Memoir Workshop Information + Registration
This workshop is now full. Please email director@mainewriters.org if you would like to be added to the waiting list.
Re/Creating Worlds: Entering Doorways into Your Past
A Memoir Workshop with Maureen Stanton
Ian McEwan wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone (or something) other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and it is the beginning of morality.”
Great memoirs offer readers the opportunity to vicariously experience others’ life journeys and thus exercise empathy and compassion. Powerful sensory writing stimulates readers’ imaginations. Your story enters the reader’s consciousness as a film they create in their mind’s eye, and the reader enters your story through that engagement with the narrative. More eloquently, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul” – and for memoir writing, another’s life.
How do writers re-create their lived experiences in a way that transports readers into those worlds, places, times, and memories? In this workshop, we will focus on craft techniques that make for compelling, richly textured, atmospheric memoirs that have the power to move readers. In discussing participants’ works, we will look for doorways to the past that writers can step through to create powerful immersive narratives using detailed scenes of pivotal moments.
+ SUBMIT Participants are asked to please submit in advance a memoir manuscript (an essay or memoir excerpt) up to 3000 words. Email the manuscript no later than 9:00 a.m. on October 6 to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “MEMOIR MSS.”
Maureen Stanton is the author of Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, a People Magazine “Best New Books” pick, and winner of the 2020 Maine Literary Award in memoir. Her literary journalism book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting, won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays and memoirs have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies and recognized with two Pushcart Prizes, an Iowa Review Prize, the American Literary Review Prize, and the nonfiction prize from Passages North, among others. She has twice received the Maine Arts Commission Literary Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the MacDowell Colony. She has taught creative nonfiction writing to a wide range of writers, from first-grade students to graduate students. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UMass Lowell. She lives in Georgetown, Maine.
Registration
To register online, please use the form below.
To register by phone or if you have questions about the retreat, please call 207-228-8264.