Our Hudson River Towns Memoir Workshop will support you in finding a memoir voice that’s all you, after closely reading an assortment of wildly varied but equally powerful memoirs.

How do you write a good memoir? You apply the narrative techniques of fiction and poetry. You take the fascinating, messy raw material of your life and build a frame for it. You distill. You find a voice that’s all you but that also offers you flexibility, perspective and the right counterbalance to the story’s content. You tap into your emotions to give your story energy and urgency.

In this six-week class, we will do close readings from an assortment of varied but equally powerful memoirs – by memoirists ranging from Richard Wright to Carolyn Forché -- to see how authors have solved these problems for themselves. Then you will try out these methods for yourselves to see which ones fit you best.

Weekly exercises based on short pieces of published work are turned into assignments designed to introduce students to various literary styles and approaches and broaden their sense of what is possible in their own work. As the student’s understanding of technique deepens so does the clarity and emotional power of the writing. Through weekly oral critiques of each student’s work by teachers, students are taught to constructively critique one another's work, a degree of attention nearly unheard of elsewhere.

This class meets at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Hudson Valley at 2021 Albany Post Road, Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520.

If you have questions about the class, please email Nancy Matsunaga at [email protected].

Instructor

Writers Studio Teacher

Nancy Matsunaga

Nancy Matsunaga is a freelance writer and editor who studied comparative literature at Oberlin College and received her MA in teaching English as a second language. She has been teaching with the Writers Studio since 2007, and she was the founder and director of the Amsterdam branch of the school. Her stories have been published in the journals Calyx and American Writers Review and anthologized in The Writers Studio at 30. She was a finalist for the 2021 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. After ten years in Munich, she has recently returned to the New York area, where she is working on a novel and a book of short stories.

"Every week, I presented a new story. Finally something did click, the very thing that’s their specialty at The Writers Studio, emotional content. Before, my work was dead. When I brought in my breakthrough story, I felt I was carrying a weird animal in my bag. It was the first story I sold."

Jennifer Egan, former Writers Studio student, Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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