Laugh About It: Humor in Autobiographical Writing with Dawn S. Davies

CANCELED

6 weeks, September 15 – October 20

Writing funny can be a challenge. Humor writer Erma Bombeck says, “Anybody can bring out your tears. That’s a piece of cake. It is twenty times—no, make that fifty times easier to make people cry rather than laugh.” Yet, humor is a healthy part of life and often can be the sugar that helps the bitter stuff go down, and in personal essays or memoir, humor can be both a refreshing and a startling honest way to connect with your readers. This course will help you learn about the various types of prose humor and how to incorporate humor into your own creative nonfiction work. Using selected readings of humorous essays, we will explore the elements of humor writing, and workshop our own writing each week. Note: this is not a comedy writing or joke writing class. We will be writing essays, but we will break down the aspects of humor in ways that will enable comedy or joke writers to advance their craft on their own.

Dawn S. Davies has an MFA from Florida International University. Her essay collection, Mothers of Sparta, received the 2015 FIU UGS Provost Award for Best Creative Project. She was recently featured in the Ploughshares column, “The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week.” She had a notable essay in Best American Essays 2015, and a Pushcart Prize special mention for nonfiction in 2015. She has a special interest in both the unreliable narrator and humor writing. Her work can be found in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, River Styx, Brain, Child, Hippocampus, Cease, Cows, Saw Palm, Ninth Letter, Green Mountains Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. www.dawnsdavies.com