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Writing the Family Constellation with Sarah Stone & David Haynes

from $120.00

Families are full of constantly shifting dynamics and allegiances: feuds and friendships; competing interests, needs, and desires; disputed histories and circumstances. All of these become part of our projects, whether we’re writing a family saga that covers generations, a work that focuses on one relationship, or a piece that takes place over the course of an afternoon. This session is for writers at all levels and working in any genre, including fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and plays. We’ll read short selections together, discuss the craft and process of writing families, and do a couple of writing exercises to explore family constellations from different angles.

 

Along the way we’ll think about who gets included and how (are they central or peripheral?) and whether the piece stays with one speaker/central character or shifts among different consciousnesses and perspectives. We’ll also touch on the dynamics around writing family that happen off the page and the critical importance of dramatic irony when traversing the family multiverse.

Please bring a pen and notebook or a laptop.

Friday, March 20th from 2:30-5:00 pm

(15% discount for Backstory co-working and community members.)

Rate:

Families are full of constantly shifting dynamics and allegiances: feuds and friendships; competing interests, needs, and desires; disputed histories and circumstances. All of these become part of our projects, whether we’re writing a family saga that covers generations, a work that focuses on one relationship, or a piece that takes place over the course of an afternoon. This session is for writers at all levels and working in any genre, including fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and plays. We’ll read short selections together, discuss the craft and process of writing families, and do a couple of writing exercises to explore family constellations from different angles.

 

Along the way we’ll think about who gets included and how (are they central or peripheral?) and whether the piece stays with one speaker/central character or shifts among different consciousnesses and perspectives. We’ll also touch on the dynamics around writing family that happen off the page and the critical importance of dramatic irony when traversing the family multiverse.

Please bring a pen and notebook or a laptop.

Friday, March 20th from 2:30-5:00 pm

(15% discount for Backstory co-working and community members.)

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Intuition and Interpretation: A Generative Tarot Workshop with Carrie Mar and Cal Calamia
from $25.00
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Sarah Stone (she/they)

Sarah Stone is the author of the novels The True Sources of the Nile and Hungry Ghost Theater, a finalist for the 38th Annual Northern California Book Awards. A new book, Marriage to the Sea, is forthcoming in spring 2026 from Four Way Books. Sarah is also the co-author, with Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her work has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, Necessary Fiction, 100 Word Story, StoryQuarterly, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, The Believer, CRAFT, Alta Journal online for the California Book Club, and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, and was included in the list of distinguished stories of 2020 in The Best American Short Stories 2021, Jesmyn Ward, editor. Sarah is a former LABA Fellow and a Jewish Studio Project creative facilitator and has taught for UC Berkeley, the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and Stanford Continuing Studies, among other places. She has also written for and taught on Korean television, reported on human rights in Burundi, looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute, and worked as a psychiatric aide in a locked facility, a graveyard-shift waitress in the restaurant where everyone went after they’d been thrown out of all the bars in town, and an office worker in an apparently haunted massage/bodywork school in the Santa Cruz mountains.

David Haynes (he/him)

David Haynes is the author of eight novels for adults and five books for younger readers.  He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. From 1996 through 2024 he taught regularly in MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His most recently novel is A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY, and in 2023 he published a 30th anniversary edition of RIGHT BY MY SIDE as part of the Penguin Classic series.  MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES, his first collection of short fiction was released by McSweeney’s in September.  

David serves as Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering, and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.