English 78: Memoir Class

English 78: Memoir Writing Fall 2009 Joe Ryan

Course Description:

Welcome to the Memoir Writing course. We are embarking on an exciting journey together—basically, reading about others’ lives and composing our own individualized histories so that others can see how we have lived and what we value. To many people, this is the height of writing—revealing the truth about ourselves and also compiling a record of our lives that others can experience.

The style of the course is workshop. That is, people will submit their material in advance, and we will read the work of our classmates before we critique it in the classroom. How much writing must we submit? At least twenty pages per person this semester, and I mean finished pages, not journal pages or rough drafts. Polished drafts of chapters from the memoir you are writing, submitted as if they were an actual book excerpt. These pages should have been critiqued in the class during the semester-and rewritten by you.

Critiques: In semesters past, writers have been very helpful to one another. It can go beyond the classroom, of course. In class, be prepared to say something constructive about each other’s work. I am encouraging you all to write a short critique and send it to each of the writers whose work you critique.

Note: Because it helps to have a deadline and an incentive, this semester, every writer must submit at least one piece of their memoir by the sixth week of this course (October 8), and a second offering by the twelfth week (November 21). Writers can be excluded if they do not meet these two deadlines.

Of course, all writers read. Here are the books for the class:

Zousmer, Steve. You Don’t Have to Be Famous: How to Write Your Life Story. F & W Media, Inc.

Coste, Chris, The 33-Year-Old Rookie. Random House.

Lopez, Steve. The Soloist. Penguin Group.

Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Reading is required. It will help you to write better. It will show you how to shape scenes, write dialogue, and choose details to include in your work. I will give a partial calendar at the end of this description, and we’ll follow it until I supply the next version.

Course Website:

Since I never much used it, we are going to do all the submissions via a class e-mail list.

You will submit your materials online, via e-mail. You will be sent a distribution list, so it will be very simple for all. In addition, I will send you some class lectures to read. If you are the writer on board for the week, you must submit your material to all of us via e-mail no later than Monday night at midnight. All of us must download these submissions, read them before class, and critique them in a full class discussion. If you make comments on the submissions—and you should—please give them to the writer. They might help. Please make sure to include that you are submitting material for the Memoir (English 78) class somewhere in your Subject line. (Note: Learning how to submit is an essential part of the course, so the faster you learn it the better.)

Attendance:

Attendance at all classes is mandatory (this means required). You may miss only one class without penalty. The second class you miss—for any reason—will lower your grade. I am strict about attendance for the following reasons: workshop classes require participation, and participation demands that you come to class prepared to help your classmates write better; people respect each other more if they can count on seeing each other every week; workshops demand you expose your innermost thoughts and feelings and even reveal important things about who you are; workshops demand courage because they entail critiquing your own and others’ work. Since you will receive credit, and you can use this credit to earn a college degree, then I will use your grade in this class to enforce this important, simple rule.


Lateness:

Late students lower the morale of all the members of the class. Therefore, you will be warned once and start acquiring absences for each subsequent late arrival. In addition, if you have not done the reading for the day’s class, you will be considered absent for the day. If you do not have the written material with you on the day it is due, it goes without saying that you should drop the class. Leaving class early will be treated as an absence.

Grading:

Quality of the work, quantity of work (reaching a required minimum), attendance, keeping up with the reading, critiquing what you’ve read, website work, all of these and more factors, will go into determining your grade for this semester. No extra credit will be available for this class.


September 3: Course Introduction and Introduction to Memoir Writing

September 10: First Student Submissions. Read Chapters I Blog or Send to You.

September 17: Read The Soloist, pp. 1 – 140 (Read Class Submissions before class)

September 24. Read A Moveable Feast, pp. 141 - end (Read Class Submissions before class)