Bearing Witness: Writing in Dark Times

A 10-week Online Creative Writing Workshop with Perrin Kerns
Mondays – Nov. 10,17,24 Dec. 1,8,15 Jan. 5,12,19,26
6:00-8:00pm Pacific Time
Registration: $600 or $540 for Fishtrappers

Is the registration fee an obstacle for you to attend this workshop? Fishtrap offers a limited number of scholarships to help with the cost. Contact Program Director Mike Midlo for more information. mike@fishtrap.org

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.   
                                                                                      — Bertholt Brecht

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness 
                                                           — Elie Wiesel

“To bear” means both to carry and to endure. In this class, we will explore what it means to bear witness as writers – to our own lives, to others’ lives, to the natural world,  to our nation’s life. During our time together, we will write to prompts, engage in peer feedback groups, and share our newly generated writing throughout our sessions. We will culminate by sharing a final short revised piece of writing.  

Perrin Kerns has been teaching creative writing for over 30 years. For many of those years, she served as the Director of Writing at Marylhurst University. More recently she has been teaching literature, creative nonfiction, and digital storytelling at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, Prescott College, PNCA’s MFA, Portland State University, Literary Arts, and Fishtrap. Her own creative work has taken her from the lyric essay to digital storytelling to personal narrative documentaries based on her lyric essays.