How to Tell Your Jewish Story: A Writing Class with Hey Alma

Do you want to write your Jewish story? If so, this is the class for you!

One of our major goals at Hey Alma is to honor a diverse range of Jewish voices — but something we often hear from writers is they’re not sure where to start, or they’re not sure how to connect their Judaism to the subjects they want to write about. Sometimes, a Jewish person with a story will say: “But I’m not a writer.”

Vanessa Friedman, deputy managing editor of Hey Alma and writing instructor with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College, believes that everyone can be a writer. Storytelling is a natural human impulse, and if you want to tell your story, Vanessa wants to help you write it down.

In this one-hour class, we’ll read short pieces and excerpts to inspire us; we’ll brainstorm and unlock our creativity with fun warm-up writing exercises; and we’ll use prompts to start writing our Jewish stories. This is not a workshop, and you won’t be sharing your work with others in the class. But participants will leave the class with the start of an essay, the confidence to continue working on it independently, and the knowledge about how and where to pitch it if publication is the goal.