Declarations of Love & Recipes for Resistance
In this workshop we will fiercely defend the things we care about, want to cultivate, nurture, and otherwise help along. We will pledge our allegiance to the people and places we love and wish to defend. We will speak for the underrepresented, the marginalized, the voiceless, and the silenced. We will declare our intentions, and explore how they can be met through research, writing, and action. To advocate for the kind of world you want, you must be able to articulate it: what it looks like, how it works, how we can get there. You have to open your heart and dream big. You have to be vulnerable, and willing to fail, knowing all the while that it’s the trying that matters. Together, we will play with the building blocks of scene, character, dialogue, and structure, while leveraging those skills to write powerfully about the things we believe in. We will compose narratives of outrage, injustice, resistance, and redemption, while covering the basics of how to do narrative well.
Jennifer Sahn
Jennifer Sahn has spent over twenty years editing award-winning nonfiction, ranging from the lyrical essay to narrative journalism and everything in between. She is currently Executive Editor of Pacific Standard, where she oversees long-form features and story packages. She previously served as Editor of Orion, during which time the magazine was twice a winner of the Utne Independent Press Award for General Excellence and twice a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She has been a judge for several literary awards and fellowships and has taught or lectured at a number of writing workshops. Stories she has edited have been awarded the Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Prize, John Burroughs Essay Award, and have been widely reprinted in the Best American Series anthologies, The Norton Reader, and via online aggregators such as Longreads.