Page 17 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
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WRITING GUIDES
“A remarkably compact, efficient, complete, and helpful guide to writing
memoirs. I plan to use it in my own teaching.”
Rachel Hadas, author of
Strange
Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry
Every person has a story to tell, but few beginners know how to uncover their
story’s narrative potential. And despite a growing interest among students and cre-
ative writers, few guides to the genre of memoirs and creative nonfiction highlight
compelling storytelling strategies. Addressing this gap, authors Lynn C. Miller
and Lisa Lenard-Cook provide a compact, accessible guide to memoir writing that
shows how an aspiring memoir writer can use storytelling tools and tactics bor-
rowed from fiction to weave personal experiences into the shape of a story.
Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir
offers an overview of the building blocks
of memoir writing. Individual chapters focus on key issues and challenges, such
as the balance between the remembering narrator and the experiencing narra-
tor, the capacity to honor the subjective voice, the occasion of telling (why does
this narrator tell this story
now
?), creating an organically functional structure for
a particular story, and taking the next steps with a written memoir. Drawing on
their combined years of experience teaching memoir writing, authoring works of
fiction and nonfiction, and working in autobiographical performance, Miller and
Lenard-Cook provide a practical guide whose core philosophy is motivated by a
key word:
story
.
Lynn C. Miller
is the author of the
novels
Death of a Department Chair
and
The Fool’s Journey
and coeditor of
Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s
Autobiography
. A playwright and solo
performer, she is former professor of
theater and dance as well as women’s
and gender studies at the University of
Texas at Austin.
Lisa Lenard-Cook
is the PEN-shortlisted author of
Dissonance
,
Coyote Morning
, and
The Mind of Your Story
. She is a faculty member at the Santa
Barbara Writers Conference and at the Narrative Arts Center in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. Together, they cofounded ABQ Writers Co-op, a creative community for
Southwest writers.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
MARCH
LC: 2012032685 CT
146 PP. 6 X 9
E-BOOK $12.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29313-0
“Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir
is original, taking its standpoint on
memoir writing from the craft of fic-
tion, and integrating research about
memory, narrative theory, and
concepts important to performance
studies.”
Craig Gingrich-Philbrook,
author of
Loss: Stories about the End
of Things
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
UWPRESS
.
WISC
.
EDU
17
Jesse Lee Kercheval
“If you are writing fiction or teaching
students to write fiction, this book is the
best guide you can have.”—Kelly Cherry,
author of
My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A
Novel in Stories
PUBLISHED MARCH 2003
LC: 2003040187 PN 208 PP. 6 × 9
