Composing Memoir in the Digital Age

This seminar will take the shape of a writing workshop. You can expect to be composing texts (either print-based or digital) every week and to be sharing drafts of your work with other members of the class. Attention will be given to how you move from idea to completed project and all completed work needs to be posted on the class blog and tagged with both your name and the rubric for the specific assignment.

Accompanying the work on these texts will be weekly readings that will mostly serve as models of how other writers have dealt with the genre and topics you are exploring. All are examples of creative nonfiction/memoir which offer writers the freedom to struggle with and recreate their version of the real world and what’s important in it. You are expected to respond to each reading and to post your responses on the class blog under “Responses to Readings.” Please post your responses to the assigned readings by the Sunday evening prior to the next Tuesday class and to respond to at least one of your classmates’ posts each week by Tuesday morning.

To be clear, the kind of writing you will be doing will be composed but should not be invented as in made up without a basis in reality. The events you will be describing need to have actually taken place; the characters need to be people you know. As the writer who has been handed the facts, you must find the story within them and tell it true, ambiguities and all. In fiction, you can change, pretend, and invent to be interesting. In memoir, you must locate and shape what is interesting within the messiness of real life.

Interesting is key. It is not enough to report, summarize, and analyze the facts; creative nonfiction also values storytelling, voice, and evocative language to illuminate those facts, making readers connect experientially, as if they were there.

Creative nonfiction is the large umbrella term that covers everything from childhood memoir to narrative journalism. In between are personal essay, portrait, lyric essay, travel memoir, nature writing, visual essay, opinion essay, investigative memoir, and all nonfiction that values language, voice, memory, research, and imagination to recreate the real world.

Some people argue that the more subjective memoir (which relies heavily on memory) and the more fact-based narrative journalism (which relies heavily on research) don’t fit under the same umbrella. My colleague, Mimi Schwartz, and I believe they do. (You will be reading more about our approach to creative nonfiction during the seminar.) In fact, we’d include all nonfiction that shares the following characteristics:

  •  A commitment to be interesting, using a full range of storytelling devices—dialogue, description, metaphor, anecdote, character development—to draw your reader into the writing.
  •  An allegiance to veracity, drawing on fact to write truthfully about the real world and drawing on memory and imagination to show us this world in full color. If you are changing or inventing facts to make a better story, you are writing fiction. If you are using the existing facts as you experienced them, you are writing creative nonfiction.
  •  A desire for self-exploration and discovery, whether writing about yourself or others. Often the writer’s mind at work is as interesting as the subject matter, creating a tension that is key to success in this genre.
  •  An engaging voice that gives personal authority to the writing and pulls in the reader whether the “I” is at the center of the text or on the sidelines.
  • A freedom in form and language to go wherever meaning and imagination take you.
  •  A fine-tuned sense of the rhythms of language.
  •  An ability, as essayist Cynthia Ozick says, to find “the extraordinary in the ordinary” so that the small things in life illuminate the big ideas that make readers care.

 

Below, then, are the assignments/prompts that you will be expected to complete during the course of the seminar. Each is a time-honored approach that has yielded truly fabulous writing from student and adult writers:

 

Where I’m From

This assignment begins with a poem that will be read and discussed in class. It serves as a model for creating your own “Where I’m From” poem and then a digital text to move from print to visual and voice-over.

 

Memory Chain

This assignment begins with an in-class exercise created by James Moffett over fifty years ago. It never fails to unearth memories that have long been forgotten or buried. You may also turn this text into a digital text or continue to revise your first digital piece.

 

Revelation Essay

This assignment asks you to grapple with the challenges of truth-telling in a creative, and public, enterprise. Your assignment is the same one that Charles Schuster and I gave the English professors who contributed to Stepping on My Brother’s Head: write about “something hitherto private, untold, or personally revealing”; “explore a secret recently discovered”; “describe a secret passion”; “reveal something new—a life lesson, a moment of surprising insight, a sudden turn from childhood toward adulthood.”

As the five essays taken from Stepping on My Brother’s Head demonstrate, secrets come in all shapes and sizes, in all levels of intimacy and exposure, so don’t feel pressured to disclose what you don’t wish to disclose at this point in your life. Play with tone. Want to be funny? Be funny. Want to be serious? Be serious. Or be both. Your goal is to engage your audience with whatever material you choose, to get them to care about something that you care about, that has, in small ways or large, shaped your life. As the essays in the book highlight, revelation often triggers an intense moment or moments of awareness for the writer. In other words, revelation inevitably leads to self-discovery. What does your secret say about you? About who you were, are, or hope to be? What do you gain from the act of revelation? What do you risk?

This assignment will also prepare us to read and respond to David Borkowski’s A Shot Story in which David reveals a secret he kept for close to forty years.

 

Memoirist’s Choice

This assignment will begin by engaging in a 50-minute in-class guided exercise called “The Guidelines for Composing” based on the concept of felt sense. After the exercise, you can decide if you have discovered a topic worth exploring or if you want to write about something else.

 

Three of the four assignments should also be turned into digital texts and shared in class.