Writing memoir is not just an act of remembering, it is an act of tending. To lineage, to rupture, to the stories that shaped us before we had language for them. This workshop approaches memoir as both a creative practice and a form of ancestral healing: a way to metabolize experience, build legacy, and transform what we’ve survived into something honest, artful, and shareable.

Together, we will explore memoir as an elastic form, one that refuses a single shape or voice. Memoir can be lyrical or fragmented, political or intimate, spiritual or satirical. It can live as a personal essay, a braided narrative, a series of scenes, or a book-length project. What matters most is not perfection, but presence: your willingness to stay with the story long enough to understand what it’s really asking of you.

This workshop is organized around the natural phases of the creative process: inspiration, organization, creation, revision, and publication and the emotional wounds that often surface at each stage. Fear, anxiety, shame, self-doubt, and urgency are not treated here as failures or things to “push through,” but as intelligent signals. We will practice listening to them, tending to them, and using their information without letting them collapse the work or you. The goal is not to eliminate fear, but to build the capacity to write alongside it.

You will be guided through reflective craft talks, generative writing exercises, and communal discussion designed to help you excavate memory, identify themes, and shape lived experience into compelling narrative. We will study excerpts from contemporary memoirists and essayists to understand how writers navigate truth, structure, and exposure on the page, while also developing practices for care, consent, and sustainability in personal storytelling.