Keep the Memoir Going

• Wednesdays, Jan. 13 - March 3 (8 sessions)
• 7-9:30 pm
• The Ink Spot

According to V.S. Pritchett, writing one's memoir or autobiography "is the easiest and most grateful task in the world. . . . So you set out. You write twenty pages and suddenly you stop. Why is it you are bewildered? Why do you have the sensation of being in a rowing boat in the middle of the ocean and having lost your oars?"

If you're a memoirist, you know the feeling. Let's regain our oars and find
some direction in this eight-week class. For those who've started a memoir
or are well along in one, we'll work on strategies for exploring your
theme-provided you're still clear what that theme is-and how to keep to it. I'm interested more and more in how a writer designs or discovers a memoir's narrative. Here's some questions to consider. What is my memoir the story
of? To what degree should I plot the book as a traditional event-based or
chronological narrative? To what degree might I follow a scenic or emotional or essayistic narrative? How do I design these? What is the nature of growing the topic in a memoir and how do writers achieve it? We'll include lecture, in-class writing, sample narrative designs from published memoirs, and read and critique sessions.

Let's read Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness (2008). Read the first twenty pages and notice Greenberg's strategies: how, mixing scene and reflection, he throws us into his daughter's crack-up. Many of you already have my book, The Memoir and the Memoirist. As we go, we'll choose several of its chapters for our discussion as well.

Thomas Larson is the author of The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative and a staff writer for the San Diego Reader. He is also an essayist, critic, and memoirist. He has taught several classes on memoir for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students at The Ink Spot. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.