The creative writing classroom is not an explicitly healing space—yet writers regularly bring their stories of trauma into workshops. In this 4-hour intensive, learn when writing heals and harms, discuss best practices, and assess your own self-regulation skills.

The creative writing classroom is not explicitly a healing space—and yet writers bring their stories of trauma into workshops on a regular basis. What are our obligations to these students as instructors? What are the best practices for managing workshop discussions about difficult and potentially triggering material?

As the final card in the tarot’s Major Arcana, the World card signals successful completion of a cycle. In this 2-hour writing workshop at The Ninth House, we’ll write into our long journeys and celebrate our final threshold crossing. The World card wants you to know: You did it. And bigger things await.

Near the end of any journey comes a reckoning: How have we changed—and have we changed enough? In this 2-hour writing workshop at The Ninth House, we’ll hold up the mirror to thoroughly and honestly account for who we are. Sounding its wake-up call, the Judgment Card wants us to know: Transformation is here. But it requires our full participation.

What causes a book-length work to move forward with urgency? How do we avoid bogging readers down in a play-by-play? In this 2 hour intensive workshop, author Katherine E. Standefer draws on the writing of her debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life to offer pacing strategies writers can bring to their own memoirs-in-process.

There is a great temptation to airbrush ourselves on the page, and yet this leaves us not only less trustworthy on the page, but less interesting. In this evening nonfiction seminar, students will explore how the contradictions in their personalities—the gaps between dirty laundry and grace—are the most interesting space. Hosted by Sublette County Public Library in Pinedale, Wyoming.

Writing can be healing. But writing can also re-traumatize, making it difficult to tell the stories that make us who we are. In this workshop at The Examined Life Conference in Iowa City, IA, participants will explore how what an embodied, trauma-sensitive pedagogy has to offer the creative writing workshop.

In this Examined Life Conference one-day workshop at the Carver College of Medicine, we’ll use published illness writing as our launching pad for exploring how to successfully manage the chronology and scope of modern illness experiences on the page. 

Join Kati and other contributors to How We Speak To One Another: An Essay Daily Reader at Tucson Festival of Books to discuss the essay as a multifaceted literary genre.  More information forthcoming.

"If you can't talk about something, you can't think about something," writer Eula Biss told Krista Tippett. Join me in late February, as alumni of my classes-- writers of sex, illness, and trauma-- read together for the first time on the patio at Tucson Hop Shop.

How have our bodies been silenced--in medical offices, in our private lives, and on the page? And what might it look like to embrace our sexualities wholeheartedly? Join writer, sexologist, and Narrative Medicine professor Kati Standefer for a short reading and interactive conversation about sex positivity and negativity, how she teaches sex writing, and her work training medical students to respond to the stories patients tell about their bodies.

Drawing on the lessons of my ongoing work with community-level writers, I’ll explore how the problems of modern illness become the craft problems of illness narratives, and how I help students break out of these ruts by teaching chronology, scope, framing, and to widen the narrative lens. Together, we'll discuss ways to avoid student re-traumatization, and explore how a supportive community can help writers see past doctors and medical technology to identify the real hero of their illness narratives: themselves.