Writing Memoir
Instructor: Deborah Kapchan
Getting a life means getting a narrative, and vice versa.
— Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
Everyone has a story — or many — to tell. A memoir is not just a recollection of events however. Finding the story, the real story, means exploring its emotional core — the conflicts, fears and desires, the generational traumas and travels, that undergird and animate a life.
A writer writes to illuminate these hidden recesses and to make meaning of human struggle, whether it’s the pull between society, family and self, or the tension created from competing and contradictory desires. This is what memoir teaches us how to do, and why it is the best-selling genre in contemporary literature. Memoir excavates the self but in the process it uncovers larger themes that connect us. The challenge of writing a memoir is to find the key scenes and details that will bring these worlds alive for the reader.
This course will help you on the journey. Working in a supportive and collaborative setting, we will map out the story and explore craft — structure, point of view, dialogue, action. We will read published memoirs and learn to find and trust our own voice. We will identify the throughline of the story, the plot that takes the reader forward. We will also share our work (when you feel ready), and learn how to read as a writer.
In this ten-week intensive we will gather in-person for two hours a week from October to December.
Week One: Finding the Story
Week Two: Truth and Fiction in Memoir
Week Three: Reading as a Writer
Week Four: The Narrative Arc; beginnings, middles, endings
Week Five: Voice and Point of View
Week Six: Sensory Writing
Week Seven: Tense, Time-line and Techniques
Week Eight: Drama and Dialogue
Week Nine: Sharing the Work
Week Ten: Writing the Synopsis, the Pitch
Fees for the 10 week course: 10,000 AED.
Deborah Kapchan is a writer, translator, ethnographer and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of several books and essays. Her most recent work, Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (2020), was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry. She has been teaching courses on memoir for more than a decade.