Memoir: Taking Your Story to the Next Level

The real artistry of prose writing is the translation of the emotional stakes of a story onto its physical landscape, and for novelist, essayist, and memoirist Pam Houston this process is second nature. Her in-person, manuscript-driven workshop focuses on demystifying the essential components of storytelling (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue, character, scene) and fashioning them into comprehensible tools we can use to shape our prose. 

As memoirists we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup of our lived and witnessed experience to pull out what we need. We pick up hunks of the physical world and bring them back to the page, translated into words. We aim for sentences where language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too-hot grill. 

During our time together, Pam creates—and holds—a safe space for participants to offer considered and compassionate critiques of each other’s work, while discussing how to make our manuscripts even stronger. It’s all too easy to be humbled by language’s infinite possibilities and limitations, but as we face the contents of our own personal narratives, we open ourselves up to the inexplicable flights of creativity that transform a good story into a great one.