The Writers Studio

Students attend this virtual memoir writing classes via Google Meet. Each week during the class meeting, students present two-page exercises that are shared electronically. The format of this virtual class is the same as our in-person classes, with students and teachers responding to work and discussing the next week’s exercise.

What is so challenging about writing a memoir is that you are asking yourself to take the emotionally charged events of your life and shape them aesthetically, so they appeal to the unknown reader—the reader who doesn’t know you and doesn’t necessarily care what happened to you. Unless you can make them.

Using the tried and true Writers Studio method, we will closely examine the work of writers who have been able to turn their personal experiences into memoirs that are transcendentally universal. What kind of persona narrators did writers like Tara Westover, Roxanne Gay, Joan Didion or James Baldwin create to project themselves as a character on the page? What narrative devices do they employ to transform the raw material of their lives into an engaging and compelling story? By focusing on craft, we will learn how to establish the narrative distance we need to connect to the emotional power of our experiences without being overwhelmed by it.

We will look at a short excerpt of a different author each week. Our goal in this eight-week course is to try to emulate different models by extracting their narrative tools and using them to unlock the full potential of our own stories.