Texts

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments
James Galvin’s The Meadow
Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face
Harry Crews’ Autobiography of a Place: A Childhood
Tobias Wolff’s In Pharoah’s Army
Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Overview

William Maxwell, in So Long, See You Tomorrow, writes, “When we talk about the past, we lie with every breath we take.” Memory is always configured on a gap—to remember suggests forgetfulness, the loss upon which memory is founded. In this sense, memoir is, first, a story, and second, a record of something that happened. So from the beginning in this course, we will qualify the lousy term “non-fiction” or worse, “creative nonfiction.”

This is a writing workshop that focuses on how both memory and forgetting shape us, and shape our writing about real lives and events. We will explore that blurred boundary where memory is both fiction and truth, and where memoir is both truth and invention.

We will also explore the real obligations memoirists have to real lives: to their subjects, and to their readers, to the “truth” (whatever that is). In all this, we will explore how craft technique informs and guides. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, writes that the true task of autobiography is the following of thematic design, of pattern and order, through one’s life. We will be seeking those patterns, attempting to make larger sense, to see how our personal lives participate in the human condition.

It is assumed that those who take this class will have specific projects to undertake, either parts of a longer work, or self-contained essays. Over the course of the semester, each member will write two pieces of memoir, each of which will be be revised. My hope is that the course will push you stylistically and technically, and encourage you to take emotional risks, to write what you could not have written before, to raise your standards for what you consider good writing, and then to meet those standards through the development of the habit of art. In order to write well, we must read well, and read as writers, and so this class will combine a balance between workshopping and the discussion of published authors.

“A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.” Saul Bellow

Course Requirements

Two memoir drafts, (20% each or 40% of your grade). Each of these pieces will be workshopped in class, according to a schedule that we will devise together.

Important note #1: the writing that you turn in to workshop must be, in some recognizable way (more on this) memoir.

Important note #2: Some of you are working on booklength projects, and so will not be turning in pieces that stand alone at 10-25 pages. Fine. If so, make sure to provide at the beginning of your workshop submissions a single spaced paragraph or so of the background your readers will need to give you feedback.

One revision (20% of your grade. Due at the end of the semester.) Note: Revisions should also include original drafts with my comments.

Peer Responses: (10%) 1 page, typed, responses (approximately 250 words) for each of your peer’s manuscripts submitted for workshop. These peer responses are to be distributed to me, and to the author of the workshopped piece, on the day the work is discussed. These responses should focus on what you take to be one of the work’s compelling craft features.

Reading Responses: (20%) 1-2 page, typed, responses for each of the courses’ required readings. Again, these responses should focus on what you take to be one of the compelling craft features.

Important note #2: Late peer responses and reading responses will not receive credit, with one exception for each.

Craft Annotation: (10%) This is essentially an expanded reading response, where instead of analyzing one craft feature closely, you will analyze several craft features of a single work. The idea is for you to become deeply familiar with the techniques of a work that you greatly admire. You have the choice of focusing on: (1) a booklength memoir, (2) a chapter from a booklength memoir, or (3) an essay-length memoir. Craft Annontations must be on works read in this class. Graduate student minimum: 8 pages double-spaced.

Workshop Logistics and Etiquette

Try to think of the workshop as a tentative process of helping the writer make this piece better, or as is often the case, make a future piece better. Everything we say will be wrong, or partial, or skewed by our own aesthetics. You will hear startlingly different analyses of your work from the class. Writing is not democratic, and you can’t possibly listen to all the voices in the class. Go away from the workshop with the reading that is most helpful to you. Choose, as your favorite critic in the class, the peer who seems most in sympathy with your work. Then make friends with that person, get together outside of class, share your work, and drink caffeine. Good workshops always extend beyond the classroom.

1. Manuscripts are due at specific times. You need to deliver copies of your work, for each of your peers and for me, one week before you are to be workshopped. There is no flexibility in this scheme. The workshop’s effectiveness depends on the timely distribution of your work. Late essays will not be workshopped. You have been charged a $20 fee for the course towards photocopying for workshop using the department's kind, able workstudy students. Your memoir should be given to the department secretary to be stamped and dated at least 48 hours before you need to distribute your work to the class. If you cannot meet this deadline, Get thee to Kinkos!

2. Essays should be typed, double-spaced, numbered, 12pt font, with one inch margins, on one side of the page, with no cover pages, and bound. Also include: your name, the course number and section, my name, the date, the title.

3. Correct grammar, usage, punctuation and spelling are expected. A piece flawed by pervasive proofreading or mechanical errors will be graded down.

4. Attendance and participation are mandatory. If you miss class more than twice it will affect your grade—the more absences, the greater the effect.