‘Tell All the Truth, but Tell It Slant:’ Writing About Trauma with Thomas McNeely

How do we tell the story of a traumatic event or its aftermath? What if, after the event, we were silenced by others or just by our own inability to put the experience into words? In this 4-week generative course, participants will experiment with different approaches to narrating real or fictional trauma while keeping in mind that each traumatic experience suggests a variety of different stories and may be narrated in a variety of different ways. The workshop includes readings by Sylvia Plath, Brian Teare, Ocean Vuong, Mary Karr, Eimear McBride, and other writers, as well as ideas from trauma narrative theorists and researchers such as Cathy Caruth and Bessel van der Kolk.
Workshop participants will leave with an understanding of how to write about trauma and its impact, ideas on which narrative form can best capture the traumatic experience and a starting place for their own piece of writing. This class is open to writers of all skill levels.
Workshop Dates: Saturdays, June 3, 10, 17 & 24, 10am-12pm CST via Zoom
Thomas H. McNeely is a Houston native and award-winning fiction writer whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and other magazines and anthologies. He teaches at Emerson College and Stanford Online Writing Studio and has led workshops at various literary arts organizations.