Writing with Ellen Meloy Winner Debbie Weingarten
Date: Friday, October 18th
Time: 9am – 11am
Location: Recapture Lodge Outdoor Area
Cost: $25
Number of Participants: Up to 15
Participants must be 16 years old.
Debbie Weingarten Instructor
Our lives are complex and layered. We exist in an accordion of time, geography, species, and inheritances, amid shifting global economics, politics, war, and climate. Sometimes an essay needs a flexible container to hold all of these pieces.
The braided essay is one such container—one that weaves together the individual story with that of the bigger wider world. One result of this juxtaposition is enhanced meaning. A braided essay can sometimes speak in a rounder voice. A braid made of multiple strands can often play with nuance more deftly than a single linear narrative. The braided essay can time travel, freeze, speculate, return to childhood, deep-dive into research, reflect and refract, chase its tail, become animal, and delight us with new associations.
We’ll channel our inner packrat to first collect bits and bobbles of shiny interesting things—memories, research, snippets of dialogue, news stories, burning questions, family mythologies, you name it—and then sort through them to develop possible strands.
Come ready to play with fragments, cut things up with actual scissors, and go on a scavenger hunt. Bring a notebook or laptop for generative writing exercises. My hope is for all participants to leave this workshop feeling inspired to continue this page-play and to eventually see their strands through to a completed braided essay.
’m an essayist and journalist who especially loves to explore the seams between lyric memoir and reporting. As a journalist, I often write at the intersection of social justice and rural issues. In my creative writing, I’m immensely inspired by place and questions of memory, longing, and home. My writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Longreads, Guernica, The New York Review of Books, High Country News, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and many other digital and print outlets, including the 2016 and 2017 Best of Food Writing anthologies. I’m a two-time Pushcart nominee and was a 2019 finalist for the James Beard Award for Investigative Reporting, among myriad other awards and honors. Most recently, I became the grateful recipient of the Ellen Meloy Fund’s 2024 Desert Writers Award. In addition to writing and editing, I have a background in food systems, arid lands agriculture, and community organizing. I write full-time for High Mowing Organic Seeds. For nearly a decade, I’ve worked with award-winning photographer Audra Mulkern of The Female Farmer Project. Our full-length documentary film, Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers, premiers on PBS in September 2024. My debut memoir-in-essays is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette. In 2021, after sixteen formative years in the Sonoran Desert, I moved back to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
