Life-Changing Advice from a Pro: Break Down the Wall

By Claire Polders

“There’s a wall between you and your writing,” my literary agent in Amsterdam told me over a cup of strong Dutch coffee at her kitchen table.

I was twenty-seven and had just finished my first novel. She was near the end of her career and had brought Don DeLillo and Paul Auster to Dutch audiences.

“What wall?” I asked.

I’d given myself completely to my story, or so I thought. I’d carried my flawed characters through escalating troubles until they changed in ways neither they nor I had foreseen. I’d written about betrayal and sex, the intimacy and complexity of female friendship. What more did she want?

“There’s something you don’t allow us to see,” said my agent.

Did she mean I had to write more interiority? Share my characters’ thoughts and feelings more directly? But I liked it when not everything was spelled out, when emotions revealed themselves through action and evocative descriptions.

My agent couldn’t pinpoint what she was missing exactly. She just sensed I was holding out, holding back. Only I knew what I left unsaid. Her advice to me was clear: Break down the wall.

——

I thought of that wall while writing my second novel and began to see what she meant. My writing wasn’t bad, but it lacked what I admired in the works of my favorite authors: a level of veracity and vulnerability. Here I was, a young woman with a complex emotional life plagued by daily neuroses, and here was my fiction, written by a philosophy major who wanted to enter the Noble World of Literature. I had erected a barrier between myself and my writing, because I believed my feelings had no place in high art, that my personal experiences were not to interfere with my work if I wanted my books to matter. Writing serious literature, I thought erroneously, was self-erasure.

But I learned that the kind of books I loved and wanted to write required the author’s presence. Not as a strong ego seeking praise and attention, but as a human being whose lived experiences color her work. It’s in our genuine responses to life that meanings are made—and found. It’s in how we react to the world that we become real.

Authenticity can be like a thread of connection between author and reader. And this is true in memoir as well. Whether the genre is fiction or nonfiction, a reader enjoys meeting an author on the page they can trust. A person who speaks from some kind of inner truth.

When I use my personal experiences in my writing, my stories gain the potential to become something universally shared. It’s through my idiosyncrasies that my stories come to life.

——

I’m not the sledgehammer type. Breaking down the wall between me and my writing meant doing so brick-by-brick.

Because I had trouble staying true to myself when working on a novel, I began writing other texts on the side: flash fiction, personal essays, magazine articles, or pieces such as this one.

I also switched to writing in English. Dutch was my mother tongue, I lived in Paris and spoke French, but married to an American and working at home, English had become the language in which I communicated the most. Although it was daunting to write in English, it liberated me from trying to impress others with my prose. I would never be a poetic genius in a foreign language—I wasn’t Nabokov—so instead, I focused on clarity and voice. I dug deeper into myself and released the thoughts and feelings I considered too dark to express in daily life. Or too weird. The more freely I wrote, the more my writing became real, and the more it resonated with readers.

Nowadays, I ask myself first what the story I’m working on means to me. Not to the world or my smart potential reader, but to me, whoever I am at the time. Only if I react to the story first can I ever hope to touch others with my writing. Only if I keep the wall down, will my writing have the chance to ring true.
___

Claire Polders grew up in the Netherlands and now roams the world. She’s the author of four novels in Dutch, co-author of one novel for younger readers in English (A Whale in Paris, Simon & Schuster) and many short stories and essays. She’s working on her first memoir and a dark speculative novel about the Dutch colonial past. Her flash fiction collection Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press in 2025. Learn more at www.clairepolders.com or sign up for her Substack newsletter Wander, Wonder, Write to follow her on her journeys.

4 Ways to Build Your Memoir’s World

By Katie Bannon

“Worldbuilding” often calls to mind fictional settings—Hogwarts, Gatsby’s mansion, Alice’s Wonderland. But creating a vivid world on the page is just as essential to creative nonfiction, including memoir.

Crafting a rich, evocative world on the page is one of the best ways to pull readers in and make them care about you and your story. When a reader is immersed in the “world” of a memoir—for instance, in a highly detailed, sensory-rich scene—they feel closer to the characters and more invested in their journeys.

Here are 4 ways to enrich the worldbuilding in your own memoir:

Get specific with the details.

