Workshop: Memoir
Beneath the Iceberg
Memoir with Mira Ptacin
Unlike autobiography, memoir does not need to include every part of one’s life. A truly good memoir is more like a series of Polaroid snapshots, highlighting the key moments or a specific time period in a person’s life that deliver a thesis statement or answer a question.
In this class, attendees will break down the most potent threads of the tapestry of one’s life and identify each page’s purpose. We will engage in the skills essential to great memoir and literary writing—scene, characterization, dialogue, and point of view—to delve into the following questions: What does this life illustrate? What has the narrator learned from his or her life? What larger issues are being explored? What’s beneath the iceberg? What is my thesis statement? What are my intentions?
We will also look at what comes next: how to prepare excerpts for submissions as stand-alone pieces? What is an agent and when—if even—should I acquire one? What do I want to do with this memoir? What is my ultimate goal here? Class will have take-home prompts, in-class exercises, as well as assigned “Rx” readings.
Participants will be required to review one or two peer manuscripts (using provided guidelines) prior to the retreat.
SUBMIT
After registering, participants in the memoir workshop are asked to submit a manuscript of up to 1000-words by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 22. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “PTACIN BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF. Please note: there is no printing available at the retreat location.
Mira Ptacin is the author of the critically acclaimed genre-bending book of history and memoir The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna (Liveright, 2019) as well as the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press 2016). Her work has been published in New York Magazine, Guernica, Down East, Tin House, LitHub, NPR, and more. Formerly an instructor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, Ptacin lives on Peaks Island with her family and is at work on her third book of nonfiction.