Upcoming Workshops
I teach privately, one-on-one and with small groups. Please email me for information. You can also subscribe to the Best American Essays newsletter on Substack to receive notification of upcoming workshops.
I will be teaching in the following venues in the Summer of 2026:
Pay No Attention to That Person Behind the Mask: Narrator, Persona, and Voice in First-Person Narratives, in-person, Maine Media, Rockport, ME, July 13-17, 2026.
When we write about what happens to us, the challenge is making the narrative vivid without sensationalism, concerned without oversentimentalizing, and fulfilled without cliché. And with first-person narratives—regardless of genre—so much rests on the shoulders of the I. How do you shape a first-person narrator whose voice is compelling and unique? Where does voice on the page originate? What, exactly, is voice? What is a persona and how does it function across genres? How do writers use different refractions of the I-narrator and to what effect? In this generative workshop, we will explore these questions and more through reading poetry and prose composed in the first person and writing in response to these works. These texts will range in register from confessional to witness to introspective.