Remember that it’s specificity, rather than generalities, that make for the most absorbing storytelling in memoir. Paradoxically, the more specifically you render the details of a setting, the more relatable it feels to more readers. That’s because creating hyper-specific worlds allows readers to inhabit that space in a visceral, immersive way, drawing us into the narrative.  If your story takes place at a very particular moment in time—Hanoi in the 1960s, New York City in 2020—you may want to weave in specific sociohistorical/cultural context to deepen the reader’s understanding of your world. Even if you’re not writing “hybrid” memoir, no one’s life exists in a vacuum, and drawing on the outside forces that make your story possible—race, politics, culture, family histories, etc.—can further enrich the worldbuilding on the page.

Lean into sensory detail.

In describing settings, most writers tend to focus on how spaces look—the colors in an evening sky, the way light filters into a room. Often that means that other senses get neglected, including taste, smell, and touch. Bringing in senses other than just sight—for instance, the texture of a rug against your skin, or the taste of crisp January air—can make your worldbuilding more multi-sensory and visceral. When readers are able to hear, smell, and touch a space, it brings them deeper into the experience, making them feel like they’re right there with the characters. What’s more, leaning into these commonly neglected senses will help freshen up your descriptive language, making your memoir’s world “pop.”

Here, in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, notice how the environment shifts time by moving from sight to touch to the sound of memory:

Sagebrush and a sprawl of hardy wildflowers blanketed the wide plain. As I walked, scratchy plants I couldn’t identify grazed my calves. Others I knew seemed to speak to me, saying their names to me in my mother’s voice. Names I didn’t realize I knew until they came so clearly into my mind: Queen Anne’s Lace, Indian paintbrush, lupine—those same flowers grew in Minnesota, white and orange and purple. When we passed them as we drove, my mother would sometimes stop the car and pick a bouquet from what grew in the ditch.

Create the world of the psyche.

I like to think of worldbuilding as not only referring to physical spaces, but also internal spaces: the complex landscape of your thoughts, feelings, and psyche. There’s nothing more fascinating than getting insight into how a character or narrator thinks about their world. In a memoir, you can show the reader the workings of your consciousness—how you make connections, internalize external stimuli, and make sense of the world around you. Tapping into the richness of your interior world—your obsessions, annoyances, and hauntings—will allow the reader access to the most nuanced, vulnerable parts of you. This enhances our understanding of who you are and what’s at stake for you, keeping us turning the pages.

Build connections between the exterior and interior worlds.

What’s happening in the “exterior” world affects what’s going on in your “interior” world, and vice versa. Playing up the links between these two spheres is an excellent strategy for evoking your experience, without being too heavy-handed. For instance, you can use concrete elements of setting—temperature, weather, and sensory experience—to show the reader your internal state rather than telling them outright. Consider a scene where you describe the presence of sunlight in your bedroom. Just the word choice of sunlight “streaming in” versus sunlight “beating in” changes how we interpret the scene and what’s happening emotionally for the characters. The way you frame physical details helps determine the emotional tenor of a particular scene and the character’s experience.

Fleshing out your memoir’s “world” is a surefire way to make your story more engaging and immersive. What’s more, drawing on both internal and external worlds—as well as the links between them—can give readers a fascinating window into who you are and how you see your world. Ultimately, worldbuilding is one of the best techniques we have for “hooking” readers and giving our stories lasting resonance.

_________________

Need more craft tools for enhancing the worldbuilding in your memoir? Join Katie Bannon and CRAFT TALKS for Worldbuilding in Memoir: Creating Vivid Worlds that Captivate Your Readers, 3PM ET October 16 ($25).

Katie Bannon is a writer, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, ELLE Magazine, Narratively, and more. Her memoir manuscript was a finalist for the Permafrost Nonfiction Book Prize. A graduate of GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator, she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Emerson College. She is a developmental editor who loves working with nonfiction writers to find the “story” behind the “situation” of their memoirs and essays.

Integrity as Craft: Willing Oneself Toward a Total, Messy Wholeness

By Ren K. D.

I’ve never been one for rules. Rules and their technical demands—functioning as authority, really—have filled me with vitriol and disgust for as long as I can remember. It’s a reaction like full-body hives that I never, not once, felt I could control.

