Over the years, founder Erika Duncan – along with the women of Herstory – have developed their own half-emotional, half-technical vocabulary, in which the study of what creates reader empathy replaces usual literary terms, allowing those with little formal education to work with complex notions of narrative structure on level ground with professors of literature, so that in time workshop members began to understand what was meant when we spoke about “Book Time” or “There-ness as opposed to About-ness” or making a passage more “Jaggedy,” to use some of our most essential Herstory terms. These words or phrases were passed on from one workshop member to another, and have become valuable teaching tools as used in our workshops and in our recently published manual, Paper Stranger: Shaping Stories in Community.
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