Make It Make Sense: Writing Memoir

Writing a story about something that really happened seems like it should be easy: after all, compared to something like fiction, a lot of the work is already done for you. You already know what happens! But as anyone who has attempted to make art about their own life and experience can attest, the practice can feel a lot more complicated when you actually get down to it. Life doesn’t always make sense — but a good story has to.

Led by Tara McGowan-Ross, the author of the Hilary Weston Prize-shortlisted memoir Nothing Will Be Different, Make It Make Sense is a workshop that engages directly with the complicated questions that can impede creativity when writing about real life. What makes memoir different from other kinds of nonfiction? Why does writing about yourself honestly so often feel like lying through your teeth? What are the ethics of writing about other people? And what gives me the right, in our complicated global environment, to take up space telling my own story at all?

This workshop aims to foster a sense of confidence and capacity in a genre that is both highly marketable arts entertainment and powerful personal reflective practice. Participants will be asked to think critically about memoir from the perspective of both writer and reader in a discussion-based environment that features short lectures, collaborative dialogue, peer editing, and revision to foster a sense of ease in one of the most fraught and risky modes of self-expression.

Make It Make Sense is designed for writers of all skill levels who feel they are psychologically blocked in their memoir-writing practice. Participants will be encouraged to develop a solid foundation of confidence and understanding so that they can live with the sense of uncertainty (or even danger) that often makes this genre so challenging and exciting. Participants will be required to write a short piece for peer editing and workshop with their cohort and encouraged to revise that same piece based on feedback. Not all revised pieces will be workshopped.