This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House

Memoir: The Power of Claiming Your Story

Writing can be a powerful tool of discovery, a way to clarify what we know, believe, and care about most deeply. In this course, we will engage with memoir as a genre in the pursuit of understanding ourselves better, mining our past experiences for patterns and meaning. Whether we intend our work for a broader audience or ourselves, the act of approaching our own story with curiosity offers us agency and the opportunity for gratitude and growth.

This in-person course will consist of 3-hour sessions set up to allow time to build creative community and to workshop student writing as a group. Have an idea for a memoir project but unsure how to shape it? Or perhaps you have already begun working on a project but find yourself stuck; if so, this class is for you. Designed for both beginning and intermediate memoir writers, this class will engage with memoir using a “writers-as-readers” approach, delighting in the art form and geeking out over excerpts from powerful works by Sarah Aziza, Joy Harjo, & Kiese Laymon, all the while culling inspiration for our own works-in-progress. Class time will include exercises designed to help writers unblock their thinking and approach their own stories with fresh eyes. Please be prepared to complete reading for homework each week, including (but not limited to) preparing comments on classmates’ writing for in-person workshops. Individual feedback from the instructor will be tailored to meet each student’s needs.