Writing about Money and Class Identity with Emily Withnall

Writing about money and class identity can be deeply uncomfortable. For people of all class backgrounds and people who have navigated more than one class background in their lifetimes, shame and other complex emotions can often interfere with our ability to write about these moments or to make sense of them within broader social, cultural, and political contexts. Readings for this workshop will be about class, money, and the intersections between class identity and race, sexual identity and gender identity, and disability, among other identities. This workshop will take place for an hour each week for four consecutive weeks. Each session will include discussion of readings and ideas, brainstorming, and generative prompts and writing time. By the end of the month, participants will have an essay drafted that addresses aspects of class and identity in their own lives.

Emily Withnall is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Gay Magazine, The Kenyon Review, River Teeth, The Indiana Review, Fourth River, The Rumpus, Orion, Ms. Magazine, and Huffington Post, among others. She is a recipient of the AWP Kurt Brown award in creative nonfiction, a John Anson Kittredge Foundation grant, and she has received fellowships from Fishtrap and Under the Volcano. Emily currently serves as a fellow for Community Change and she is at work on a book about domestic violence and hydraulic fracturing. Her work can be read at emilywithnall.com. Emily lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.