Workshops | Online & In-Person

LaDonna teaches occasional writing workshops, bringing her twenty-some years of writing experience to students who are just beginning to put pen to paper as well as those who have been telling stories for years.

In-person workshops are held in collaboration with Salted Books in Lisbon, Portugal.

Online workshops are held over Zoom. New dates TBA.

ASSAY THE ESSAY

A 3-session essay writing workshop @ Salted Books, Lisbon
5:30-7:30pm on Sunday, Oct 25; Nov 1; Nov 8

Maybe you don't have a full-length book burning a hole in your brain (yet), but you've got something. An itch, a premonition, a squeaky wheel. Something you want to pin to a page – perhaps you could call it an essay.

In this three-part follow up to her generative Write Your Life workshop, LaDonna Witmer helps you figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it. In three 2-hour Sunday sessions, you'll work together to figure out how – and where – to begin. Together you'll read examples of essays that work, take them apart, put them back together, figure out which writing rules work for you and which rules you need to break.

You'll leave with one complete (or nearly so) essay, and lots of writing prompts and reading inspiration to keep you motivated. Bring whatever you use to write on and that memory, revelation, or true kind of story that wakes you up in the small hours of the morning.

(Although it's helpful if you've attended LaDonna's Write Your Life workshop before, that's not a pre-requisite for this course. Everything will still make sense.)

Are you one of those people to whom everyone says: You really should write about your life! Perhaps you’re nearing your golden years, and you’d like to record some of your (mis)adventures or preserve family stories before they disappear. Maybe you’ve wondered how to begin, or worried that no one will want to read what you’ve written, or told yourself you couldn’t possibly do such a thing because you’re “not really a writer?”

You don’t need previous writing experience to learn how to write about your life in an engaging way. This two-hour generative writing workshop provides thoughtful guidance, craft basics, and easy prompts to help you make your memories come alive on the page. You’ll walk out of this experience with one short written work about your life and lots of ideas for how to keep the stories coming—including a take-home packet that includes writing prompts and a reading list. All you need to bring is yourself, your memories, and something to write on.

Upcoming Write Your Life Workshops

Shame is suffocation. It robs us of agency, creativity, confidence, joy. When we feel a profound sense of shame, it changes the story that we tell about ourselves. We believe that the shameful thing is not simply a thing that happened—a mistake we made, or something someone else did to us, or a facet of ourselves that others tell us is less than. We believe that the shameful thing is actually who we are.

This generative writing workshop delves deep into the sensitive work of untangling the myriad shames that bind us. In four separate two-hour sessions, we will take an incisive look at what shame actually is, we will interrogate the ways in which shame has harmed us, we will talk about who shame actually benefits, and we will discover how to take the fangs out of shame’s mouth by writing our stories out in the open, on a bright new page.

During the course of this workshop, we will read the works of other writers who have written through their shame, and we will use lists and grids and a variety of writing exercises to see ourselves — and our shames — clearly.

This workshop requires no small amount of bravery and vulnerability. If you are ready to take up a pen (or keyboard) and write yourself free, let’s begin.

Writing to DeFang Shame is a four-session workshop, with each session lasting 2 hours.

Upcoming Writing to De-Fang Shame Workshop Series