Get Started! - Developing a Writing Practice

Feb 6, 13, 20, 27 - 6-7:30pm

Age Group: 18+

Level: Beginners & anyone who wants to jumpstart their writing practice!

Description: Beginning anything is hard. The idea of sharing your work can feel overwhelming, no matter whether it's your first time or you're coming back to writing after a long break. In this workshop, we’ll create space to discuss not only why your voice matters, but also how a writing practice can help you to feel confident about your voice and sharing the stories you create.

We’ll talk about what a writing practice is and how you can develop a habit of writing consistently, whether it be the same amount of time or the same time each day. In each session, we'll take a look at short pieces by working writers like Louise DeSalvo and Stephen King, to focus us and give us direction.

We’ll try out one writing tool each session to assist in developing participants' writing practice. We’ll use simple prompts to allow everyone to write together. Then, if participants wish to, they’ll have time to share what they've written. Each session will build on the previous one, so by the end of the four weeks, you will have a number of new tools to continue your writing practice on your own. You will then feel confident to create a body of writing that you can return to for inspiration and ideas.

By the end of this workshop, you will have jump started a writing practice that will allow you to continue writing each day on your own. You will feel confident to create a body of writing that you can return to for inspiration and ideas.

About the Facilitator:

Nancy Caronia is a writer, scholar, and educator who co-edited Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (Fordham University Press) and wrote the introduction for the reprint of DeSalvo’s only novel Casting Off (Bordighera Press). Nancy has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her creative writing has appeared in Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing and Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (Feminist Press) as well as numerous journals including Lowestoft Chronicles, BioStories, 94 Creations, New Delta Review, and Ovunque Siamo. She also created Labor on Broadway, which starred David Straithairn and William Wise, for The Working Theater in New York City. Her most recent publications include “Dime Novels and the Creation of the Italian Immigrant Criminal” for the volume American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (UPenn Press) and “Refusing the Sentimental Italian Immigrant Story in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven” for the Journal of Working-Class Studies for which she received the Working-Class Studies Association Russo & Linkon Award. Nancy is a long-time Tai Chi practitioner and loves sharing this moving meditation through her writing workshops and seminars.

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Note: All workshop participants will have the opportunity to publish at least one work with Write Pittsburgh during the year in which the workshop was taken. Workshop participants will also be invited to share their work publicly either in-person or online at Write Pittsburgh events hosted throughout the year.