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!