WRITING WITHOUT FEAR WORKSHOP FOCUS
A wise writing teacher asked Britta Jensen “how would you write if you weren’t afraid?” Writers have a lot to fear: rejection, changes in the marketplace, years of unpaid work only to have to go through even more revision… the list is almost endless. In this workshop, we’ll create a vessel for those fears and interrogate them further, centering our focus on: what is riding on your writing?
You’ll have the chance to not only investigate, for yourself, the hopes and dreams riding on your writing, but also looking at each obstacle, naming it and carving out pathways around the roadblocks you do have control over. We’ll explore the bold literary choices that sometimes feel out of reach, the goals that fuel your writing (or once did), and the pathway that will work best for you to write with as little fear as humanly possible!
Britta will use her seventeen years of experience working in mental health, schools and universities, drawing on meta cognition-based exploratory exercises, short readings from poets & writers toward an interactive, guided discussion. Her goal is to investigate the layers of thought behind your fears in order to set your writing free!
We welcome participants from all over the world. Registration closes July 26 at 11:59 CST.
This class will be conducted over Zoom on Wednesday, July 28 from 12:00-1:00pm CST.
This course will cover the following topics:
- Identifying your expectations for your writing and how they influence your current practice
- Investigate the obstacles you’ve encountered with your writing that might influence how you approach drafting, revision and submission.
- Use meta-cognition and exploratory exercises to re-map the way that you see fear and its relationship to your writing (including re-shaping your relationship with your inner critic).
- Identifying what aspects of your writing journey you have control over in order to reassert your artist identity.
- Drawing on the experiences of other artists to inspire your journey.
- Creating a future pathway for fear and renaming its relationship to your artistic process.
Who should take this course?
- Writers who feel that fear is holding them back from doing their best work.
- Writers of all genres who would like to feel more productive with their writing without sacrificing the artistic process they need as an individual.
- Writers interested in taking a live, online course with a focused group of peers.
What does the course include?
- All digital handouts (sent 24 hours before the workshop starts)
- All questions answered from the Q&A (even if we run out of time during the live class, all questions will be answered in the follow-up e-mail with the class recording, handouts, etc..)
- Access to the recording
- Access to all the slides (in pdf) after the course concludes.
Deliverables for Students
- Digital handouts
- Course recording
- Class slides
- Q&A answers
PRICE $25 (Register by July 26 at 11:59pm CST)
How do I know if the course is worth the cost?
This is a difficult question to answer, as live, online classes (with access to all of the above after the course concludes) can range anywhere from $25-175+. A few important gauges in comparing costs are the two important features of this course: you meet live, online in real-time with the instructor and fellow students for one hour (and if something comes up and you cannot attend the live class, you have access to the recording later). When you factor in the opportunity to meet and talk with other writers, share your work in progress (if desired) and receive both instruction and informal feedback, this course is priced for a variety of budgets so that individuals from around the world can participate.
However, ultimately you decide if this form of investment in your writing is best for your budget, writing goals, and work. We hope that you will find value in Britta’s instruction (you can read more in her bio below).
About the instructor:
Britta Jensen has spent seventeen years in the literacy education and publishing world. She is the award-winning novelist of the Eloia Born series. She has also received numerous awards, including the General Sharp Award, for her teaching of creative writing and literature. Many of her stories explore themes of persevering through disability, parental separation and the intersection of various cultures in new worlds. She holds a BA in Acting Performance from Fordham University and an MA in Teaching of English Literature from Columbia University. Friends often refer to her as a polyglot—which is a product of living twenty-two years overseas in Japan, South Korea, and Germany before settling in Austin, Texas. She enjoys mentoring writers and editing books with The Writing Consultancy and Yellowbird Editors and teaches first-year writing at St. Edward’s University. (Photo credit: Peter Domican)
Testimonials from Previous Students
“The class was so rich with ideas and wonderful exercises…I also loved the advice to not focus so much on rewriting the beginning (which is something so many of us do!) but instead to try to finish a draft and then go back to rework the beginning.”–Maureen Turner Carey, author & librarian
“I like the way you provide a mechanism to explore what a character might do, not necessarily in the context of the story, but just behave if I extracted them from the story and watched them go.”–Sam Ritter, author
“So much revealed in so little time!”–Roanna Flowers, author of Dramedy Au Contraire