At the age of 3, I lasted precisely three days in ballet classes, discovering I could not simply leap and twirl around the room in the special outfit, causing absolute chaos and getting swiftly kicked out. I lasted a few months in piano, a few weeks in guitar. Then gymnastics, karate, swimming, even Irish dance. I was suspended twice in high school, some version of “struggles with consistency, defiant” showed up on every report card.

I never saw myself as a writer of any seriousness, nor planned on this profession. I spent over a decade of my life training to be a research psychologist before something turned on me, from the inside. I’d finally finished my Master’s Thesis and swore I could never write again. But a year later, I started writing as if I’d explode otherwise. It took me over two years to muster up the courage to apply to an MFA in Creative Writing, knowing I wanted to go beyond the act of writing as “whatever feels good,” and into something with integrity—into craft.

Last spring I finished the first year of my MFA program in creative nonfiction. I’m thirty years old, three years sober from alcohol, and I live alone. Smoker, no pets. I’ve been in therapy for twelve years and I still struggle with being hard on myself. My life has not unfolded on a remotely straight or narrow path. But the nature of rules—through the craft of writing creative nonfiction—has started to make sense. Not just sense, but something deeper. I mean this in the sense of the etymological root of integrity, the Latin word integer. Meaning whole.

What I couldn’t predict nor anticipate in the MFA experience was precisely what the work would demand in this deeper sense, and continues to.  I had to make room for the craft of creative nonfiction. Maybe this seems simple, or silly, but I think it merits real conversation. The craft of creative nonfiction requires something extra: a pure and willing integrity towards the self, for the sake of the story. If you’re someone like me, that story often turns out to be more than we might be initially willing to share, or remember, or both. But in this craft, one can’t afford to let shame suppress elements of the story as it really was, or is. The craft is in willing oneself toward a total, messy wholeness. That is where the truths of our lives live.

One of my dearest friends Billy is finishing their MFA thesis, and it’s no secret between us that I admire them deeply. I try to learn from everything they do. We were just on the phone the other day, catching up between some feedback they had on a recent piece of mine when they mentioned, “One of my favorite professors said we have to write toward the shame. It shifted something in me, and I think it might do the same for you.” Billy is always feeding the truest and deepest momentum in people that way. Having been my friend through the story on the page, they could see what had been redacted, aspects I hadn’t even really meant to leave out, and they could see the emotional core of the piece as well.

I find myself processing the realization that good writing, in creative nonfiction, requires a very real plunging into oneself. It must be done sans judgement. Shame and narrow narratives of self, just like ego and its enforcement of The Story of Who I Am, prevent the authenticity necessary for the work. “And so what do you really want the reader to feel?” Billy asked me. I think we have to want to know what we are feeling to get there. I had to make a commitment. Follow the rules and dive into the deep end, as it were. Headfirst.

Even for all my time in therapy, and all my time turning myself into someone who could withstand the complexity of life as it actually is, I still struggle with the deep end of myself. With the more complex truths lurking in the depths. The parts of self that could tell the whole, ugly, necessary story. Writing creative nonfiction is, on the level of craft, a uniquely humbling psychological experience. Maybe I was supposed to know that already, but I didn’t. Not really, anyway.

It is no easy feat to convey oneself, to try to do so fully. To leave the reader feeling resonant—more full in return. I see the foundation of this craft, of writing creative nonfiction, as its entry point: To be willing to catch oneself hiding between the lines, to catch oneself avoiding parts of our own story.

Though I still don’t make the rules, I am trying to live within them.
___

Ren K. D. (they/she) is an emerging writer and former research psychologist on the spectrum. She has a Bachelor’s and Interdisciplinary Master’s in Cognitive Psychology with an emphasis in memory and identity. Now an MFA Candidate at the University of California, Riverside, they are the Dean’s Distinguished Fellow (2023-2024) and the Dorland Fellow (2024). They have been published in Tangles Locks Journal, are forthcoming in Mulberry Literary, and run an interdisciplinary publication on Substack called Cicatrix Galore

My Teacher, My Students, Myself

By Liz deBeer

Many years ago, when I was working toward a master’s degree in English at Rutgers University, my instructor, an acclaimed author, saw himself as a gatekeeper: a judge who determined who had a story worthy of telling, as opposed to everyone else whom he felt was wasting his time.

