FALL FEATURE WORKSHOP - Finding the Heart of Your Memoir with Judah Leblang
Saturday, October 14, 2023 | 10:00-3:00pm MT
Instructor: Judah Leblang
MEMBER PRICE: $195.00 (with member coupon AWCSM25)
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $260.00
Coffee, tea and snacks will be provided in the morning.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr identifies the importance of internal conflict and stresses how conflict feeds the theme or throughline in memoir, which keeps the reader turning pages and the writer focused. Karr stresses the importance of "...the writer's emotional investment in the work at hand. Why is she driven to tell the tale? Usually it's to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity."
In this full-day interactive workshop, we'll complete several exercises to identify key conflicts and turning points in your story, identify a potential theme or throughline, and explore why you, the writer, need to tell this tale--all in the service of finding the emotional core of your memoir or essay collection. You'll leave with new ideas and approaches -- including possible story structures -- that can further and enrich your work.
This workshop is designed for writers who are actively engaged in writing a memoir or essay collection, or who are exploring the possibility of writing one.
This event will take place in person at the RGO Treehouse at cSpace Marda Loop.
Copies of Judah's memoirs Finding My Place and Echoes of Jerry will be available for sale at the event.
Judah Leblang is a Boston-based writer, teacher, and storyteller. He is the author of the essay collection, Finding My Place (Lake Effect Press, 2012) and the memoir Echoes of Jerry (Red Giant Books, 2019). He has performed his one-man show, "It's Now or Never" at Calgary Fringe--(Best of Festival 2019) and in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Chicago, and Boston. His radio pieces have been broadcast on 200 NPR and ABC-radio network stations in the US and on several Canadian stations. He teaches memoir-writing at GrubStreet in Boston, at Literary Cleveland, and at the Alexandra Writers' Centre in Calgary.
