Autofiction Introduction: The Bad genre, Thursday 21st May, 6-8pm- THIS MASTERCLASS HAS PASSED – if you would like the recording, please get in touch: info@londonlitlab.co.uk
Autofiction is a word you hear a lot, a difficult to define ‘bad’ genre used to describe writers from Danté and Proust to Annie Ernaux via Rachel Cusk, Knausgaard and Sheila Heti. But what does autofiction actually mean? And, if you’re using your own life as your material, how do you know when you’re writing it?
For Serge Doubrovsky, autofiction is a hybrid of fiction and autobiography: “Fiction of strictly real events or facts; the autofiction, if you like, of having entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language.”
In this online Masterclass, join acclaimed writer Susanna Crossman in an exploration of how our lived experiences can be shaped and reimagined on the page as autofiction! In this introductory session of a three-part series, we’ll be unearthing the history of autofiction, examine its complexities and avant-garde vibe. We’ll be experimenting with POV, voice, style and getting inventive, writing the self and the selves we make up. We’ll also address questions of ethics and emotional truth. Come along to shake up your personal narrative ideas, rock the world and be bad!
Autofiction, à la Française, and Writing Autofiction as Resistance, Thursday 18th June, 6-8pm
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!
Autofiction and Breaking the rules, Thursday 16th July, 6-8pm
What if I broke the rules? In this final auto-fiction Masterclass we’ll be looking at the most experimental forms of autofiction, such speculative, essayistic, sci-fi versions of the autobiographical story. Reading experimental, wild texts such as Danté’s 14th-century narrative poem The Divine Comedy, State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg and Michelle de Kresner’s Theory and Practice that she describes as a “hyperrealist novel, a novel that doesn’t read like a novel.”
Having recapped the history and defintion of autofiction, we’ll be plunging into all the inventive forms auto-fiction can take, involving a story that we could imagine happening to ourselves that we can tell by subverting many literary forms.
All our interactive class workshops combine:
- Short recap of the history and definition of autofiction and breaking the autobiographical pact.
- Exploring and understanding: Inventive and speculative forms of autofiction from Danté, Duras to Van den Berg, via Woolf and Kresner.
- Experimenting with speculative techniques to move from real life to autofiction: Imagining what if? Establishing which truth I need to tell.
- Using generative autofiction writing exercises with hybrid forms: including fiction, essays, poetry, found language and sci-fiction within our autofiction texts.
- Discussing 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 be given access to the session recording for ten days after the session.
You can purchase an individual £30 ticket for this event, or this combination ticket for £75, which includes all Susanna’s sessions in this series:
- 21st May | AutoFiction Introduction: The Bad Genre | £30 – THIS MASTERCLASS HAS PASSED – if you would like the recording, please get in touch: info@londonlitlab.co.uk
- 18th June | Autofiction, à la française, and writing autofiction as resistance | £30
- 16th July |Autofiction and breaking the rules | £30
