Monthly Memoir Manuscript Workshop

I’ll be leading a private memoir manuscript workshop starting this July. In addition to dedicating class time exclusively to each manuscript, we’ll discuss editing, revising, narrative arc, possible ethical and moral concerns, ordering of chapters and submitting a manuscript for publication. These discussions will emerge from student manuscripts. By offering feedback on someone else’s work, your own editing and revising skills will strengthen.

The class is limited to eight students, and two manuscripts will be discussed during each class. You’ll be expected to carefully read and prepare feedback for the other students’ manuscripts. The first class will be dedicated to a discussion of craft, drafting, revising, and more.

If you are considering this class, you should have a manuscript that is about 75-150 pages long. Please send me 10-15 pages (Times New Roman, 12 point font, double-spaced) by June 1st to be considered for the class. Email your materials to: Chloemiller(at)gmail(dot)com

Details:
Monthly Memoir Manuscript Workshop
5 sessions: 2nd Tuesday of every month, 7-9 pm
dates: July 8, August 12, September 9, October 14, & November 11
Cost: $250.00 per student (payable by cash, check or Paypal invoice)
The class is limited to 8 students.
The class will share materials via email.
We will meet in a private conference room near Dupont Circle

Visit my writing coach site to learn more about my services. 

Teaching Memoir Writing While Not Writing: A Reminder About Thinking, Art and Life

I'm re-reading The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick for my memoir manuscript class at Politics & Prose Bookstore. Pregnant, I haven't been writing very much (neither essays or poetry.) But, reading and teaching writing has kept me connected to literature. Thinking about memoir, in particular, has helped me to, at the very least, think more deeply about this pregnancy and transitional period. Here is a quote - a definition, really - from The Situation and the Story which offers a clear reminder about the relationship between thinking, art and life:

“A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required. As V.S. Pritchett once said of the genre, “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.”

- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story