He responded to a short story I handed in with a single word: NO. It was typed on white paper, centered in the middle. No comments, no encouragement, no reflection.

Just NO.

I felt like Veruca Salt, that girl in Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory who gets dumped down a trash chute: Bad Job, Game Over, You Lose, NO. 

Stephen King reflects in his book On Writing, “In the end, [writing’s] about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.” Clearly my former teacher found nothing enriching in my writing. And, since he’d earned accolades for his various works, including a best seller, I figured he knew more than I did.

Whenever I considered writing creative nonfiction or fiction, I recalled those two letters throbbing with implied insults. Any internal chirp of curiosity about writing was drowned by that NO. 

I stopped writing.

But then I started my career at a public high school. My students didn’t give a damn what lauded authors had to say about most things. Shakespeare? Too hard to comprehend. Hawthorne? Too many big words. Twain? Too much dialect. Salinger? Too much complaining. Dickinson? Too much bizarre capitalization and punctuation. Morrison? Too depressing.

Obnoxious? Yes. But also liberating. They were totally unintimidated by fame or authority.

I had to be creative to get their attention, find new ways to approach books—like asking students to collect as many quotes as they could find from Catcher in the Rye that might explain why it’s so often banned. Like writing the quotes on index cards, then rearranging them into poems (they loved discovering quotes with curses). Like starting a journal entry with a random sentence from an assigned novel: see where it takes you.

Journals, graded on effort only, allowed us to take risks. We’d listen to music as a prompt. Or respond to a picture prompt. Or emulate an essay’s style. Or after passing around papers where each student wrote down a word or phrase, we’d write journal entries using the list that ended up on our desks. Or after distributing arbitrary objects like a whistle or a feather or a plastic frog that I’d found in my junk drawer, we’d write using some reference to whatever item we got.

It was weird, but it was fun.

The sessions would close with a few students standing by the whiteboard, willing to share, allowing themselves to be vulnerable. Two boys always included a penguin in their journal entries, their challenge to each other, which earned them applause every time.

As I cajoled my students to play with words, to be silly (or “random” in their lingo), I started to enjoy creative writing again too.

Joining in journaling, I’d forget my fears and find my voice again. Writing like this was more like finger painting with my eyes closed rather than attempting to mimic Leonardo DaVinci. We could explore language rather than be threatened by it, flirt with our creative side, silence any misgivings.

Similar to Julia Cameron’s morning pages in The Artist’s Way, our journals involved writing without edits. But while she suggested that “there are no restrictions to morning pages,” Cameron did have a few requirements: Every day! Three pages! Those two rules were intimidating, because sometimes I just didn’t have three pages in me. So, I’d feel like I wasn’t doing it right. I’d start to hear that judgy teacher’s NO again.

But when I remembered how I’d given credit to every student who tried to write something—anything—whether using a prompt or not, whether the suggested length or not, my confidence improved.

I wrote a blog about teaching. Then I joined a writing cooperative, where I wrote and wrote and wrote. Flash, essays, novels, and more flash, essays, and novels.

I submitted essays and flash to online journals. A few essays were accepted. One flash was rejected, but the journal’s editor added a personal note, stating that while the submission wasn’t a match stylistically, she enjoyed it, including commentary about the story’s message. These supportive words motivated me to submit the story to another journal, which accepted and published it.

I started to think of myself as a writer instead of a reject.

No one wants to be dismissed, as my former instructor did to me. When I picture that rude response in my head, I rip it up, replacing it with TRY AGAIN. Since several of my pieces have been published and received praise, I can finally move past that teacher’s judgment and hear my own voice saying YES!

___

Liz deBeer, a graduate of University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, resides in NJ. Retired from teaching public high school, she now writes and teaches with Project Write Now, a writing cooperative. She’s been published in newspapers, teaching journals and magazines. Her latest flash has appeared or is forthcoming in Sad Girls Diaries, Lucky Jefferson, Every Day Fiction, 10 by 10 Flash Fiction, and Blue Bird Word. She likes beach yoga, fresh lavender, and tuxedo cats. Find out more on her website.

