Masterclass: Writing shame: Navel gazing, subversion, and subterfuge
Tuesday 25 February 2025, 2pm - 3.30pm
The Levett Room, Wolfson College
All welcome - Register here.
For more information please visit the event page.
Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Please note that there are there are only 25 spaces available. Spaces will be confirmed one week before the event.
In this interactive masterclass, Lucy Burns draws on her own experience of struggling to write about abortion for the first time. Participants are invited to read the opening chapter of Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2022) in preparation for an informal discussion on the challenges of writing about shame and trauma. The masterclass will conclude with a series of writing exercises based on strategies Burns used to write the first drafts of her memoir, Larger than an Orange (2021). Participants do not need to prepare anything for these writing exercises, and there’ll be no expectation to share writing produced in class.
Preparatory reading: Melissa Febos, ‘In Praise of Navel Gazing,’ in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (Manchester University Press, 2022), 3-28.
Speakers:
Image credit: Sophie Davidson
Lucy Burns (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Prose at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first book, Larger than an Orange, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2021. It was named a 2021 Sunday Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. Lucy is currently working on a creative non-fiction book about the US liberal arts college, Black Mountain College.
Josephine Rosman (she/her) is a graduate of Oberlin College. She is currently reading for an MSt in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the portrayal of female friendship in modern and contemporary women’s literature and feminist theory.
This event is hosted in collaboration with the Feminist Thinking Seminars, organised by students reading for the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programme. Lucy Burns will also deliver a public lecture—'Writing Abortion: Reflections on Larger than an Orange’. Further details are available here.
