8-Week: Memoir Beyond the Personal

Memoirists dwell on on the blade of a double-edged sword: we draw our breath in pain, as Hamlet says, to tell our stories, but it is also our obligation to make those stories compelling to readers who know nothing about our lives, who will pick up our books in the hope of finding something that connects them more deeply to their own experience. The goal of this workshop is to help memoirists expand the imaginative and analytical scope of their work in order to make it more multifaceted, unique, and, ultimately, publishable.

We’ll experiment with how personal narrative can double as cultural criticism; practice using research and/or data to scaffold larger discussions in a reader-friendly way; and develop thematic throughlines and constraints that can help structure our personal narratives. In addition to participating in large- and small-group discussions and writing exercises in class, writers can expect to work on their own projects as homework each week, and will have the opportunity to be workshopped at least once. We’ll also read and discuss a book-length memoir, as well as several essays, together over the course of the eight weeks. Participants will leave the workshop with a clearer and deeper sense of their memoir’s structure, brainstormed passages and free-writing that can be used in their manuscript, and an overview or summary that could become the start of a book proposal.