The Makery: Generate Together with Neema Avashia

Are you feeling stuck in your writing these days? Struggling to find ideas? Sometimes constraints and community can help! This class will jumpstart your non-fiction writing, giving you several writing “seeds” that you can build out after class ends. Each session is generative in nature. We will have time to look at some mentor texts together, respond to prompts within a set amount of time, and then share our work. You’ll leave with source material for multiple possible essays, and well as ideas for where they might be placed.

Neema Avashia, the widely celebrated author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (WVU Press) and former attendee of the Workshop, is joining our faculty to lead the creative non-fiction section.

Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her book, Another Appalachia, examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.