2025 Summer Workshops
“Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times,” Sven Birkerts writes in The Art of Time in Memoir. The best memoirs don’t simply relate the events of a writer’s life from start to finish, but instead dramatize a journey of the mind, using a writer’s personal experience as a lens through which to bring some aspect of human experience into focus. But memory is an unreliable thing, and often runs aground before our stories do. We’ll tackle this challenge, as well as the challenges of navigating other people’s memories (which may differ in important ways from our own), and how to overcome the fear many of us encounter when we commit to telling our own stories.
Students should bring ten copies of an essay or excerpt of a memoir to the first class gathering on Sunday night (twenty pages maximum, double spaced, twelve-point font). Bring something that you want to understand better, that you know has potential but you’re too close to see how large or what kind.
Biography
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and is author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Other Side (Tin House, 2014). She is also author of Trespasses: A Memoir (University of Iowa Press, 2012). Her third book, The Reckonings, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2018. She teaches creative nonfiction in the Low-Residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and at Rice University.