Upcoming Sessions

Presenter: Jamie BrickhouseTrack: Writing for Performance

Deeply personal, honest, funny true stories can be therapeutic and cathartic for the storyteller, but the storyteller’s catharsis isn’t the point. By performing a story for an audience, the storyteller must create an emotional experience in the audience. Jamie Brickhouse—a nationally recognized (PBS-TV), 4-time Moth champion, National Storytelling Network Grand Slam champion, New York Times published memoirist, and award-winning solo show performer—reveals how it’s done. In this introduction to personal narrative storytelling, he demonstrates how to adapt stories from your memoirs and personal essays that are dynamic, compelling, engaging, funny, suspenseful, moving, and ultimately universal and cathartic. He adapted his memoir Dangerous When Wet: Booze, Sex and My Mother into a multi-award-winning show that he continues to tour across the country. His second solo show, I Favor My Daddy, is based on his memoir-in-progress and is also multi-award-winning. Using examples from his own work, that of other stellar tellers and tools taken from writing his memoirs, he reveals the art and craft to unlocking and adaptive personal narrative prose into stories that are entertaining, profound, funny and moving. Participants should come with one chapter, story, or personal essay they want to workshop for performance and will leave the class with the tools for a stage-ready story.