Writing What You Don’t Know

The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Lexington KY. Photo: visitlex.com

Writing workshop wisdom used to be Write What You Know, a doctrine I’ve found increasingly confining. Since everyone I teach is interested in writing memoir, a form I’ve found self-limiting, I hope to move on in the workshops I’ll teach this October at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning in Lexington, Kentucky to “Writing What You Don’t Know: Memoir As History.”

This is an ambitious aim. The memoirs I’ve read, written by students, often show limited awareness of the historical context that impacts all “personal” history. For example, the wars the U.S. has been engaged in since its founding are never mentioned even when a father or grandfather has enlisted or been drafted with life-long consequences for him and his family.

In fact I think it is truthful to say there is no personal history.

Think how the changing attitudes about childbirth have affected all the women in your family and through them, the men, from the strange “twilight sleep” of my mother’s era, which wiped out memory of the pain rather than the pain itself, through the radical ideas of Natural Childbirth to the planned hysterectomies of today.

And yet these facts do not appear in memoir.

I think when there are conspicuous gaps like these, they display a lack of authority on the part of the woman writer. Who is she to question medical certainties? Or to analyze the effects of war?

So part of “Writing What You Don’t Know” will be increasing the memoir writer’s sense of authority, allowing the bigger world to play a larger role.

Keep in touch for further information about these workshops, which I will repeat in Santa Fe.

[Unfortunately I’ve had to reschedule this workshop for next spring. Once dates have been finalized, the workshop will appear on my events page, and also in my emails which you can subscribe to below.]

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