“There was the story I told about where I was from, and then there was another one running alongside it. The shadow story. The one I never wanted to tell at all.”

Writing memoir gives us a chance to make sense of real-life events. By crafting a story, we can regain control over circumstances and experiences we felt lost to in real-time. In this craft talk, Jeanne Hodesh discusses the risk and reward of putting yourself fully on the page. We’ll explore the power of secrets and lies, and how, by writing about them, we can pull back the layers of a story we not only want to tell, but need to.

This workshop with prompts will draw on personal experience, excerpts from texts, and give participants a jumping off place to explore writing about their own lives.

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Jeanne Hodesh's essays, interviews, and articles have been published in Literary Hub, Lenny Letter, and The Hairpin, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, where she also taught literature and writing. She has led workshops at Grace Church School, Girls Write Now, and the New York Writers Coalition, and is at work on a coming of age memoir about navigating public and private personas while growing up in a family business.