The myth of Writing/ Writing the myth: A Creative Writing Workshop

Detail: Khatija Possum

Ms Alexandra Kostoulas
Thursday 12 January 2023

Stories, just like all writing, have a structure that organizes and categorizes the work. In journalism, this happens in the form of the inverted pyramid structure. In expository writing, the thesis statement is the organizing principle of the work. In creative writing (like fiction and memoir) it’s the throughline and character arc. 

As storytellers, we think and envision our literary analysis of a work in a different way than scholars do. Instead of critical analysis, we are engaging with the craft of storytelling.  

As creative writing artists, our goal is the creation and craft of new work. 

One way to envision new work is to borrow plot structures from myths that are already there.  

There’s something archetypal to storytelling. Stories are ancient and as human beings we like to hear the same stories told over and over again in different ways. 

This workshop analyses what we can use from the structure of mythology and how to incorporate mythology and archetypal storytelling structures into modern day myth. 

We will explore as creatives where to work from existing story structures, societal myths and such, and also where to break from them in order to create new and compelling work that turns these ideas on their head. 

When: Thursday 12 January 2023
What time: 16:00-18:00
Language: English
Where: This is an online event via zoom, a zoom link will be sent to registered participants

Registration is now closed. Thank you very much for your interest.

Bio

Alexandra Kostoulas is a Greek-American writer of poetry, fiction and journalism and the founder & executive director of the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. Alexandra has taught students from all walks of life in her career as a professor and independent educator and has coached many aspiring writers to publication and performance of their work. She teaches writers to find their voice and unblock themselves creatively every day at http://sfwriting.institute. Her students have gone on to run literary organizations, become professors at top universities, publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, land prestigious book deals and break barriers in their writing and lives. As a writer, she has read and performed her work as a featured poet at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, the Melbourne Fringe Festival in Australia, Litquake in San Francisco, Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, Beastcrawl in Oakland and all over the Bay Area and beyond. Her blog turned performance series, “Dispatches from Quarantine,” won the 2022-23 California Arts Council Local Impact Award and will be produced as a hybrid workshop and performance series in 2023 that seeks to answer the question: how has coronavirus changed the face of creative writing across genres?  Her recently finished poetry collection Becoming Athena is ready to be published. She is also working on a debut novel, Persephone Stolen that weaves in mythology, immigrant stories, and stolen artifacts. She is also writes articles on creativity and the creative process in the SF Creative Writing Institute newsletter and on Medium.