Residency Dates: February 12, 2023 - March 04, 2023
Application Deadline: November 27, 2022
Susanna Sonnenberg is the author of two memoirs, Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, both published by Scribner. She has published personal creative nonfiction in a variety of magazines and critical reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including The Bitch is Back, The Secret Currency of Love and West of 98. She has received fellowships and grants from the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and others. Since 2017 she has taught in the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In Missoula, Montana, where she’s lived for 30 years, she teaches writing classes online.
Residency Statement:
How well do you know the Self? Do you wish to investigate the Self in order to produce fresh authentic writing? If you respond to these questions, work with me on whatever project you are writing. I write and teach memoir mostly, which is how I have, over decades, come into a relationship with the Self in artistic ways, learning to use the Self in art in very different ways than I use it (or it uses me) in life. Residents — poets, memoirists, essayists, fiction writers — can expect to come together the first week as a group, as we establish our close, safe and confidential community. In the following two weeks, with looser schedules, you will be encouraged to read and write copiously, freely, rigorously, all in service of this great, risky investigation, and I will be available to help you. We will spend time in the natural world, have periods of breathwork and silence, and bring in the occasional non-writing artistic endeavor. You will, bit by bit, crack open, which will suffuse your work with heart and Self.
Application Requirements:
A writing sample of 10-12 pages.
A 250 word bio or a creative CV.
A personal statement of up to 300 words describing your literary influences and aspirations, as well as what you hope to achieve during the residency.
Residency Fee: Waived for this Residency (Includes weekday meals and housing; does not include artist materials, transportation, or weekend meals.)
For details, please visit the Mentoring Artist details page.
Application fee: $25. Click here to Apply!