Description
Memoir is not autobiography. It is something more special, more personal. Autobiography tells the story of a famous or infamous person, from birth to the present, without culling the deeper stories within that life. Memoir finds those deeper, specific stories and the writer investigates them—what they mean, why they happened, why they matter. While autobiography focuses on the extraordinary, memoir finds the extraordinary in the ordinary: an 1100-mile hike on the Pacific Coast Trail, finding your birth father, surviving cancer, or beating alcoholism, or raising a child.
Denis Johnson said: “Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it. Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.” That is at the heart of writing memoir.
I believe we can all find the story from our life that we need to tell, and this class will help students do just that. Through selected readings, writing prompts, and discussions of writing, memoirs, and your stories, we will find that story you need to tell and help you start to tell it.
