Preliminary notes on two seminars I will be teaching in May
I have been invited to teach at the Pima Writer's Workshop in Tucson, AZ, May 25-28. I will be critiqueing portions of manuscripts and doing one lecture and one group exercise.
There is a pleasing symmetry to this. When I was a child in India, Nancy Wall, a professor of English and Creative Writing from Pima Community College, befriended me and encouraged my writing. When I moved back to the USA, she invited me to attend the very first Pima Writer's Workshop.
I was thirteen and the youngest person there, and it was a great experience except for having a horrible early version of my never-ending attempt to write about my childhood get a bad critique by a woman who felt that it was not only bad, but racist. (I was attempting to write from the POV of a girl who was utterly freaked out at the first sight of India, and either did it very badly or too well. However, the critiquer should not have assumed that the opinions of the characters had to be the opinions of the author, give that it was a fragment of a novel, not a memoir.)
Twenty years later, I am returning to teach at the same workshop, and to discuss the final and successful version of that same story I tried so many times to write. But since I've never taught writing before, it will be my first time all over again.
Also, I now have new friends who live in Tucson! We must get together while I'm there!
I was alarmed to recently receive an e-mail from the program director asking for the titles of what I would be teaching, given that I had not yet given the matter any thought whatsoever, except to decide that I should do something on memoir since that's what everyone there would know me for. And since I've never done this before, and will be flying straight there from London and will be totally jet-lagged, I intend to do extensive pre-planning and work from notes.
The group exercise is "Memory into Narrative: Crafting Childhood Recollections Into Memoir or Fiction."
This is NOT going to be some ghastly unlicensed psychotherapy session, but an exercise in evoking memories, then working them into a usable form-- I mention this because that's exactly the sort of exercise that I might be scared to go to at a workshop unless I really trusted the person who was running it, lest it turn into "Now thing about the most painful thing you've ever endured..."
1. Introduce the exercise by explaining that they will first do some work on writing from memory, then have re-write those memories so they can get the experience of re-working material without actually changing the facts.
1a. Briefly discuss how to evoke memories and build them from fragments into fully-remembered scenes. Start with a fragment. Then, one by one, try to remember what was going on with each of your senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Orient yourself in place: look around you: what's in front? What's behind? What's under your feet? Sketching a floor plan of your house, or sketching any place can be useful. Orient yourself in time: What happened right before? What happened after? How did you feel about it?
Write all these points on a board, so they can refer to them while writing.
1b. Tell them that I am going to give them a couple choices for picking a childhood memory to write about. Strongly advise them to stay away from anything traumatic or strongly weighted with negative feelings. This exercise will work best if the memory is something that focuses more on sensory detail than on emotion, or in which the emotions are more-or-less positive.
1c. Choose a memory from when you were under the age of twelve. It should focus on or involve one (or more) of these three elements: food, playing a game or with a toy, or an animal-- could be a pet, but doesn't have to be. (If you pick "animal," think of a memory that's not the tragic death of your pet.) You have fifteen minutes to write.
Write this from the point of view of yourself as a child, not from the point of view of yourself as an adult looking back. Don't include any details that you the child wouldn't have known; don't explain anything that you the child didn't understand. Write only about what you the child felt and experienced. Refer to the board if you get stuck. Go!
Note: I picked the three elements as being things that people tend to have vivid childhood memories of that are not necessarily traumatic, but I'm open to other suggestions.
If anyone's still sitting frozen after five minutes, I'm going to tell them to just pick the first memory that comes to their head, and start writing.
2. Tell everyone to stop writing. Take a couple of comments about anything that anyone discovered or found interesting about the exercise.
Explain that the first element of memoir is recalling events. The second is shaping them. Both are equally important. We've just worked on recalling; now we'll work on shaping.
How you re-write will depend on what you're trying to do. For now, we're just going to practice re-writing a true story in a way that substantially changes the tone and sentences, but preserves the truth.
What you're going to do now is take the exact same memory you've just written from the child's point of view, and re-write it from the point of view of yourself as an adult, looking back. You may now mention things that you didn't know at the time, but do now. You can explain things that you didn't understand. Still include the sensory detail, but you might interpret it differently. Also, maybe now you know why that particular memory is important, and why you still remember it. Or maybe it's still a mystery to you. Any of that may now be included. However, you're not going to write an essay on what you left out of the first memory; you're going to write the same memory again, but just from the point of view of you, the adult. It's possible that you won't even change that much of it.
You have fifteen minutes. Go!
