This class is only open to students who have taken two terms of Virtual Intermediate Memoir and/or by permission of the teacher.

Virtual Advanced Memoir offers students the opportunity to choose, develop, and refine their own narrator over time. It is particularly well suited to writers working on memoirs, linked essays, standalone chapters, or book-length projects.

The work of crafting the narrator is more sustained and nuanced in Virtual Advanced Memoir and involves a deeper engagement with technique through The Writers Studio Craft Class–taken in conjunction with the workshop–and the work of refining the techniques used with increasing precision to develop the narrator who is telling the story and the story that narrator most urgently wants to tell. Through multiple submissions and ongoing discussion, students deepen their understanding of narrative distance, authority, and emotional complexity while developing a larger body of work.

Class Structure & Details

•Format: Weekly, unrecorded live classes via Google Meet

•What to Expect: In Virtual Advanced Memoir, students do not submit new work every week. The term begins with two weeks of shorter exercises, during which everyone brings in two pages based on a narrator, model, or narrative approach of their choice. The remainder of the class is organized around rounds of longer submissions, which are uploaded in advance and discussed in class.

•Who Can Join: Virtual Advanced Memoir is open to students who have completed at least two terms of Virtual Intermediate Memoir.

📌 Note: Our Google Meet sessions are highly interactive and designed to be a safe space for sharing fresh work, so they are not recorded.

Instructor

Writers Studio Teacher

Sylvie Bertrand

Sylvie Bertrand's stories and poems have appeared in Peregrine Journal, Epiphany, Cleaver Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, Alexandria Quarterly, and December magazine, among others. She was nominated for the 2017 Pen / Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, received a 2018 Pushcart Special Mention, and was a finalist for the 2019 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. Sylvie is the co-founding editor of Cagibi, an online and print literary journal. She studied with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio and has degrees in Communications and Literature, Political Sciences, and a MA in Anthropology from Princeton University. She is working on a hybrid collection of fiction and memoir about language, disappearance, self-invention, and what gets left behind.

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