The desire to make art out of trauma, struggle, and challenge is by no means new—St. Augustine set the tone for the rest of us some years back. Writing about your very worst experiences  is something you either feel called to do or cannot fathom. 

If you find yourself in the former category, welcome. This space is for you. Once you know you want to write about your trauma, the challenge is twofold: How do we make art out of our most traumatic experiences, and how do we do so in a way that doesn’t cause us further harm?

This four-session course will begin with a co-facilitated session with a Stacey Ramsower, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, who will establish best practices for trauma writing, equip the group with somatic resources to use throughout the course (and beyond), and provide us with a shared language for how to talk about the often abstract ways trauma appears on the page. The subsequent three sessions will feature guest authors—Athena Dixon, T Kira Māhealani Madden, and Lacy M. Johnson—who engage trauma in their own work. Often, craft concerns and care-of-the-self concerns dovetail, so this class invites you to bring your whole self to class, recognizing that the act of writing about trauma can range from re-traumatizing to neutral to therapeutic.

Our class sessions will be seminars, each including a craft discussion, a prompted writing practice, and an intimate conversation with the guest author or co-facilitator. You’ll leave each class with guided work to do on your own throughout the week. This class doesn’t incorporate feedback, but there will be opportunity for brief sharing of work among fellow writers engaged in the challenge of writing trauma.

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This course will take place on Zoom on Tuesdays October 1-22 from 7 to 9 p.m. EST. Participants will receive a Zoom link prior to the course as well as a recording of the course afterwards. We cannot offer refunds once the course has begun. Please email courses@offassignment.com with any questions.

A limited number of scholarships may be available for this course; please send a brief statement outlining how and why a scholarship would impact your ability to attend to courses@offassignment.com by September 2 and we’ll get back to you by September 9.

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Off Assignment’s Masters’ Series courses are unique four-session courses on in-depth writing topics that harness the perspectives and craft tactics of a lead instructor plus celebrated guest lecturers, such that participating writers gain a wealth of input while benefiting from the cohesive leadership of one renowned writer in a particular niche of nonfiction.