Workshop: Memoir

MEMOIR WITH ALYSIA ABBOTT

I Am a Camera: From Memory to Memoir with Alysia Abbott

Our first job as writers is to notice. This is important to remember because noticing is what we were born to do, and forms the basis of all of our earliest memories. But what we notice, how we notice, and why, is a function of our unique point of view and the foundation of all good memoir.

In her seminal craft book, The Situation the Story, Vivian Gornick separates the events that have happened to us, what she calls “the situation,” from our perspective on those events, “the story,” what Gornick further describes as “the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” Two members of a single family may write about the same situation but each have very different stories to tell. As Gornick writes, “the way the narrator sees things, is, to the large degree, the thing being seen.”

In these workshops we will hone our ability to notice, using prompt-driven exercises to slow down and focus our camera’s eye in order to pick up the specific “lived” details that make those memories come alive as scenes. We will also explore the emotional layers that inform our noticing, using reflection and speculation to uncover what’s behind and beyond the moment, in order to draw out meaning that will resonate with readers. You will come in with one or more situations you want to write about and will leave with a better sense of the stories you have to tell.

Alysia Abbott is the author of Fairyland, A Memoir of My Father, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an ALA Stonewall Award winner and was named Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Shelf Awareness. She grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the only child of gay poet and writer, Steve Abbott. As a journalist and critic, she’s written for The New York Times, Real Simple, Vogue, Marie Claire, OUT, Slate, Salon, TheAtlantic.com, TriQuarterly and Psychology Today, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from New School University and was a contributing producer at WNYC Radio. She’s presented Fairyland at bookstores, libraries, literary festivals and universities across the United States as well as on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Fresh Air, The Leonard Lopate Show, The Brian Lehrer Show, KQED’s Forum, and the BBC’s Outlook, among other venues. Formerly the Director of the Boston Literary District, she now leads the Memoir Incubator Program at GrubStreet in Boston.