Moth-Style Storytelling and Creative Nonfiction: Driving Directions and Polaroids

By Olga Katsovskiy

Participating in workshops often gives me the extra push I need to work on my writing, and observing other instructors in action helps me refine my own teaching philosophy, so I recently took a class geared towards The Moth StorySLAM style of storytelling. Going in, I assumed creative nonfiction translates well into telling true stories on stage.

The Moth StorySLAM format allows storytellers 5-minutes in the limelight to tell a personal story. While those of us in the class were encouraged to write true stories, the instructor allowed students flexibility regarding their genre. Some shared essays, some flash fiction, and some improvised in class. We were free to read from our seats, stand, or present from the front of the room.

The first time I workshopped my piece, I remained seated and focused on reading, gripping my suddenly soggy print-out.

The camp was in the middle of a forest. There were no telephones, no contact with the outside world. I shared a room with another girl, our cots on either side of the barred window. At night, the moonlight peered in between the bars stretching across the floor, caging us in.

When I finished reading, I put down the paper and looked up. What happened next caught me off guard. A classmate sighed and brushed the silence away with his hand. He told me I need to s-l-o-w down. Breathe. Make eye contact. I sank in my seat. I was expecting feedback on my narrative but was critiqued only on the delivery.

A Moth story is like spoken word, a monologue, or a stand-up skit. It must engage an audience with a limited attention span. A story begins with “You know,” or “So.” The storyteller raises or lowers his voice, bangs his fist on the table, stamps his foot to convey emotion. An essay relies on syntax, while the storyteller is the punctuation.

Moth stories delivered on stage and nonfiction stories on the page share the same fundamental elements of narrative—following a narrator’s journey towards transformation. However, while the essayist stops to take pictures of scenery along the way to enrich the narrative, the speaker steers the audience with a set of driving directions focused on actions at key moments. It appears that this style of storytelling is a natural way of communication. I often notice my students’ early essay drafts resemble Moth stories by setting up the framework with actions and leaving out the details.

An essayist can layer stories, time travel, weave in love letters, dialogue, and use the second person narrative to embody a former or future self. A reader can read at their own pace, stroll along the sentences, revisit passages.

In a Moth story, however, there is no fourth wall between the speaker and audience, and saying “you” would make the audience think the speaker is addressing them or talking to themselves. Moth narratives are limited to simple, conversational language. They mainly follow two narrative structures, either a linear telling or beginning with rising action and heading straight to conflict and resolution.

At times essay writers do not know where they are heading. They linger at pit stops, sometimes stray off course, and may end up somewhere unexpected. An early draft might spend too much time on an excursion, describing a picture in painstaking details that may or may not be essential to the narrative. The storyteller needs to have the plot down, while the essayist can take a series of Polaroids and watch them develop.

The main difference between writing an essay and writing for the stage is the balance of showing and telling. The next time I shared in workshop, I leaned more on telling to pick up the pace.

When I was a little girl, I was sent to a summer camp where I was completely isolated from the outside world. I couldn’t wait to go home.

I focused on the action in my scenes, cutting down on the imagery. I noticed the wide-eyed audience and built on the suspense, straying off the page. I found myself relying more on the energy in the room than the written words. Instead of reading my story, I performed it. The round of applause and positive feedback was strikingly different from the earlier silence.

Reading an essay aloud does not make it a Moth story, and a Moth story is not an essay just because it is written down. The novelist Paul Auster once suggested that thousands of people can read the same book, but each interaction is individual, creating a sense of intimacy between the reader and the writer. Conversely, a Moth story is intended for a group experience shared among the audience members along with the speaker.

Learning to adapt my writing to performance allowed me to gain a new appreciation for storytelling. I realized storytelling can be the basis for an essay, but story and essay are not interchangeable. A story can be engaging in person but fall flat on the page. The Moth speaker says let me tell you where I’ve been, the essayist flips through a stack of photographs and shows you. 
__

Olga Katsovskiy is a writer, editor, and educator living in Boston. She works in healthcare and is a writing instructor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She serves as Creative Nonfiction Editor at Minerva Rising Press, Managing Editor & Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at JMWW, and nonfiction reader at Reckon Review. Her essays appear in Atticus Review: The Attic, Barzakh Magazine, Gone Lawn Journal, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Learn more at The Weight of a Letter

Should All Writing Prompts Come With a Trigger Warning?

