Workshop: Object to Essay: Finding Your Master Narrative In-Person
A writing workshop as part of the 2026 To Taste Life Twice Seminar - three days of author talks and writing workshop. Registration is limited to 15 participants.
Instructor: Kim Barnes
Who am I, and why? This is the question writers of personal nonfiction must ask in order to understand their Master Narrative and how it informs their writing and their lives. As William Kittredge observed, “What we are is stories. We do things because of what we call character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories, reinventing reasons for our lives. We are like detectives, each of us trying to make sense and define what we take to be the right life.”
In this workshop, we will discuss how to identify your Master Narrative as well as how it informs and defines your personal, familial, and socio-cultural mythology. By examining a singular object and contemplating its memory association, attendant symbolism, mythology, and etymology, we will explore ways to heighten and deepen the artistic quality of your essays and memoirs, focusing on the use of harmonic metaphor, echoing imagery, illustrative motifs, objective correlatives, vertical movement, and the Third Sphere of the imagination.
Participants will receive optional reading material before our meeting and will share singular memories with the group. I’ll also provide a prompt that will guide you through the writing of your memory and how it might be elevated to the condition of art.
- Date:
- Saturday, May 9, 2026
- Time:
- 1:00pm - 4:00pm
- Time Zone:
- Mountain Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
- Campus:
- The Community Library
- Audience:
- Adults
- Categories:
- Classes & Discussions Seminars & Conferences
Kim Barnes was raised in the logging camps and small towns of Idaho's Clearwater National Forest. Her novels and memoirs have been named among the best books of the year by San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, and The Kansas City Star. Her novel A Country Called Home received the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and she is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award for her first memoir, In the Wilderness, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, WSJ, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. A former Idaho Writer-in-Residence, recipient of an Idaho Governor's Arts Award, and University of Idaho Distinguished Professor Emerita, she lives with her husband, Robert Wrigley, in the mountains of North Idaho.