Keep the Memoir Going

• Tuesdays, July 8 - August 12 (6 sessions)
• 7-9:30 pm
• The Ink Spot

OK, so you’ve got your book or story started in the right place at the right time with the right characters. You know that the year you spent traveling in Italy, India, and Indonesia—where you ate pizza and gelato, prayed at an Ashram, and had the best sex of your life with a man fifteen years your senior—is your topic. The first few chapters feel alive and purposeful. How do you keep this baby going?

In our six weeks, we’ll focus on the elements of narrative design: 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 plot these? What is the nature of growing the topic in a memoir and how do writers achieve it? How does it differ from plotting in fiction? We’ll include lecture, in-class writing, sample narrative designs from published memoirs, and read and critique sessions.

Let’s read Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life (2006). Start reading her memoir before we begin and watch how she identifies aspects of her emotional condition and narrates their growth. 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 writes personal essays, memoir, nonfiction, and literary criticism. He is the author of Memoir and the Memoirist, from Swallow Press, the literary imprint of Ohio University Press and editor of A Year in Ink, SDW, Ink's first anthology. He is a contributing writer for the San Diego Reader where, since 1999, he has specialized in narrative nonfiction. Larson’s work has appeared in many literary magazines and journals, among them The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, The Potamac Review, Counterpunch, Chicago Reader, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Fourth Genre, and the Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1997. www.thomaslarson.com