Description
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past…”
— Sonnet 30, Shakespeare
Through in-class reading and writing, the class will discuss voice, structure, characterization, dialogue, and other literary tools that help make art from personal experience. We will explore states of consciousness as an important part of the psyche, which will lead to discussions on memoir, as opposed to biography, as a work of freedom.
The memoir workshop will also discuss the concept of our life experience as a “fragmentary whole.” T.S. Eliot describes the fragmentary concept in his essay on the metaphysical poets: “The ordinary man’s experience is always chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking…”
Written work by participants will be workshopped, but an emphasis will be on creating new work in class through craft exercises and the reading of targeted selections from renown memoirs.
About Jennifer Clement
Jennifer Clement is the author of five novels, two memoirs, and several books of poetry. Two of her novels were New York Times Editor’s Choice books. Both Elle Magazine and the French Ministry of Education awarded prizes to her novel Prayers for the Stolen, which was made into a movie in 2021. Her novel Gun Love was an Oprah Book Club selection and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Time Magazine and several other publications named it one of the ten best books of 2018. Her books have been translated into thirty-eight languages.
Clement is the only woman to hold the office of President of PEN International, 2015 to 2021. Under her leadership, the groundbreaking PEN International Women’s Manifesto and The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto were created. When she was President of PEN Mexico, she was instrumental in changing the law to make the crime of killing a journalist a federal crime.
Jennifer Clement has received awards for both her writing and her humanitarian work, including fellowships from Guggenheim, NEA, MacDowell and Santa Maddalena; a Hispanics in Philanthropy Award for her contribution to Latino Communities; the 2023 Freedom of Expression Honorary title for World Press Day in Brussels; and numerous other awards.
Clement was raised in Mexico City. Together with her sister Barbara Sibley, she founded and ran Poetry Week every January in San Miguel de Allende for many years.
By Jennifer Clement:
