Become an FWR Annual Member and join this class/event (and others) for 10% off! Member promo code must be applied at registration.

Once when I was working on a longform political story, my editor asked me mid-draft "What is this story about? Why do I care?"

I fumbled for an answer. I knew I had beautiful sentences, but I wasn't sure that they lined up with my motivations or my purpose for writing. 

In this 3-hour workshop we will investigate your reasons for telling a story, talk about the ladder of abstraction as a tool for taking the personal to the universal level, and learn more about how to get out of your own way in order to craft beautiful effective sentences. 

This class is primarily for creative nonfiction writers considering a longer project (3,000+ words) that requires some research. Whether the project is investigative, scientific, historical or personal, this class is meant to recalibrate the writer's compass to make sure that their research, narrative structure and storytelling technique are all appropriate for the type of story that they wish to tell. 

Latria Graham is a journalist, and fifth generation South Carolina farmer. Her work stands at the intersection of food, social justice, sports and culture. She’s written longform pieces about everything from foodways to NASCAR. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and later earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The New School in New York City. She is a three-time Best American Sports Writing notable for her stories on athletes in places of tension—primarily Standing Rock, ND and Flint, MI. In 2019 she was awarded the Great Smoky Mountain Association's Steve Kemp Writer-in-Residence position, and for two years she has been in and out of conservation spaces, intent on unearthing long forgotten Black history that she finds crucial to the narrative we tell about the American South. She is the University of Montana's 2022 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer, and is currently in Missoula teaching environmental and nature writing to graduate students in the Environmental Studies program. A contributing editor Garden&Gun and Outside Magazine, she is the writer behind Garden&Gun's This Land column. which uses time, place, and memory to document and investigate the lesser known or rapidly disappearing aspects of the natural world in the South. Her work has been featured in the NYT, LA Times, The Guardian, espnW, Southern Living, and The Atlantic. You can find more of her work at LatriaGraham.com