Writing the Memoir
Posted on | June 28, 2009 | 1 Comment Leave a comment | Print This Post
I just finished teaching another two-week memoir intensive. My students were fabulous and I was amazed by the amount of wonderful writing that came from it!
I’ve had a few requests to talk a little more about memoir writing and why I teach it with such a passion when I am a fiction writer. Well, for starters I’ve been teaching creative writing for over fifteen years, long before I was ever a published author. My favorite form has always been the personal narrative, I think in part because I’ve kept a journal since I could write and, like many of you, felt that my life had a lot of stories worth telling.
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study with Judith Barrington, expert memoirist and author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, while I was still living on the mainland. And, as a writer, I am a reader first: I love a good memoir and read one whenever I can! I also think we are all drawn to strength and beauty and raw truth—I know I am. Honesty in writing is big for me, especially when it comes to memoir (although, to digress for a moment, a memoir does differ from an autobiography in that it is your memory of an experience and not a factual play-by-play of the event. So I’m referring less to the accuracy of every detail and more to the integrity of the author, to their emotions and personal revelations). If you want to learn more, get a good book on memoir writing (Judith’s is an excellent start), or better yet, take my class when I offer it next!
Here’s an article I wrote for our lovely local paper on writing the memoir. If you have a story to tell, this may be the narrative form for you. To read the article, click on the image (you can also see the huge ad for the 2009 Hawaii Community Federal Credit Union college scholarship recipients!).
If you’d like me to post some handouts from my memoir classes, just leave a comment below and if there’s enough interest, I’ll PDF and post what I can. In the meantime, here’s a reading list of some of my favorite memoirs (you’ll need Adobe Acrobat to view the file). Enjoy!
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August 9th, 2009 @ 4:41 pm
I would love to have handouts from your memoir class. They would be really helpful for ideas for my memoir genre study with my middle schoolers.