Ravi Shankar | Memoir Writing Workshop
Dramatizing the Daily: Mastering Unruly Forms
Himalayan Literature Festival & Writers Workshop 2026
Malla Hotel, Kathmandu
31 May 2026
11:00 AM – 1:00 M
Creative nonfiction is a literature of productive contradiction: it renders truth—or rather the “not untrue”—into compelling prose without fictionalizing what happened. That tension between what we know, what we half-remember, and what we cannot quite say is not a problem to be solved, but a resource to be mined. In this workshop, we explore how formal innovation can honor complexity, vulnerability, and the irresolvably contradictory.
Working closely with braided and lyric essays, hermit crab forms, and speculative CNF, we will reverse-engineer craft by reading against the grain—asking not just what a piece says, but how its architecture makes meaning. Our guides include Virginia Woolf and Michel de Montaigne, Sei Shōnagon and Wendell Berry, Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine—writers who have made the personal essay carry extraordinary cultural and political weight.
From close reading, we move to generative writing, producing new work of our own that takes risks with form as deliberately as it takes risks with feeling.
Pushcart Prize–winning poet Dr. Ravi Shankar is the author, translator, and editor of 18 books, including Correctional, a Memoir Magazine and Connecticut Book Award finalist; the Muse India Award–winning translations of Andal, The Autobiography of a Goddess; Tallying the Hemispheres: New and Selected Essays (Nirala Books); and W. W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century, called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer.
He has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Caravan, The Daily Beast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and on the BBC, NPR, and PBS NewsHour. He founded Drunken Boat, one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, has received fellowships and residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, been featured at the Ubud, Sydney, and Jaipur Literary Festivals, delivered a TEDx talk on #impuritanthinking, and currently teaches creative writing with the New York Writers Workshop and at Tufts University.
Online Participation:
A limited number of virtual seats are available for those who wish to join remotely.
To register or request more information:
Himalayan Literature Festival & Writers Workshop
📧 hlfwwk2026@gmail.com
🌐 https://hlf.whitelotusbookshop.com/
