Memoirs: Writing the Truth, Even When It Hurts

March 8 - 10am - 1pm

Level: Intermediate & Advanced

Age Group: 18+

Description:

This workshop is about more than digging through our memories to write an engaging life story. Our stories matter, but sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start or how to organize them for publication or family and friends. In this half-day workshop, we will discuss the materials we have at hand–photographs, objects, interviews (those we’ve conducted or may need to do), places we live or have lived, events that have shaped us, even old newspapers and magazines–and how to gather information from them most effectively for the narratives we wish to shape. We will use the workshop to recognize how many of these materials we already have at our disposal and to develop the kind of research we may want to do to expand our narratives. We will write from these materials using prompts provided throughout the session. In addition to prompts, we will discuss how other tools such as reading and group writing practice can sustain us as we delve deeply and get at the nitty gritty details that make our personal stories come alive. Participants will have a chance not only to explore their personal stories, but will discuss how understanding the larger political, economic, and cultural environment in which these stories live, give greater impact to the stories we want to tell about our own lives.

By the end of this workshop, participants will have the beginnings of at least five memoirs or non-fiction pieces that could be further developed.

About the facilitator: Nancy Caronia is a writer, scholar, and educator who co-edited Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching, and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo (Fordham University Press) and wrote the introduction for the reprint of DeSalvo’s only novel Casting Off (Bordighera Press). Nancy has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her creative writing has appeared in Don’t Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing and Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (Feminist Press) as well as numerous journals including Lowestoft Chronicles, BioStories, 94 Creations, New Delta Review, and Ovunque Siamo. She also created Labor on Broadway, which starred David Straithairn and William Wise, for The Working Theater in New York City. Her most recent publications include “Dime Novels and the Creation of the Italian Immigrant Criminal” for the volume American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (UPenn Press) and “Refusing the Sentimental Italian Immigrant Story in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven” for the Journal of Working-Class Studies for which she received the Working-Class Studies Association Russo & Linkon Award. Nancy is a long-time Tai Chi practitioner and loves sharing this moving meditation through her writing workshops and seminars.

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Note: All workshop participants will have the opportunity to publish at least one work with Write Pittsburgh during the year in which the workshop was taken. Workshop participants will also be invited to share their work publicly either in-person or online at Write Pittsburgh events hosted throughout the year.