Memoir as Interior Renovation with Brian Turner

4-Day Workshops
Wednesday – Saturday, May 3 – 6 | 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

In this four-day intensive workshop on memoir, we’ll offer critique and feedback on the memoir you’ve begun, as well as discover ways to expand and explore the work you’ve already created. With a literary tool belt and an eye toward renovation, we’ll knock out some of the walls, put in skylights, and revamp the inner corridors so that all of the rooms interconnect with one another. Required: Participants must turn in 30-60 pages of a memoir-in-progress prior to the course start date.

Brian Turner is a poet and memoirist who served seven years in the US Army. He is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise and Here, Bullet, which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 PEN Center USA “Best in the West” award, the 2007 Poets Prize, and others. Turner’s work has been published in National Geographic, the New York Times, Poetry Daily, Harper’s Magazine, and other fine journals. Turner has been awarded a United States Artists Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and more. His recent memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, has been called, “achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful.”