By Jennifer Leigh Selig

When I lead memoir writing retreats, I like to kickstart the mornings with writing prompts. One of the tricks of my trade is a manilla envelope stuffed with images I’ve printed out of vintage and iconic toys and games from across the decades. It’s a ritual I cherish—spreading these images out on the long conference room tables, imagining my students’ delight as they light upon a special toy or game that brings back fond memories, and then watching them begin to furiously write.

This last retreat was different. I found myself tearing up as I laid out the pictures of the Kewpie doll and the troll. I found those tears falling as I laid out the pictures of Clue and Yahtzee. So many of the toys and games took me back to my beloved grandmother’s house. This was the first retreat I led since her death at 102 years old. I was blessed with 60 years of my life with her. And now no more.

I wiped my tears away before anyone entered the room. Sitting alone in the circle, I wondered if there was any writing prompt I could give that wouldn’t trigger someone. Even asking: “Write a happy memory about your mother” is fraught with danger. What if someone has no happy memories of their mother? What if someone’s mother has just been diagnosed with a terminal disease? What if someone has no mother?

Then I remembered a writing prompt a teacher gave me that triggered a torrent of furious writing. I shared that piece with my students, to acknowledge that any prompt, no matter how seemingly innocuous, can stir something deep within.

For fifteen minutes, write about your father’s eating habits. Remember the journalistic imperative to include what, how, where, when, and why, all aiming to flesh out a deeper sense of who your father is. Follow the writer’s adage to write what you know.

I don’t know a thing about what my father eats. I don’t know if he peppers everything he eats with tons of salt or if sugar is his road to ruin. I don’t know if he frequents farmers’ markets for the freshest produce or if he stockpiles boxes of frozen food in his grocery store cart. I don’t know if he goes to the grocery store or if that’s the province of his wife. (I don’t know if my father even has a wife.)

I don’t know a thing about how my father eats. I don’t know if he’s a gentleman who savors each bite or a feral animal who wolfs down his plate. I don’t know if he smacks his food with relish, if he rests his elbows on the table, if he licks his fingers or knows to use a napkin. I don’t know whether he dives straight into a meal, or if he stops to thank God first. (I don’t know if my father even believes in God.)

I don’t know a thing about where my father eats. I don’t know if he eats standing up in the kitchen or if he takes a plate to the sofa where he can watch sports on TV. I don’t know if his taste skews toward fine dining establishments or all-you-can-eat buffets or if he prefers eating at home. (I don’t know where my father’s home even is.)

I don’t know a thing about when my father eats. I don’t know if he’s a creature of habit or if he eats when he’s hungry, regardless of the hour. I don’t know if he eats after smoking or smokes after eating, or if a happy-hour cocktail always precedes dinner. I don’t know if his children nag him for skipping a meal, or scold him for snacking all day. (I don’t know if my father even has other children.)

I don’t know a thing about why my father eats. I don’t know if he’s trying to gain or lose weight, to lower his cholesterol, to control his diabetes, or to stave off cancer. I don’t know if he eats when he’s stressed or he eats when he’s bored. I don’t know if he eats for pure pleasure or whether he eats to stay alive. (I don’t know if my father is even alive.)

If my father is no longer alive, I don’t know where he died, when he died, or why he died. I don’t know how he died, or what he was doing when he died. I don’t know whether he is interred in a tomb where coffin flies feast on his corpse or if he was buried at sea where fish nibble on his flesh or if they bled him out before they burned him to ashes and scattered him.

I cannot flesh out my father, Teacher. I cannot write what I know, because I do not know the flesh and the blood of my father.

___

As a writer, I was seething. Not seething at my teacher, though the prompt did seem presumptuous. But in the end, I’m glad I wrote to it. It was good to see how bad I still feel that half of who I came from is a ghost. This is the raw power of writing prompts crafted by others—when we open our memory bank, we have no idea if the coins will fall out heads or tails, or which is best for us.

