Workshop: Memoir
TAKE A STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE
Memoir Writing with Melanie Brooks
The shelves of our minds are filled with memories. Whether in a momentary snapshot or a full film reel, life's collected scenes can be the raw material for compelling stories. The challenge for any aspiring memoirist or personal essay writer is to figure out how to sift through those memories, re-enter those scenes, poke around, ask questions, and shape them into something meaningful on the page.
In this workshop, we will rise to that challenge, and through writing exercises and prompts designed to tap into remembered experiences, we'll reconstruct scenes from the past and write into the stories they hold. We will spend time examining craft topics central to memoir, including sensory details and descriptive language; vivid, cinematic scenes; realistic dialogue; narrative tension; and authentic voice. We'll read passages from a range of writers and discuss how they invite us into their experiences in ways that make us feel what it was like. We'll also unpack some of the complicated topics that emerge when writing memoir, including how to handle memories that intersect with the lives of others, and ways to navigate the potentially painful emotions that surface when digging into our pasts.
Though the focus of this workshop is to generate new material, we will spend some time discussing revision and offering feedback to one piece of your writing on which you are currently working.
SUBMIT
After registering, participants in the memoir workshop are asked to submit the following materials:
one piece of writing that still needs work (either a completed essay or an excerpt from a larger work-in-progress). This should be no more than 1000 words.
one brief paragraph that describes the context of the excerpt or where the piece stands in the greater scheme of your writing.
Please submit these materials by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 26. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to programs@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “Brooks BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF.
Melanie Brooks is the author of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University and narrative medicine in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts and creative writing at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program. She has had numerous interviews and essays on topics ranging from loss and grief to parenting and aging published in Psychology Today, the HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. Her forthcoming memoir, A Hard Silence (September 2023), explores the lasting impact of living with the 10-year secret of her father’s HIV before his death in 1995. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college), and two labs.