Description
Eight Tuesdays, Oct 1-Nov 19, 8-10 pm
Open to all
Limited to 12 participants
Hybrid Workshop*
The memoir used to be a large and weighty book, often written by a man of power, once he had stepped out of the limelight (or been cast out of it). Presidents and prime ministers wrote memoirs; the common people did not.
Flash-forward to the present. People have discovered that they had and still have lives worth writing about. The classic memoir was about the exercise of power in times of crisis. The current memoir is often about a period of time during which the writer learned something about themselves. Which should make all of us potential memoirists.
The form contains a number of moral traps and rough spots. How much fiction can you put in a memoir? What happens when you forget something, or misremember? How much can you reveal about yourself and others before you cross a line you might regret?
We’ll look at several examples of memoir, from Harry Crews to Kyo Maclear and others. With Crews, his story begins before his birth; is that still memoir? Mark Abley’s travel story is clearly designed to tell as little as possible about its author. In sociologist mode, Daniel Allen Cox brings in a slew of outside sources to bolster his self-inquiry. Where do we want to situate ourselves?
That, of course, will depend on our inquiries. A memoir can be about someone else – how you did or did not live with that person. Memoirs can spring from a mystery – but not always. All of them involve the writer wanting to achieve greater self-understanding, which means we have to turn ourselves into a character to do it.
The workshop will be a mixture of reading one another’s projects and proposals, and considering excerpts from other books. Participants are free to submit material a week or two before the first workshop. This material will be part of class discussions. Please submit to David.Homel@concordia.ca. For the first submission, please do not go beyond 5 or 10 standard pages. See you there!
*This workshop will take place at the QWF Office (Room 3, 1200 Atwater Avenue, Westmount, Quebec) with up to 2 virtual spots for participants who are unable to attend in-person because of distance or disability. By default, all workshop registrations are for in-person spots. If you can’t attend in person and would like to request a virtual slot, contact Riley at riley@qwf.org and wait for confirmation before registering. Please do not register until after you receive confirmation that there is a virtual spot for you.
