What Burns Must Be Beautiful: Following Shame to the Page with Kimberly King Parsons

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Editor's Note

What Burns Must Be Beautiful: Following Shame to the Page with Kimberly King Parsons
Saturday, May 30
10 AM – 1 PM PT/ 1 PM – 4 PM ET
Online

While shame often feels like something to avoid, this universal human experience can become a valuable creative tool when approached with care and intention. This virtual intensive explores the productive relationship between shame and literary craft, examining how writers can harness feelings of discomfort and vulnerability to create more authentic, resonant work.

Beginning with examples from Zadie Smith, T Kira Māhealani Madden, Garth Greenwell, Diane Seuss, and Megan Nolan, we’ll analyze how shame operates as both subject matter and artistic method across genres and cultural contexts. We’ll examine concrete strategies that help writers identify and use shame as a creative compass, particularly focusing on how shame manifests in physical detail, social interaction, and material objects. Through close reading of selected texts, we’ll see how attention to moments of personal and cultural shame can lead writers toward deeper truth and universal meaning.

Then we’ll practice these techniques through targeted writing exercises. You’ll learn to recognize shame’s physical signatures, explore how shame functions in dialogue and scene, and discover how objects and places can carry shameful meaning. These prompts will guide you toward writing that positions shame not as an obstacle to overcome, but as a sophisticated artistic tool that illuminates connections between personal experience and broader social structures.

You’ll leave with new work that may surprise you with its honesty and depth. This class might be particularly relevant for writers working with themes of class, identity, sexuality, and family dynamics in their work.

Scholarship
The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.

BIO: National Book Award-nominee KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick ranked #2 on TIME Magazine’s Best Books of 2024. The New York Times praised the debut novel as “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power” and it was a best book of 2024 in Elle, Oprah Daily, Marie Claire, Marie Claire UK and many others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Fiction Award. An Oregon Book Award-winner, Parsons teaches fiction at Pacific University and lives in Portland with her family.