Category: Memoir

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September 25 Memoir Writing Workshop on Zoom!

Hey, I’m teaching my eight-week memoir writing workshop again, on Wednesday nights starting September 25 on Zoom! The class meets from 7-9 PM ET, and the last class is November 13.

The workshop focuses on craft, especially on using emotion, the senses, lyricism, storytelling, and voice. Students will get frequent feedback in a supportive atmosphere. Class size is limited to 8. The fee is $325.

Let me know if you’re interested! You can contact me at minkowitz46@gmail.com.

Below is some more information about my background:

Donna Minkowitz has taught memoir writing for 24 years, at venues ranging from the 92nd Street Y and the Mt. Chocorua Writing Workshop to the JCC of Manhattan, the New York Writers Workshop, and The Kitchen. Her most recent memoir, Growing Up Golem, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and she won a Lambda Literary Award for her first memoir, Ferocious Romance. A former columnist at The Village Voice, she has also written for Slate, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, New York magazine, and Salon. Donna earned a BA in Literature from Yale University and received an Andrew D. White Fellowship in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She founded the Lit Lit literary series in Beacon, and has served as a judge for four book awards.

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All About My Economic Class! Plus Hunky Gay Robots.

So, I have a couple new pieces on the Substack that I really wanted to tell you about! Coming out today, I have a science fiction story called “The Tender Brigade” that is a riff on the fact that the US military has been developing lethal, autonomous military robots with, um, “ethical” capacities. And because this is a story by me, the ethical, military robots are also gay, and very sexual.

Next, I wrote an essay called “This Is the One About Class,” which details exactly what economic class I currently am, plus the class that I grew up in. This one was hard to write — it’s about, among other things, growing up on welfare, but much later on becoming economically privileged through the pure luck of the draw. And how I feel about that very complicated reality. It’s very much about the shame many of us feel about being poor, and about how easy it is to be attracted to the false claims of elitism (the idea that we get better stuff in society BECAUSE WE’RE WORTH IT! I’m proud of this piece, so I’d love it if you’d take a read.

Finally, I have some neato events coming up! Lit Lit in Beacon is Friday, May 5 at the Howland Cultural Center, from 7-9 PM. We have our very first LIT LIT MIXER scheduled for Thursday, May 11 at Homespun Foods, 272 Main Street in Beacon, 7-9 PM — an opportunity for all of us local readers and writers to meet each other and TAWK! And then, on Friday, May 12, I will be participating in a fantastic event called Twice Told Tales, where 10 writers write original pieces based on photographs by the artist Margot Kingon. At Norma’s, in Wappinger’s. Then on June 17 and 18th, get on down to the first Beacon Literary Festival, where I will be reading and talking about my work on the 17th. Would love to see you there. :-)

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What’s New for January

Hey campers, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

We got a lot going on in January here In Donnaville:

  • On Thursday evening, January 12, I will teach A FREE MEMOIR WRITING WORKSHOP at the Howland Public Library, 313 Main Street in Beacon, 6 PM- 7:15 PM. Please register here.
  • My next 8-week memoir workshop starts Wednesday, January 25 at 7 PM. It goes for eight Wednesday nights, from 7-9 PM, and the cost is $325. See here for more info.
  • The next LIT LIT is Friday, January 20 at the Howland Cultural Center at 7 PM, 477 Main St. in Beacon. If you’re interested, come on down! Some reading slots will be available at the door, or just come and listen 😎
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Next Lit Lit: Shaina Loew-Banayan!

NEXT LIT LIT: chef/writer Shaina Loew-Banayan, who just got a glowing review in @newyorkermag, is our featured author Fri. June 3, reading from their tough, tender, lyrical memoir Elegy for an Appetite. I’m so excited about this! It’s a memoir about, among other things, being a chef and someone who is crazy about food who also has an eating disorder. 7PM @howland_cultural_center in Beacon, followed by our regular awesome literary open mic. 477 Main St. in Beacon NY.
All of the advance signup slots to read in the open mic are full, but if you arrive by 6:30 you have a good chance of getting a spot! See you there! #beaconny #beaconnewyork #openmic #foodwriting #hudsonvalley #literature @cafemutton #hudsonny

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Donnaville: Work in Progress

Hey there! I thought I would describe to you what I’ve been working on since late fall of 2019. It’s a new book called DONNAVILLE, and it takes place in a city that is, yes… the city of my mind. You know how the poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote, “The mind is a city like London/Smoky and populous: it is a capital/Like Rome, ruined and eternal,/Marked by the monuments which no one/Now remembers”? This book imagines that city, er, my city — the little citystate of my mind.

You know how Sylvia Plath once wrote, “Is there no way out of the mind?” (Look it up, it’s a terrifying poem.) Well, sometimes Donnaville feels a little bit like that, because its central location is a prison, and one of the two main characters is the Jailer, who is also a janitor and torturer.

You know how Denise Levertov once wrote to a lover, “You invaded my country by accident/not knowing you had crossed the border./Vines that grew there touched you”? And then she tells him, “I invaded your country with all my/’passionate intensity,’/pontoons and parachutes of my blindness./But living now in the suburbs of the capital/incognito, my will to take the heart/ of the city has dwindled. I love its unsuspecting life,/its adolescents who come to tell me their dreams in the dusty park…”? Well, Donnaville is also about that, what happens when people approach the “countries” of other people’s minds, and try to have relationships with them. When different countries (or citystates), in other words, try to get together.

So, I have finished preliminary edits. It will be a long while before this book is out, but if you want to read some short excerpts, you can read them here, here, here , here, and here. Hope you like! :-)

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Vote For Me!


Edited on April 20: oh my God, I’m a finalist! Truly did not expect that. If you want to, please vote for me to advance further. For this readers’ choice award, people actually get to vote once a day!

Okay… For the very first time in my life, I get to say, “Vote for me!”

I’m thrilled to have been nominated for Chronogram Magazine’s annual award for the best author in the Hudson Valley :-) This is a readers’ choice award, and finalists and the winner are determined by whoever gets the highest number of votes. It’s the absolute truth to say I would be honored if I got yours.

Just to refresh you, I am the author of two award-winning and critically acclaimed memoirs. I am the founder of the Lit Lit series in the Hudson Valley, the winner of a GLAAD Media Award and Radcliffe College’s Exceptional Merit Media Award, and a writer who has gone undercover to write about white nationalists and the Christian right.

Everyone is allowed to vote, whether you live in the Hudson Valley or not.

You can vote for me at this link. (Please just scroll down slightly from the Artist category where this page begins, to the Author category where I am.) Many thanks, and if I win, I’m giving out pie!

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Lit Lit, the New Reading Series

Image: Poet Addison Goodson reading at Lit Lit.

Update: the next Lit Lit will be Friday, June 3 at 7 PM, at our regular location, the Howland Cultural Center. We are thrilled that Shaina Loew, author of Elegy for an Appetite and chef/owner of Café Mutton  in Hudson, will be our featured reader this month and sign books!! Advance open mic signups are now closed.  Proof of vaccination is required at the door.

For more info, click here.

Hey everybody! I’m thrilled to announce that I will be hosting Lit Lit, a new monthly literary open mic at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, 477 Main Street on the first Friday of every month.

Come and read your work of any genre. Or tell a story, or perform your writing!

We would love to hear you. Or if that’s not your bag, just come and listen — we would love to have you do that, too!

You can sign up to read on the night of the event. Everyone gets five minutes each. Sign-ups are first-come, first-served, and we will take readers until we run out of time.

Wine, beer, soft drinks and snacks will be available by donation.

Seriously, I’m excited about this. Donna