Instructor: Melissa Fraterrigo
Date: Wednesday, April 16
Time: 6:30-8:30 pm EST
Location: Zoom
Cost: $50 Nonmembers, $32 Writer/Reader Members, $28 Senior, Teacher, Student, Military/Veteran, Librarian Members

You have a story to tell, but how best to get the scenes and memories on the page so that readers feel as if your lived experience is also theirs? In this class, we’ll explore the following three narrative structures in creative nonfiction that reveal personal and universal wisdoms: narrative, flash, and braid.

Class time will be used to examine these three different approaches to structure a narrative, the benefits of each, and then we will use this discussion to try our hand at the multiple possibilities structure affords in our own writing. You will leave this class with the start of three new essays or one essay with three different approaches and endless possibilities.

About the instructor:
Melissa Fraterrigo’s forthcoming collection, The Perils of Girlhood will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2025. She is also the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which was named one of “The Best Fiction Books of 2017” by the Chicago Review of Books as well as the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in more than fifty literary journals and anthologies from storySouth and Shenandoah to Notre Dame Review, Sou’wester and The Millions. A graduate of the University of Iowa (BA) and Bowling Green State University (MFA), she teaches creative writing at Purdue University, and is also the founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, where she offers classes on the art and craft of writing. She lives with her husband and two daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana.