How to Find the Through-Line: Writing Memoir and Personal Essay with David McLoghlin

Memoir is not your autobiography, or whole life: it is the exploration of a particular thread, or theme, from your life. In this class you will learn to extract the story that you want to tell from the raw material of your life. In This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff writes about those years he spent with an abusive stepfather. His second memoir, In Pharoah’s Army, describes his time as a soldier in Vietnam. There is no crossover. There is in life, but in memoir or personal essay we keep material separate in order to better tell a specific story. If you’re interested in writing your personal story by teasing out that central defining thread, or through-line, then this class is for you.

Course Outline

Classes 1, 3, 5, 7 will be dedicated to questions of craft; in classes 2, 4, 6 and 8 we will workshop your writing. In craft we will look at:

• how to find the through-line
• when to “show” and when to “tell” (Both are necessary.)
• how to create authentic scenes, and “glides”: glides are the informative linking material between scenes
• how to create authentic dialogue
• how to improve characterization
• how to pace your story and polish the narrative arc
• how to use time in memoir by moving between present and past in a convincing way without confusing the reader
• finding your narrative voice, which is a crafted version of you “pulled from the raw material of a life” (Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story)
• establishing the narrator’s present life and what is at stake in terms of the past
• learning to distinguish between the situation, or scene, at hand and the deeper story
• researching the times you lived in, interview relatives and relations, read in ways that deepening your project in terms of historical and cultural contexts
• looking at challenges regarding how to include other people’s stories while expressing your own truth

Books we will read and study*

• The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts
• Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
• Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
• Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight Alexandra Fuller
• The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
• A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism and Travel by Robin Hemley
• Dispatches by Michael Herr
• The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński
• Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
• Are You Somebody? Nuala O’Faolain
• The Rings of Saturn by W.S. Sebald

*Excerpts will be provided.

Capacity: 12