WORKSHOPS

Memoir Writing Book by Thomas Larson

Forthcoming:

"Keep the Memoir Going"

Ghost Ranch, Santa Fe

May 30 - June 5, 2010

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"Keep the Memoir Going"

The Loft, Minneapolis, MN

August 16 - 20, 2010

**

"Writing the Memoir"

Ghost Ranch, Abiququ, NM

October 10 - 16, 2010

Memoir Writing Workshops:

Thomas Larson has given two-hour, half-day, all-day, and weeklong workshops at bookstores, writing centers, libraries, writers' guilds, and private clubs for beginning and advanced memoirists throughout the United States

From 2007 to 2010, venues include Warwick’s Bookstore (La Jolla, CA); Ghost Ranch (Santa Fe, NM); St. Louis Writer’s Guild; Lancaster (PA) Literary Guild; Writers’ Center of Indiana (Indianapolis, IN); Mobile Writers Guild (Mobile, AL); Bookpeople (Austin, TX); Houston (TX) Public Library; Palm Springs (CA) Public Library; Book Passage (Corte Madera, CA); Margaret Mitchell House (Atlanta, GA); OLLI Memoir Writers (Auburn, AL); Clemente Program (Port Hadlock, WA); Wordstock (Portland, OR); Kansas City (MO) Public Library; Columbia (MO) Public Library; The Loft (Minneapolis, MN); and Worthington Library (Columbus, OH).

Prior Appearances:

Lancaster Literary Guild

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A List (With Links) to Recommended Memoirs Print E-mail
Memoir Writing Workshops

Here is a list of memoirs I recommend. These titles are in addition to the 125 books I list in the back of The Memoir and the Memoirist. Click on the link for either the Amazon page or the author's website.

  1. The Tender Land Kathleen Finneran (2000). This is a masterpiece of emotional narrative; movement between past, present, and future times in the author's memory; and the haunting presence of her brother who suicided at fifteen.
  2. Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground Peter Svenson (1992). Svenson's history/memoir interweaves two stories: his buying the property to farm and his discovery that it is hallowed Civil War ground.
  3. Stephen Haven's The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk (2008) is a marvelous then-now drama as Haven returns to his boyhood home, Amersterdam, New York, for a three-week visit, there to struggle less with the adolescent he was and more with the man who has changed and who must find out how.
  4. Kay Redfield Jamison's Nothing Was the Same (2009) is an exquisite portrait of her marriage to, and the eventual loss of, her scientist-husband, Richard Wyatt. I was particularly impressed with how she narrated his absence in her life the year after he died.
  5. I think Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine (2008) is a family-systems classic: the Greenbergs (ex-wife, mother, new wife, father, son, brother) are held hostage during the daughter's psychotic breakdown while their attempts to help her point out how nearly impossible it is, without drugs, for loved ones to do anything constructive than to express their own guilt and frustration.
  6. One of the best Americans-in-a-foreign-land memoirs is Tony Cohan's On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel (2001). Cohan and his wife, fleeing L.A., make the naive plunge into purchasing a house in San Miguel, where buyer protections do not exist and all craft and graft is stacked in favor of the seller, especially when his documents are as recondite as his promises. More than a travel guide, Cohan is forgiving and tolerant, the only way to survive as an exile.
  7. A richly intimate and subtly political memoir is Richard Terrill's Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir (1990). Terrill's one year there took place three years before the slaughter of students in Tianneman Square. It's a beautiful book, revealing the hopelessness of the Cultural Revolution's first-born generation whose futures are utterly set and whose despair lies dormat in their stifled selves. Most touching is Terrill's honest struggle with his preternatural individuality in a country that desires and rejects it.
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