A First-Year (Level I) Writers' Program
Approved by the UW English Department
Do you want to write about your life? Do you want to learn techniques for creating the modern memoir? This program explores the turbulence of memory. Memoir is not fiction, yet it uses fictional techniques, like dialogue and description, close-ups and stream-of-consciousness. Memoir is biography, but not autobiography. Memoir is a looking back, but it is more than a retrospective. The subject for the memoir can be the writer: My Life as a Dog; The Liar's Club. The subject can be someone famous like A. E. Hotchner's Papa Hemingway. Or someone unknown like Frank McCourt's mother, the Angela of Angela's Ashes. Memoir can be a slice of life, following a thread that creates a theme that ignites the writing, like Lauren Slater's Lying. In this program, student writers transform their personal experiences and memory into a dynamic personal memoir.