Teach­ing life writing

I value the earnest impulse of some­one who says, Lis­ten, I have seen this and expe­ri­enced that, so much of it, and all that stuff is brew­ing, foam­ing, over­flow­ing, want­ing to be told …  Okay, I say. I am lis­ten­ing. I would love to hear your story.

If writ­ing our dreams, in David Hume’s words, is a way of ‘becom­ing acquainted with our own hearts,’ read­ing mem­oirs, and more­over, lis­ten­ing to live frag­ments of sto­ries as they come out – raw, urgent, frag­ile – reac­quaint me with some aspects of my own heart.

Each tale mea­sures itself in words. Each word can be explained with other words, which in turn, can be clar­i­fied with new words. Mean­ing shifts and reshapes: a mem­oir can be a ‘log’, a log can be a ‘chart’, which can be map, which can be an atlas and ‘a book of maps’. A uni­ver­sal thing. An indi­vid­ual ver­sion of what it means to be human.

Week­end Mem­oir Writ­ing Workshops:

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Opin­ion: On show­ing and Telling