Made Visible Workshops

The Made Visible workshop series is for people who want to explore their story through personal essay and memoir. In these workshops, participants will write, give and receive feedback, and hear from guest speakers about how to write, hone, and publish work. In everything we do, we’ll focus on topics that are specific to writing about invisible illness. 

Best of all, you can choose which and how many workshop sessions you attend. With the unpredictability of invisible illness especially in this current time in the world, we wanted to make it as accessible for you to join in whatever way works best for you. 

Each workshop will have the same structure with different guest speakers.

Workshop Dates

• October 5, 12-2pm EST: Emily Stone

• October 19, 12-2pm EST: Amanda Stern

• November 2, 12-2pm EST: Sari Botton 

• November 16, 12-2pm EST: Susannah Cahalan 

• November 30, 12-2pm EST: Dawn Fraser

If you sign up for an individual workshop or the whole series and you are unable to attend live, we’ll be sending out the recording within 24 hours of the workshop so you can watch the replay. All workshops are non-refundable.

Once you are registered, you will receive the Zoom link the morning of the workshop. Please do not share the link with anyone who is not registered. Come with a notebook and pen to take notes and/or write!

About the Guest Teachers

Sari Botton

Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Kingston, NY. She is a contributing editor at Catapult, and the former Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the award-winning anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY and its New York Times bestselling follow-up, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY. She teaches creative nonfiction at Wilkes University, Catapult and Bay Path University. Her memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself... will be published by Heliotrope in June, 2022.

Susannah Cahalan

Susannah Cahalan is an award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author of 2012 Brain on Fire and 2019's The Great Pretender. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Post, Elle, The New Scientist, and BBC’s Focus, as well as academic journals The Lancet and Biological Psychiatry. She teaches narratives in mental health at New York University.

Dawn J. Fraser

Dawn J. Fraser is a storyteller, public speaker and a nationally acclaimed communications coach based out of San Jose, California. She is the Creator/ Host of ‘Barbershop Stories’, which features storytellers performing true tales in barbershops and salons around NYC, and the Founder/ CEO of Fraser’s Edge, LLC, which offers programs for businesses, nonprofits, and college students the opportunity to develop their leadership potential through storytelling. Past clients have included companies like Spotify, Vox Media and Google as well as 1 on 1 celebrities including the rapper Common. Dawn currently serves as a Lead Instructor with The Moth and was featured amongst some of the nation’s top change makers at TED@NYC.

Amanda Stern

Amanda Stern is the author of 13 books: The Long Haul, Little Panic, and eleven books for children written under pseudonyms. In 2003, she founded the Happy Ending Reading Series which ran for 15 years at NYC’s Joe’s Pub and then at Symphony Space. She hosted the yearlong podcast Bookable and is about to launch her first newsletter called How to Live, about psychology and mental health. She is working on another memoir. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Monaco. Okay no—she does not.

Emily Stone

Emily Stone is a writer, teacher and content alchemist with 25+ years of experience working with authors to distill the power and impact of every story. She taught at Latin at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights, creative writing at Hunter College and drama at Stern College. Her book Did Jew Know? is a cultural history of all things Jewish from Saul to Seinfeld. She runs a popular online Book Dive, a collision of pop culture and high criticism that explores classic gothic and genre novels. Her Plot Spine course was the Zoom hit of the pandemic. Emily lives with her wife in New York and Los Angeles.