Working Class Love Notes: A Writing Retreat Weekend

Working-class people are natural storytellers. You can often find us gathered on front porches, sitting around a kitchen table, or circled up around a campfire swapping stories. Stories are a way we hold onto our history, pass along knowledge, preserve traditions, and entertain ourselves. Often our instincts for writing come directly from our experience of hearing a good story and learning to tell them ourselves.

Working-class stories deserve to be nurtured, shaped, and published but having a space for us to retreat, skill up, rest, and write together are few and far between which is why I’m thrilled to partner with Kirkeridge retreat center to host a weekend working-class writer’s retreat where we can give ourselves and our stories the care and attention we deserve with a group of people who can understand who we are and where we come from.

Who is this for? Class is a tricky thing to define and nail down, but this workshop is for you if you: grew up in a family where economic stress weighed heavy on hearts and minds; you and/or many of your family and community worked with their hands and bodies; you often worried about healthcare, paying the rent, and keeping food on the table; you have bosses and your bosses have bosses; you’re in a labor union; and/or you’re a first generation college student. This workshop is best for those who write creative nonfiction and have stories you want to write and share about your class experience as a way to create a greater degree of justice in the world. Note: Sometimes we have a mixed class background where one side of our family experienced more economic precarity than the other. You’re welcome here, too. The fact is, most people in America are working class so if you feel you belong here, you do.

This is a creative nonfiction generative writing retreat weekend focused on producing new work and getting ideas flowing with a group of people who share similar life experiences and have similar goals and values. We will spend time reading other working-class writers like Dorothy Allison, Annie Ernaux, and Crystal Wilkinson. Plus, we will have plenty of time to rest, read, reflect, and write, as well. The weekend will be structured around themes from my memoir Song For a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity From a Coal Miner’s Daughter.

In a time of extreme wealth inequality, heightened targeted violence against PoC and our LGBTQ community, and rising authoritarianism, working-class stories and writers are critical. Our stories have the power to touch the hearts of our people and call them into action towards a vision of the future where we all have what we need and deserve. Let’s come together and write them.