ONLINE What About Me: From Memoir to Autofiction
One-Day Workshop | Monday, November 24, 2025
12PM-3PM PT | 1PM-4PM MT | 2PM-5PM CT | 3PM-6PM ET | 4PM-7PM AT
Instructor: Robyn Diner
UPDATE: This class is full. Email us to join the waitlist.
MEMBER PRICE: $60.00
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $75.00
Memoir is often praised as the genre that can best capture and convey a writer’s personal tale and truth. But this premise and promise can feel faulty and constraining. In turn this workshop looks to autofiction as an alternative way to tell stories linked to the self. It asks: What is autofiction? How is autofiction different from memoir or creative nonfiction? What personal, political and literary purposes might it serve?
The first half of this workshop consists of an interactive presentation that highlights the strengths and limitations found in some key contemporary memoirs, and then it shifts to exploring recent contemporary autofiction. As students are exposed to autofiction, they learn how to blur the boundary between truth and fiction in order to subject their biographies to a twist, construct alter egos, re-imagine life events, reconfigure form, call the truth into question -- and create the most compelling literary, political and philosophical chaos.
In the second half of this workshop, participants will be given tips, tricks and relevant prompts designed to enable them to begin to craft their own autofictional slice of life, which they may share with other participants. Generous and insightful feedback from the instructor is also available.
This class takes place online using Zoom.
Robyn Diner teaches literature and pop culture at Vanier College in Montréal, Canada. She is working on an autofiction novel titled Badass Teacher Lady: Tales From the Classroom and Beyond. Most of her publications to date are a mashup of the personal, the theoretical and the literary. She lives in the Mile End in Montréal where she continues to be amazed by the price of cute dresses at the neighborhood thrift shop -- never mind the cost of groceries.
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