Home of the autofiction genre, French autofiction began with Doubrovsky, and has evolved via daring writers such as Camille Laurens, Constance Debré, Annie Ernaux and Edouard Louis experimenting with writing as resistance: Louis writing ‘a map of the social world’, and Debré describing her “tipping point, the Kairos, it’s like the conversion of Saint Augustine, just as radical… there’s a life before and a life after.”
Many international writers, such as Sheila Heti and Sheena Patel, now employ the genre, as autofiction encourages resistance, opens the page to political subjects like motherhood, class, sexual violence, gender, sexuality and race. Ernaux says,
“My project was not to uncover all or part of my past life, but just one dimension of it: the transition from a working-class world to a culturally dominant world.”
In this online Masterclass, join acclaimed writer Susanna Crossman in an exploration of autofiction as resistance, an engaged way into untold stories. In this session we’ll be discovering French autofiction, it’s understated style coupled with a fluid approach incorporating elements of autobiography and sociology. We’ll be experimenting with collective POV, social history, and dynamic hybrid forms. Come along to write your new ideas, hidden stories, and change the world!
- Exploring and understanding the history, writers and texts which are part of ‘autofiction’ from the experimental ‘I’, breaking the autobiographical pact, via psychoanalysis to autofiction as resistance.
- Learning techniques for blending truth and invention in service of autofiction work.
- We will do generative autofiction writing exercises which allow you to move from real life to auto-fiction without losing narrative control, through POV, voice, inventing new rules.
- The masterclasses will give you practical tools for creating distance from autobiographical material while retaining emotional honesty.
- We will discuss handling vulnerability, ethics, permission and truth
- A Q & A.
We’ll be giving ourselves the permission to experiment with form, with intention, care, and artistic freedom. The session will provide a supportive, rigorous space. This course is open to beginners and experienced writers, poets, essayists, novelists, and short story writers who want to discover autofiction.
Tickets
This event will be recorded for the purpose of sending to ticket holders who can’t make the event, and those who require the recording to meet their access needs. Tickets purchased after the event takes place will give access to the session recording for ten days after the session.
You can purchase an individual £30 ticket for this event, or a combination ticket for £75 which includes Susanna’s previous sessions in this series:
- 21st May | AutoFiction Introduction: The Bad Genre | £30
- 16th July |Autofiction and breaking the rules | £30
