Mining for Meaning in Three Genres of Writing
At Mining for Meaning: The Writer’s Life, you’ll find offerings for classes in three genres of writing: Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Legacy Writing. The courses are structured to be six to eight weeks in length, although you can complete them at your own pace. At the end of each weekly module, you will submit course exercises for personalized feedback, aimed at helping you develop your writing in the revision process.
By the end of the course, you will develop one of the course exercises into a longer essay format. From there, we can discuss options for continued writing coaching in the genre, or avenues of publication for your piece!
In each of these courses, you will learn:
Essential craft elements that will enhance whatever genre of writing you are undertaking
Aspects of storytelling that will propel a strong personal narrative
The most effective writing processes, from brainstorming through revision, to produce professional-quality writing that you can publish anywhere
The process for researching and pursuing publications in which to showcase your work
Check out the full course pages for more details on these course offerings.
Creative Nonfiction
This 8-module course will:
- Introduce craft elements that are essential for good storytelling, including imagery, description, narrative structure, and narrative perspective
- Consider unique challenges of creative nonfiction, such as accessing “truth” versus memory and overcoming barriers that may be preventing you from telling your stories
- Offer techniques for conducting effective research to support personal narrative
- Provide numerous prompts to help you mine your personal history and produce compelling creative nonfiction!
Legacy Writing
This 6-module course will:
- Provide a foundation in legacy writing and what it has to offer
- Explore the value of elegy, or writing focused on loss, as a healing modality
- Include numerous prompts to get you writing your own personal history
- Provide shareable prompts to help you put individual family members’ stories into the larger context of the family history
Poetry
This 8-module course will:
- Provide you with new tools to read and unpack poetry, so you will no longer be intimidated by the genre
- Introduce you to great poets and poems that you will undoubtedly love
- Provide a foundation in the craft of poetry, including elements of language, rhyme, structure, and form
- Include prompts to help you generate six original poems
- Offer personalized instruction to help you revise rough drafts into fully-developed versions