins Sundays, July 9th, 2023
Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Sundays, 6:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST
Now Enrolling!
Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.
Led by 2022 LARB Publishing Fellow Eraldo Souza dos Santos, a Brazilian writer currently based between Paris and São Paulo. Eraldo has taught creative writing at the Center for Fiction as well as history, philosophy, and political science at the Sorbonne and at the University of Chicago's Vienna Human Rights program.
Conceived as a series of three autobiographical experiments, this workshop is an invitation for artists to explore what it means to write (about) the self amidst experiences of injustice, trauma, and censorship but also of happiness, pleasure, and resistance.
Throughout this three-week journey, we'll be reading and discussing for inspiration the work of authors such as Sarah M. Broom, Hazel Carby, Alexander Chee, Annie Ernaux, Édouard Louis, and Aaron Robertson.
Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their pieces and receive feedback in the second and third meetings as well as during one-on-one meetings.
COURSE TAKEAWAYS:
- The Publishing Market... and the Literary Tradition: Autobiography, Autofiction, Memoir, Diaries, and Other Genres.
- Writing the Self: Three Unusual, Sometimes Forgotten, Experiments.
- The Pitching Toolkit for Autobiographical Pieces.
- How to Overcome Self-Censorship?
TESTIMONIALS:
This was a brilliant workshop! I really enjoyed the mixed approach of tasks, reading & discussion, and I came away with some amazing new thoughts & insights. Thank you so much! -UEA Creative Writing Course, MA Prose Fiction
I was in Eraldo’s Lounge Writers session on writing autobiographies. Eraldo selected excellent readings and discussed them closely, inviting our questions and comments. I really appreciated the balance between thorough examination of content and concepts and hands-on exercises on autobiography. Eraldo shared his extensive knowledge of world literature, literary criticism, and history in ways that contextualized the readings and provided a useful framework for the participants to contextualize the autobiographies they may want to write. I left this relatively short session with a deeper and broader understanding of the concepts covered. Eraldo is a generous, engaging, and enthusiastic instructor. I look forward to learning more from him in future sessions. -Lounge Writers
The workshop was agile and engaging, where Eraldo Souza dos Santos shared his knowledge and encouraged everybody to participate. The writers and books he recommended to us (so hard to find alone in a bookstore) were precisely what I was looking for to pursue my project. Thanks! -Center for Fiction
ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:
This class meets weekly via Zoom. Come prepared for a super fun class with live interaction on Zoom each week and plenty of writing, reading, and talking!
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Instructor: Eraldo Souza dos Santos
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Class Starts Sunday, July 9th, 2023
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Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Sundays, 6:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST
Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this class.
A 2022 LARB Publishing Fellow, Instructor Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a Brazilian writer currently based between Paris and São Paulo. His first novel, to be published in 2024, is an autobiography of his illiterate mother and a meditation on the lived experience of Blackness and enslavement in modern Brazil. At the age of seven, his mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister. It was 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree. By weaving in extensive archival research and interviews, the novel narrates their journey to Minas Gerais—where she was born—and Bahia—the Blackest state in Brazil, where she was enslaved on a farm for three years—to investigate why the family that enslaved her has never been brought to justice. It also narrates his grandmother’s journey to search for her missing daughter. In March 2023, he offered a masterclass based on his novel at the prestigious UEA Creative Writing Course.