Write Your Memoir in 16 Weeks: Bring Your Story to Life

The focus of this course is workshop, so we will discuss craft as questions arise in the pages shared. Each week, you will submit up to 3,000 words of your memoir for feedback. Every other week, I’ll also share optional craft essays and writing exercises to help you deepen your understanding of memoir and further develop your skills.

Readings: Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work (prologue); Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir (prologue)

We begin by exploring the deeper purpose behind your memoir—what drives you to tell this story, and what questions you hope to answer along the way. You’ll start shaping the scope of your narrative by identifying key events, themes, and the time period your memoir will cover. This foundational work will help you build a strong emotional and structural framework for the pages to come.

Reading: Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dreamhouse (excerpt)

Before we can write about others, we must learn to write ourselves as a character—with honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to be exposed. In these weeks, you’ll explore your own character arc and begin to understand the people central to your story through the lens of their desires, flaws, and conflicts. The goal is to render real people—yourself included—on the page with nuance, complexity, and emotional clarity.

Reading: Ryan Van Meter, “If You Knew Then What I Know Now”

Memoir often builds toward a moment of heightened understanding, meaningful change, or irreversible action—something the narrator (and reader) must try to make sense of. In these weeks, you’ll work to identify that climactic moment in your own story and explore how it shaped or shifted your life. We’ll also look closely at how memoir functions as a gradual reveal, helping you consider what narrative question your story is asking—and how to hold that question until the very end.

Reading: “Sarah Sentilles on Writing about People You Know”

Can we articulate exactly what is at stake in telling our truth? This week, we’ll reflect on the risks and rewards of writing from life—considering the worst, best, and most likely outcomes. You’ll think through your purpose for writing, the role of your imagined audience, and how that audience shapes your approach. We’ll also explore the parts of your story you may be afraid to tell, and what it means to hold space for discomfort, uncertainty, or self-revelation in memoir.

Readings: Kiese Laymon, Heavy (excerpt); Maggie Nelson, Bluets (excerpt)

Much of the power of a story comes from voice—your voice. This week, you’ll consider how to write in a tone that feels authentically you, but also the smartest, funniest, most empathetic version of yourself. We’ll explore how point of view shapes your story, and what happens when you try telling it from another character’s perspective. What might they reveal? How might this deepen or complicate your memory of the moment?

Reading: Mark Doty, “Return to Sender: Memory, Betrayal, and Memoir”

Much of creative nonfiction is imagination—filling in the blanks of what isn’t remembered and trying to understand what others were thinking and feeling. This week, you’ll consider what you don’t know and how you might go about finding it out. Are there people you could interview, photographs to examine, old emails or journals to revisit? We’ll also look at how your individual experience fits into a larger political, social, or economic context, and what kinds of research might help you explore that connection more deeply.

Reading: Jenette McCurdy, I’m Glad My Mother Died (excerpt)

Dialogue in memoir lives at the intersection of memory and imagination. Most of us don’t have total recall—so we do our best to recreate what was said, focusing not on perfect accuracy but emotional truth. This week, you’ll revise scenes that include or need dialogue, thinking carefully about when to summarize, when to quote directly, and how to convey subtext. We’ll also explore how action, silence, and withholding can be just as powerful as what’s spoken aloud.

Reading: Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (excerpt)

Setting is more than backdrop—it’s a dynamic force that informs character, plot, theme, and mood. This week, you’ll focus on describing a micro-setting from your memoir in vivid, sensory detail, grounding your reader fully in time and place. You’ll also consider your memoir’s broader “story world” and explore how the central conflicts of your narrative are shaped by the environments in which they unfold.