MEMOIR WORKSHOP

The “I” and the “Eye”: Making Meaning of Personal Narrative

Lauren Markham

Writers of nonfiction are often called to the page in order to excavate our own experiences; it is also the writer’s job to attempt to make sense of the world around us, and of the larger human condition. Strong nonfiction—be it memoir, personal essay, or reported work—is at once deeply particular (written from the subjectivity of the “I”) and taps into, or toward, the universal (the roving “eye” of the reader). As writers of memoir, how do we ensure that our stories are bigger than just us, and that they resonate with others? How do we write our personal experiences with resonant immediacy and the simultaneous clarity of narrative remove?

In this workshop, we’ll use generative exercises, workshop-style feedback sessions, and discussions on published works to expand our skills as nonfiction storytellers, focusing on both style and substance. We’ll consider how scene, exposition, rumination, sentence-level craft, and larger structural choices work together to create a narrative whole, and how we can use the conceit of narrator – a character representing self, who is neither the author nor the person on the page – to most effectively tell our story.