Classes

Nonfiction, Reading, The Writing Life

  • Term: Summer 2023
  • Start Date: July 5, 2023
  • End Date: August 9, 2023
  • Day of Week: Wednesday
  • Time: 5:00pm - 7:00pm PT
  • Level: Intermediate, Advanced
  • Audience: Adult
  • Location: Online
  • Availability: Yes
  • Public Price: $305.00
  • Member Price: $274.50

Learn About Scholarships

The First Fifty Pages of Your Memoir

The first fifty pages of your memoir have the power to snag (or lose!) the attention of agents, editors, and readers. In this six-week workshop, we'll read the first fifty pages of four published memoirs, excavating the ways authors set up their primary tensions, structures, voice, and more, coming to understand the craft choices that propel a narrative. In our final weeks, you'll turn in fifteen opening pages to your peers for feedback, cranking up the momentum of your own memoir.

Registration dates:

June 5: Scholarship Donation Day (Learn more.)

June 6: Member registration opens

June 13: General registration opens

Katherine E. Standefer

Katherine E. Standefer

she/her

Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown Spark 2020), which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, an NYT Book Review Editor’s Choice, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Lightning Flowers was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, on the goop podcast, and in O, The Oprah Magazine, and People Magazine. Standefer earned her MFA at the University of Arizona. Her writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. Standefer was a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. She currently lives in the Tetons. 

Website: www.KatherineStandefer.com

Social Media: @girlmakesfire