Writing Workshop - May 2023
Helping high school students process writing their own memoir pieces
In Writing the Journey, I write about writing. I share my travel and personal experiences through writing in a lot of contexts, but I also strive to achieve more as a writer. This is where I reflect on that process.
Sometimes I have a hard time believing that I have landed in the teaching space where I have landed. Teaching in 2023 is hard. Teaching while being a mom is hard. Teaching while also working to be a writer and podcaster is hard. But when you have colleagues who stand behind you, it makes all of it just a little bit easier.
This past week, an English colleague invited me to speak to her Hoosier Hysteria class. They have spent the entire semester studying Indiana authors and now they are working on three of their own short memoir pieces to put into a time capsule. She asked me to speak to them about writing short memoir pieces. I put together a workshop and spent the class period having them freewrite and work their way to an unpolished piece of writing.
To cap off the class period, I read to them a piece that I had written in 2007 when I was taking my very first graduate level course. I needed two classes for my recertification and one of them was a creative writing course for teachers at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Rereading the piece as I put it into the presentation, I realized just how far I have come as both a writer and teacher from the twenty-eight-year-old that I was when I wrote that piece. Hopefully you can see that growth when you read through the presentation as well.
The presentation can be found here.
You can also see the talk I did with the same colleague’s creative writing club a couple of months ago.
Order my new book!
I’ve written a memoir collection of essays based on several of my blog posts from the past seven years. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com.
And if you do purchase, please give it a favorable review on Amazon and Goodreads, or any other book tracking app that you might use.
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Very helpful powerpoint! Thank you for sharing. Biographies and memoirs are some of my favorite genres to read. Any recommended reading on the craft of writing biographies or memoirs (of course, aside from actually reading good biographies and memoirs)?
Nice!