Workshop: Memoir
This workshop is full. Please click the register button below to add yourself to the waitlist or email director@mainewriters.org.
MEMOIR AS STORYTELLING, STORYTELLING AS MEMOIR
Memoir Writing with Phuc Tran
Before humans wrote their stories, they told their stories. From the Homeric oral tradition that gave us The Odyssey to campfire tall tales and late-night porch yarns, the story hatches within us and takes flight in the space between the storyteller and the listener.
This workshop will explore how telling our story shapes memoir writing. How do you tell a compelling story? What are the critical components to your story? What do you leave on the editing floor and what must you include? How do you tell your story in twelve minutes? Do you want to make your audience cheer? Sob? Cringe? All the above?
In light of live storytelling’s popularity (consider The Moth Radio Hour), attendees will take a true story from their own lives (this is memoir after all) and revise/rewrite it with an eye and ear for live storytelling. Attendees will have the opportunity to read/perform their stories (not mandatory but highly encouraged!) at the culmination of the workshop.
We will read and listen to live stories along the way to examine the written and performative mechanics of those crafts (the differences are as numerous as the similarities).
SUBMIT
Participants are asked to submit a work of nonfiction (essay, memoir, non fiction excerpt ), up to 2500 words prior to the workshop. This submission will be the foundation for their workshop, editing, and performance work.
Please submit these materials by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 17. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to taryn@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “Tran BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF.
Phuc Tran—writer, tattooer, and classicist— has a lane-swerving résumé. He is the author of the memoir SIGH, GONE A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In which won the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. SIGH, GONE was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, Audible, Kirkus Reviews, and many other publications.
He has been a high school Latin teacher and tattooer for over twenty years, for which he has won no awards. His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s TED Radio Hour. He is also the author of a children’s book series in collaboration with bestselling illustrator Pete Oswald entitled CRANKY. He has been a live storyteller in and around Portland Maine since 2016 for a variety of organizations and events including SoundBites, Show and Tell, Slant, and others. In 2023, he was a storyteller for The Moth Mainstage. Phuc lives in Portland with his wife and two daughters.