Finding the Unique in Memoir:
Telling Your Story, Your Way
Life writing is a way of making sense of ourselves and our world. Narration enables us to analyze and express the complexity of our lived experience, bringing order and meaning to the jumble of the individual and the universal, the private and the public.
Anyone who has survived adolescence could likely fill hundreds of pages with anecdotes. Regardless of whether we have lived exciting lives filled with accomplishments of world-wide recognition, or quiet ones spent in the same place, with the same people day in and day out, we all have interesting and unique stories to tell. Often the best ones are hidden, shut away; they take extra energy to pull from the dark, into the light and onto the page.
How do you know which experiences to relate? How do you choose which memories to share and which ones to ignore? And how do you shape these memories into a story, a narrative that reaches and moves its readers? That deepens your own understanding of both the chaos and the coherence of your life?
This two-day workshop in Edmonton, Alberta will use writing prompts to help you access significant memories. Jean and Caterina address the problems of honesty, balance, viewpoint, portrayal of others, and context. They guide students in balancing the dramatic with the reflective and the evocative and in recreating events, times, and places, using discussion, examples, and writing exercises.
Writing a memoir is not a simple undertaking: it’s a journey. This workshop provides the guideposts.
