Advanced Memoir with Betsy Bonner

Memoir is not autobiography, which is intended to cover the narrator’s whole life to date, but a short and significant stretch of a life.

It’s also different from autofiction: it takes its obligation to truth seriously, and it’s almost always written in the first person. Yet good memoirists operate much like fiction writers: they create and resolve tension, employ a reliable or an unreliable narrator, build characters, and make structural and aesthetic decisions about their stories’ beginnings and endings.

Why and how does a story from someone’s life become a memoir? Why do some books seem as if they had to be written as memoir, and couldn’t have worked in fictional form? What is the shape of a memoir, and what are its boundaries? And how does a memoir turn real people—including its narrator—into characters?

Your manuscript submission (up to 20 double-spaced pages, in 12-point font) for this class will be what we discuss in workshop. Each group member will have one workshop (approximately forty minutes) devoted to their material.

Manuscript submission required. Enrollment is limited to 10 students.

Students are chosen by Betsy Bonner on the basis of a manuscript submission. Applications must be received by Wednesday, May 22 at 5 pm. View the submission guidelines and submit an application for this class.

Scholarship assistance is available. Applications must be returned to Scholarship Services at least two weeks before the first session.

Class meets Tuesdays: June 18, 25, July 2 and 9.