Writing Your Memoir

So, I've been teaching creative writing with the Wethersfield Adult Education Department for five years now. When I first began teaching there, I focused on novel writing. I did that for two semesters in a row and found it was too big for a six or eight-week class. Novel writing should be reserved for a full college course, where students get graded and hate the class for at least half the semester. But for adults who just want to have fun, not so much.

So, I decided to teach two different, shorter classes each semester instead of one longer one: short story and poetry. That was a great choice and the students actually had fun! I knew they had fun because many kept coming back to repeat the classes, and that made me feel warm and squishy inside. But the downside was that after a while, the students wanted something different. And that's were memoir writing comes in.

Although I'd never done it before, I decided to teach a memoir writing class in addition to the short story class. I have never written a memoir, but I have read many and I followed my mom through the process of writing her father's story. Still a young teenager, I was living at home at the time and I followed my mom as she interviewed her father, taping their talks on one of those clunky cassette recorders of the 1970s.

My grandfather Armand Magnan grew up in the Hereford Mountain region of Quebec, Canada. His father was a horse trader and a bootlegger during the Prohibition, and nine-year-old Armand was charged with being his assistant. His childhood was grueling and fraught with cruelty. My mother was able to complete his story before he passed away, and I realized the importance of passing on the significant aspects of a person's life in the form of a story.

As for my memoir class, I completed the first of the three-week program last Wednesday, and tonight I head into the second. I found the experience fascinating and exciting. I read aloud the first couple of pages of two highly regarded memoirs to give the class the feel of how to start their story. The memoirs were Lost & Found by Kathryn Shultz and I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. They both open with coping in the final days of a parent's life, and though the theme in both is similar, they are two completely different stories.

We then discussed the importance of being accurate and not making assumptions or elaborating for effect. We worked on our six-sentence memoir in which we find the heart of our story and write it down in six words. For example, mine was:

Went to prison, taught creative writing.

If I were to write a memoir, I might write about how I came to teach poetry at the York Correctional Institute, CT's maximum-security prison for women, under the direction of best-selling author Wally Lamb. 

Tonight, I am going to read from two memoirs with lighter themes to show you don't have to suffer a tragedy or overcome negative forces in order for your story to be interesting. They are The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson and Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk. The first is about growing up happy in middle America in the 1950s. The second is about Volk's 100-year family history in the food business and growing up in the middle of it in the garment district of NYC. 

Even if you don't think you would like to read memoir, I recommend these selections, as they read more like novels than nonfiction. 

I'm happy I chose this new class to teach and I'm looking forward to tonight's adventure. Thanks for stopping in, everyone, and have a great day!

I'm Back!

Hello! I know it's been a while and I'm sorry about that. I'm not sure why I stopped posting stuff, but it struck me the other day that I have this blogging site so, I should be using it! I have been writing over the last couple of years. Writing a lot, in fact. I've been writing poetry and finishing up my latest novel. The novel is titled One Good Kick, and it's a psychological thriller placed in Hartford, CT, in late 1989. This is the story of Annette Goode, a promising young editor who, after drinking too much at the office holiday party, accidentally shoots a strange man in a parking garage. Here, she makes a fateful choice and leaves the scene without reporting the incident. Despite her initial struggles with her conscience, she finds herself on a tense, winding path of deception that leads to guilt-ridden visions of the man she shot and a chilling spiral of murder and madness. This is a fast-paced, twisty thriller that is sure to satisfy! Currently, the novel is out with agents. No bites yet, but fingers crossed!

One Good Kick is actually my fourth novel written, but only my last novel The Windsome Tree made it to publication. I did work with an agent to get that published, but she since retired and other agents from her agency are either not accepting submissions or they do not work with my genre. So, I'm on the hunt for new representation. I have to say, it's hard, frustrating, and scary. But it's worth the try.

The Windsome Tree takes place in 2014 in the fictional town of Windsome, NC. It's about Mercy Amoretto, a grieving mother of four who lost her youngest child to leukemia. In an attempt to heal, she starts cleaning the house, and in the garage she finds an old rope and a tire. In a fanciful moment, she fastens them together to make a tire swing. Unbeknownst to her, the rope, the tire, and the tree in her yard share a violent history. Once the three are connected, that history is unleashed in the form of two child spirits from decades past. While on the swing, Mercy hears cryptic messages from the spirits and begins to ride the swing obsessively, believing these spirits are key to finding her dead daughter. You can find this on Amazon and B&N, but the Amazon Kindle version has the best free preview. So, check it out!

(This is the original cover from 2018. We've since created a new cover, which I love, but there is something nostalgic about this that I find haunting.)

So, that's basically what I've been up to, besides surviving the world shutting down, keeping a business open, and trying my best to keep up in the writing, publishing, and hocking my books worlds.

I am not good at being consistent with my blogging, so if you have any topics you would like me to address, please drop a note below. I teach creative writing, so I can address a diverse array of topics. I can also talk about other stuff, like cats or cooking (but not cooking cats).

Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful day, and HAPPY SPRING!