How do the big questions of our time–from climate change to racism–inhabit the stories of our lives? And what does it look like on the page to tell exquisitely personal stories in ways that gesture toward larger concerns? In this 90-minute workshop, writers uncover some of the big questions buried in their own narratives, identify research paths that might amplify the intersection between the Self and the World, connect with their own potentially-transformative obsessions, and explore how the stories we choose to tell can change us.

This workshop is taught by Katherine E. Standefer, author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving A Life. The book tells the story of the author’s troubled relationship to her own implanted cardiac defibrillator, and her global journey to understand whether the making of a potentially-lifesaving medical technology could have caused loss of life elsewhere in the world.

Lightning Flowers has been selected for Oprah Magazine’s Reading Room in November and was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School for Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Terry Tempest Williams called it “a riveting debut.” In a starred review, Kirkus called it “packed with emotion and a rare, honest assessment of the value of one’s own life, this debut is a standout. An intensely personal and brave accounting of a medical battle and the countless hidden costs of healthcare.” Standefer’s other writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and won the Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She has been a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge, and a resident at Jentel Arts in Banner, Wyoming. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA program. She writes from a juniper- and piñon-studded mesa in New Mexico with her nine chickens.