3. Ask for comments on second exercise. Ask for volunteer to read both of theirs, then discuss briefly.
There is a pleasing symmetry to this. When I was a child in India, Nancy Wall, a professor of English and Creative Writing from Pima Community College, befriended me and encouraged my writing. When I moved back to the USA, she invited me to attend the very first Pima Writer's Workshop.
I was thirteen and the youngest person there, and it was a great experience except for having a horrible early version of my never-ending attempt to write about my childhood get a bad critique by a woman who felt that it was not only bad, but racist. (I was attempting to write from the POV of a girl who was utterly freaked out at the first sight of India, and either did it very badly or too well. However, the critiquer should not have assumed that the opinions of the characters had to be the opinions of the author, give that it was a fragment of a novel, not a memoir.)
Twenty years later, I am returning to teach at the same workshop, and to discuss the final and successful version of that same story I tried so many times to write. But since I've never taught writing before, it will be my first time all over again.
Also, I now have new friends who live in Tucson! We must get together while I'm there!
I was alarmed to recently receive an e-mail from the program director asking for the titles of what I would be teaching, given that I had not yet given the matter any thought whatsoever, except to decide that I should do something on memoir since that's what everyone there would know me for. And since I've never done this before, and will be flying straight there from London and will be totally jet-lagged, I intend to do extensive pre-planning and work from notes.
The group exercise is "Memory into Narrative: Crafting Childhood Recollections Into Memoir or Fiction."
This is NOT going to be some ghastly unlicensed psychotherapy session, but an exercise in evoking memories, then working them into a usable form-- I mention this because that's exactly the sort of exercise that I might be scared to go to at a workshop unless I really trusted the person who was running it, lest it turn into "Now thing about the most painful thing you've ever endured..."
1. Introduce the exercise by explaining that they will first do some work on writing from memory, then have re-write those memories so they can get the experience of re-working material without actually changing the facts.
1a. Briefly discuss how to evoke memories and build them from fragments into fully-remembered scenes. Start with a fragment. Then, one by one, try to remember what was going on with each of your senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Orient yourself in place: look around you: what's in front? What's behind? What's under your feet? Sketching a floor plan of your house, or sketching any place can be useful. Orient yourself in time: What happened right before? What happened after? How did you feel about it?
Write all these points on a board, so they can refer to them while writing.
1b. Tell them that I am going to give them a couple choices for picking a childhood memory to write about. Strongly advise them to stay away from anything traumatic or strongly weighted with negative feelings. This exercise will work best if the memory is something that focuses more on sensory detail than on emotion, or in which the emotions are more-or-less positive.
1c. Choose a memory from when you were under the age of twelve. It should focus on or involve one (or more) of these three elements: food, playing a game or with a toy, or an animal-- could be a pet, but doesn't have to be. (If you pick "animal," think of a memory that's not the tragic death of your pet.) You have fifteen minutes to write.
Write this from the point of view of yourself as a child, not from the point of view of yourself as an adult looking back. Don't include any details that you the child wouldn't have known; don't explain anything that you the child didn't understand. Write only about what you the child felt and experienced. Refer to the board if you get stuck. Go!
Note: I picked the three elements as being things that people tend to have vivid childhood memories of that are not necessarily traumatic, but I'm open to other suggestions.
If anyone's still sitting frozen after five minutes, I'm going to tell them to just pick the first memory that comes to their head, and start writing.
2. Tell everyone to stop writing. Take a couple of comments about anything that anyone discovered or found interesting about the exercise.
Explain that the first element of memoir is recalling events. The second is shaping them. Both are equally important. We've just worked on recalling; now we'll work on shaping.
How you re-write will depend on what you're trying to do. For now, we're just going to practice re-writing a true story in a way that substantially changes the tone and sentences, but preserves the truth.
What you're going to do now is take the exact same memory you've just written from the child's point of view, and re-write it from the point of view of yourself as an adult, looking back. You may now mention things that you didn't know at the time, but do now. You can explain things that you didn't understand. Still include the sensory detail, but you might interpret it differently. Also, maybe now you know why that particular memory is important, and why you still remember it. Or maybe it's still a mystery to you. Any of that may now be included. However, you're not going to write an essay on what you left out of the first memory; you're going to write the same memory again, but just from the point of view of you, the adult. It's possible that you won't even change that much of it.
You have fifteen minutes. Go!
3. Ask for comments on second exercise. Ask for volunteer to read both of theirs, then discuss briefly.