“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin

In the subtle words of my agent: “Nobody gives a shit about what happened to you. They care about the meaning you make of it.”

In other words, it’s the meaning we create out of the events of our lives that makes our story interesting, relatable, and worth reading. We turn our memories into a memoir. 

Memoir isn’t recounting the cleverest, most shocking stories of our lives, nor is it sharing a collection of brilliant thoughts we’ve formed over our years on earth. It’s about weaving the events of our lives into a narrative that shows something about the human condition. It’s about using real life events to draw greater truths, to bring people together into a shared experience through the page. Even if they haven’t lived what you lived, they have felt what you’ve felt, and our job as memoirists is to tell a very old story in new words, in a new way, in a way only we can.

James Baldwin said he thought his pain was unprecedented in the history of the world and then he read, and he realized his pain is what connects him with every human who has ever lived. That is, in my opinion, the point of all writing, including memoir.

Let’s be real: Unless we are Mick Jagger or that dude who had to saw his own arm off after it got stuck under a rock during a solo hiking trip, our lives aren’t interesting enough to just tell the world about it. Even our family trauma. Even that summer in Europe. Even that one really fucked-up cousin.

Memoirs are thematic. We choose events to say something about a topic.

We create a plot. We strip away that which isn’t relevant. We create characters. To me, a good memoir pulls me into an author’s life and head, and we travel along with her, hopefully ending up somewhere new. One of the worst feelings I have is when I close a book and think “What was the point of reading that? What was the author saying?”

I have spent ten years writing creative nonfiction in essays and blog posts, and a memoir called I’M JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE, which was published by Hachette in 2018. I have a BA and an MA in English and have taught writing at the college level.

I’ve been teaching creative writing workshops since 2014, and have led writing retreats both by invitation and on my own, but that’s all a bit of bullshit, isn’t it? 

The only way to decide if a writing teacher is for you is to read their work. So, please read my memoir, and if it appeals to you, let’s do this. 

So, What Am I Offering?

This will be a six-week online workshop for the person who wants to write a memoir or has a draft they’d like to revise. In other words, this will benefit you whether you’re thinking of writing a memoir or have an abandoned one that needs direction, structure, plot, cohesion, narrative arc, fewer words, etc. And yes, I offer tailored weekly prompts for both groups (people with a draft and people without). 

We will have six one-hour online video conferences, each centering on different topics.

Here’s what we’ll talk about each week, and the main questions we’ll be answering: