Quebec Writers' Federation Workshops

Spring Session 2010

Develop your writing with the mentorship of an acclaimed professional writer and feedback from your peers.

Workshops take place at the QWF office, Suite 3, Atwater Library unless otherwise indicated.

DRAWING FROM LIFE: MEMOIR AND PERSONAL ESSAYS

Eight Thursdays, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. (March 11–April 29, 2010)

1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 3
Workshop leader: Robyn Sarah

This workshop is for people who have personal stories to tell, and who want to get those stories on paper. Whether you already have a memoir in progress or are thinking of writing one, whether you have in mind a book-length work or something much shorter, the group will provide a forum to share drafts and ideas, to help stimulate you to begin (or motivate you to finish), and to find solutions to the problems that arise as you try to shape your personal narrative.

Time will be given to a variety of activities: discussion of problems specific to “writing from life”; reading and studying excerpts of personal narratives that can serve as models; occasional in-class exercises; and presentation and critiquing of participants’ work. Optional home exercises will be assigned, aimed at jump-starting the creative fuse for those who do not have a file of work in progress to bring to the group, or for those who would like to practice different approaches.

We will explore such questions as:

• Why write a memoir? Why choose memoir over fiction as the genre for writing about/from one’s real life? How does a memoir differ from a fictionalized account? Where is the border between them?

• What is a “true story”? Is there ever just one true story--one objective account of “what really happened”? What impact does perspective have on a personal narrative? If, at age 15, I write an account of something that happened to me when I was five years old, and then at 30, I write an account of the same event, will it be the same story?

• What are my reasons for wanting to share this story? What do I think will be interesting to others about this story? How will I make it interesting to others?

• How and where do I begin my personal narrative? Where will I end it, and why? How do I decide what to include and what to leave out? How do I give this story some sort of a shape?

• When, and why, might I want to deviate from or embellish the actual events I’m writing about? How far can I deviate from “what really happened” and still call what I am writing a memoir?

Robyn Sarah is the author of eight poetry collections (most recently Pause for Breath), two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry. Her poems, stories, reviews, and personal essays have appeared widely in Canadian and American publications, and her poems have been anthologized in The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. A selection of her poems in French translation, Le tamis des jours, was published in 2007. She was recently appointed poetry editor for Cormorant Books.

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