5 Wednesdays, April 18-May 16, 7-9:30 p.m.
$185 members/$215 others Berkeley
Student Testimonials
Special Package Deal: Take this class together with Aurora’s 5-week “Raw Writing“ class, and get both classes (10 weeks total) for the price of one 9-week class. This discount applies only if you choose the “Combo Class“ option when you register.
“I believe that anyone can learn to write well and really enjoy the process,” says Aurora Brackett. “Writing isn’t a gift bestowed by magic. It’s a practice. And in the busy lives we lead it is hard to make time to practice. This class will give you that time.”
For five weeks you will live as writers, paying attention to the world around you and translating your experience (and imaginations) into language. “Our classroom will be a creativity laboratory,” says Aurora. “We’ll do writing exercises, read aloud, look at art, listen to music, study maps and old photographs, tell jokes and make up fables. We’ll read stories, poems and personal essays and take them apart to see how they work. You’ll learn to take notes and to pay attention to detail as you go through your days — observing crowds in airports, the facial expressions of a Safeway cashier, a story overheard on the bus. The exercises and assignments I give will help you put it all together: vivid details, imagination, structure and voice.
“Our classroom will also become a community. We’ll listen to each other’s work and exchange feedback. Along the way we’ll talk about our obstacles and triumphs. I’ll bring in essays by authors about their writing practices, to give us perspective. Our conversations about the process of writing will help you to stay motivated, to keep writing even after the class is over.”
You don’t need to have any experience in writing to take this class. Most people come here simply with a desire to write. They leave with a community of writers to support them, work they are proud of, and a strong sense of their own innate creativity.
Aurora Brackett loves to teach as much as she loves to write. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University (where she received a Wilner Award for Short Fiction) and has taught there, at Johns Hopkins University and at College of Alameda. Her stories and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Cosmopsis Quarterly, Alimentum Journal, Tinfish, The Portland Review and Fourteen Hills. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook.