Using Humor to Write Pain with Natalie Lima

A Meet an Author, Be an Author Workshop

This craft intensive will serve as an introduction and guide in using humor, and other forms of levity, to your advantage⁠—particularly when writing about tough subject matter.

When we write about ourselves in memoir or autofiction, it is easy to weigh down the reader with the darkness and drama in our lives. Humor is a way to create balance in tone. This craft intensive will serve as an introduction and guide in using humor, and other forms of levity, to your advantage⁠—particularly when writing about tough subject matter.

This workshop is being offered in partnership with the Indiana Writers Center (IWC). The IWC IWC supports Indiana writers of all ages and backgrounds and reaches out to people whose voices are rarely heard.

Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer, raised in Las Vegas, NV and Hialeah, FL. She is a first-generation college graduate of Northwestern University and a graduate of the MFA program in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Lima’s writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions (2020), and noted twice in Best American Essays (2019 and 2020). Her work has received support from PEN America Emerging Voices, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Hedgebrook Writers’ Residency. In fall of 2022, Lima will join the creative writing faculty at Butler University as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She is currently working on a memoir and an essay collection.

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