The First Fifty Pages of Your Memoir

with Katherine E. Standefer

Genres: Nonfiction, The Writing Life, Reading

Online

Intermediate, Advanced

6 Sessions

Start Date: July 12, 2023
End Date: August 16, 2023
Day of Week: Wednesday
Time: 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm PT
Capacity: 22 seats
Member Price: $274.50
General Price: $305.00

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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 E. 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

Most classes are offered at a general and member tuition rates based on instruction hours, with Hugo House members receiving a 10% discount on classes fewer than six sessions.

Early bird discounts are available during the first two weeks of registration and apply to both general and member tuition rates.

To help provide financial accessibility to our class offerings, some classes each quarter are offered with a sliding-scale tuition model, allowing students to pay what they can for the class. For these classes, tuition increments starting at $5 and going up to 125% of the standard pricing will be listed on the page.

Hugo House will only process refund requests that are submitted 5 business days or more before the class start date. To request a refund, log in to your account, go to “My Account,” select the “Orders” tab on the left-hand side, click the appropriate order, and request a refund for your specific class. Administrative fees apply. Please see our full refund policy here.

Class sessions may be recorded if a session falls on a holiday, or if a student has access needs. Class recordings are not guaranteed.

We do not tolerate racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic or any other oppressive behaviors, regardless of who commits them. Please check out our full community guidelines by clicking here. If an instance of community guidelines are violated and not resolved within the classroom, students may let us know by filling out the student incident report.

Classes may be cancelled if less than the minimum number of students are enrolled within ten days before the class start date. If Hugo House needs to cancel a class for any reason, students can choose between receiving a full credit toward future classes or full refund.

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