Thomas Larson

Thomas Larson Memoir Writing Workshops

Thomas Larson, renowned writer and memoir facilitator, is available for daylong, weekend, and weeklong workshops. He has taught beginning to advanced classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, MN, Ghost Ranch in Santa Fe and Abiquiu, NM, and Ashland University's Low-Residency MFA program, among dozens of venues. He works one-on-one with participants, often reading and editing manuscripts. The announcement below describes his basic workshop and can be used for advertising or promotion.

Join Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, for a workshop in memoir writing. We begin by discussing the significant differences between traditional autobiography and contemporary memoir. Next we explore memoir’s demanding questions: Where do I begin? What is my focus? How do I discover the emotional truth of my story? How do I write about the living? With numerous writing prompts, we look at the mainstays of the memoir form: truth-telling and self-disclosure; sudden versus long-ago memoir; good and bad therapeutic writing; and the importance of metaphor and myth in the personal life.

Barber Adagio Book

The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings"

Pegasus Books (ISBN: 978-1605981154), distributed by Norton.

Hardcover, September 2010; paperback, March 2012.

A YouTube video of my one-hour "Saddest Music" multimedia presentation at Warwick's Bookstore, La Jolla, CA, Tuesday, November 30, 2010.

In the first book to explore Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, music and literary critic Thomas Larson tells the story of the prodigal composer and his seminal masterpiece: from its composition in 1936, when Barber was just twenty-six, to its orchestral premiere two years later, led by the great Arturo Toscanini, and its fascinating history as America's secular hymn for grieving our dead. Older Americans know the Adagio from the funerals and memorials for Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, Albert Einstein, and Grace Kelly. Younger Americans recall the work as the antiwar theme of the movie Platoon. Still others treasure the piece in its choral version under the name "Agnus Dei." More recently, mourners heard the Adagio played as a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Because of its 75-year use at countless memorials and funerals, Barber's Adagio is arguably the saddest music ever written: pound for pound, far more tears have been shed for Barber's work than have been loosened for any other of the great laments in music.

THOMAS LARSON