Please note that this is an online workshop conducted via Zoom. Participants will be provided information on how to join the online sessions.

Patricia Hampl writes that “memoir isn’t fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather, memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience.” In this memoir workshop we will focus on how consciousness contends with experience to distill a definable event or period of time in one’s life. In crafting this distillation, how might the memoirist approach language, dialogue, and reflection to create scenes that resonate with readers? What techniques do writers rely upon to distinguish their past and present selves? What is the difference between fact and authorial truth? And how might attention to form underscore the subject matter? We will attempt to answer these questions through the reading of model texts, discussion, and writing generated from prompts. Edward Abbey, Tim O’Brien, Ernest Hemingway, Kiese Laymon, Maggie Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, and Esmé Weijun Wang are some of the writers we will discuss.