Autofiction and breaking the rules with Susanna Crossman

What if I broke the rules? In this final auto-fiction Masterclass we’ll be looking at the most experimental forms of autofiction, such speculative, essayistic, sci-fi versions of the autobiographical story. Reading experimental, wild texts such as Danté’s 14th-century narrative poem The Divine Comedy, State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg and Michelle de Kresner’s Theory and Practice that she describes as a “hyperrealist novel, a novel that doesn’t read like a novel.”

Having recapped the history and defintion of autofiction, we’ll be plunging into all the inventive forms auto-fiction can take, involving a story that we could imagine happening to ourselves that we can tell by subverting many literary forms.

Our interactive class/workshop will combine:

1. Short recap of the history and definition of autofiction and breaking the autobiographical pact.
2. Exploring and understanding: Inventive and speculative forms of autofiction from Danté, Duras to Van den Berg, via Woolf and Kresner.
3. Experimenting with speculative techniques to move from real life to autofiction:Imagining what if? Establishing which truth I need to tell.
4. Using generative autofiction writing exercises with hybrid forms: including fiction, essays, poetry, found language and sci-fiction within our autofiction texts.
5. Discussing handling vulnerability, ethics, permission and truth
6. A Q & A.

We’ll be giving ourselves the permission to to experiment with form with intention, care, and artistic freedom. The session will provide a supportive, rigorous space. This course is open to beginners and experienced writers, poets, essayists, novelists, and short story writers who want to discover autofiction.

Tickets

This event will be recorded for the purpose of sending to ticket holders who can’t make the event, and those who require the recording to meet their access needs. Tickets purchased after the event takes place will give access to the session recording for ten days after the session.

You can purchase an individual £30 ticket for this event, or a combination ticket for £75 which includes Susanna's previous sessions in this series:

• 21st May | AutoFiction Introduction: The Bad Genre | £30
• 18th June | Autofiction, à la Française, and Writing Autofiction as Resistance
  | £30

Your Tutor

Susanna Crossman is an essayist and award-winning fiction writer. Her acclaimed memoir, Home is Where We Start: Growing Up In The Fallout of The Utopian Dream, was published by Fig Tree, Penguin, in 2024 and will be published by Heliotrope Books (US) in 2026. Her new novel, The Orange Notebooks, was out in 2025 (Bluemoose Books, UK and Assembly Press, NA). She has recent work in Aeon, The Guardian, Paris Review, Vogue, Neue Rundschau and more. A published novelist in France, she regularly collaborates with artists. When she’s not writing, she works on three continents as a mentor, lecturer and clinical arts-therapist.