Dig into memoir writing and find ways to interweave the personal and the universal, so that the resulting work is neither diary nor reportage—rather a work of art that lets readers in on a new way of being a human in the world.
In this 5-day intensive, New York Times best-selling author Ada Calhoun helps you develop the themes of—and make significant progress on—a memoir. Calhoun is author of the New York Times best seller Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis, as well as the New York history St. Marks Is Dead, the memoir Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, and Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me.
Class members will read and discuss one another's work, as well as the work of important memoirists, and each hour of class will feature multiple writing exercises.
Together, we explore characters, narrative arcs, research, and style. And we talk practically about the editorial and proposal process. We also discuss what it means to write about ourselves and the people close to us—the ways in which it can be fraught or liberating or both at once.
This class will be a safe, supportive place to develop ideas, to come up with a plan for publication if that's the goal, and to get a lot of writing done—and it will be fun!