So I tell my students—I’m going to give you writing prompts this week. Even if I don’t mean it to, any prompt may trigger distressful or traumatic memories. If you go there, it may hurt. If you go there, it may help.

It’s a coin toss, really.

Consider this your warning.

__________

Jennifer Leigh Selig is an LBGTQ+ teacher, book publisher, and author whose writing career spans nearly four decades. Her most recent book is Deep Memoir: An Archetypal Approach to Deepen Your Story and Broaden Its Appeal, a companion to her co-written Nautilus Gold award-winning book, Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit. Learn more about Jennifer and her writing classes here and her publishing companies here.

But My Sister Remembers It Differently: On Working with Contested Memories

By Dinty W. Moore

It happens time and again—a writer I am working with turns to me and says, “I want to use this memory, but I just shared it with my sister, and she has an entirely different version of events.”

My answer: “Well of course she does!”

Disparities in distant memory—and often even recent memory—are simply inevitable. It is how our minds work. What is important as writers is that we don’t let these apparent contradictions tumble us into uncertainty mode, stall our projects for weeks, or form into permanent roadblocks.

“But how can I write this when my older sister, the one my sisters call ‘the boss,’ says I’m full of baloney?”

“Your older sister says you are full of baloney?” I answer again. “Of course. That’s what older sisters do.”

Alternate versions of past events are common, because it is human nature, especially where childhood memories are concerned, to move ourselves—over time—to the center of a story. We are hardwired to see the world through our own points of view, and increasingly so with the passage of time. Memory is a river, not a block of cement.

Let’s say at four-years-old you tumble off the family porch and lurch comically into the shrubbery. You remember well, and can still hear your older siblings’ teasing taunts.

But your little sister now says, “No that was me. I had a bump on my head for weeks.”

You feel sure. But she is convinced. What does a writer do with that?

Well, first do this:

• Sit with it a while. Excavate that memory and see what you find. Remembering well can take some time.
• If your version still seems right, embrace the possibility that your sister is somehow conflating events. She heard the story so many times that she took it on as her own. It happens.
• But if you end up honestly unsure who rocketed into the shrubbery, just share that with the reader. Talk about it. Acknowledge the competing stories.

These moments where one of your siblings, or cousins, or your mother, remembers differently is not an occasion to hide, panic, or lose faith in the story you want to tell. These contested memories can be among the most interesting and significant parts of a memoir or essay.

For instance, I helped a writer (I’ll call him Andy) with an essay focused on his childhood, one where he felt largely on his own. Both parents struggled with booze, the marriage itself was in shambles, and in his memory he wandered around the family’s dimly-lit house taking care of himself for the most part, not wanting to bother his parents, so stressed that they had little or no time for Andy’s normal childhood concerns.

But his older sister is fond of telling him—they are both now full grown adults—that he was loved and doted upon and, in fact, a “golden child.”

“Don’t you remember how much attention I gave you? Don’t you remember all the times we played with your Lincoln Logs on the living room floor? You were such a happy little boy!”

Well he doesn’t remember, sadly enough, what his sister claims. He can imagine it to be true, once or twice, but childhood is a long haul.

What matters here, and I’ve urged Andy to explore this directly in his memoir, are the possible motivations behind why his sister so eagerly remembers her version of his life. Why does she insist?

All families have curated versions of the past. Sometimes these are just fun memories, but often they serve as a way to make sense of the imperfections of life, to smooth over uncomfortably rough edges so we can neatly fit an experience into a box. To reconcile the pain and trauma of her own difficult childhood perhaps, the older sister has to believe that her brother was isolated from what she experienced. It would break her heart to think the younger brother she so loves suffered the same as she did.

And to be fair, maybe Andy’s version of childhood contains his own instances of smoothing over the rough edges, fitting the experience into a box that he can live with, call his own.

I don’t see a problem in these contradictory versions. I see opportunity. Andy went on to share these moments with the reader. He tried to understand his sister better. He explored likely reasons why he and his sister cling to their own “accurate” memories. And his memoir is better for it.

These are fault lines, where the tectonic plates of childhood and family rub up against one another. These are the very moments and memories you should be writing about.

We all need more phrases like these in our memoirs:

• I can’t be certain after all this time, but my memory replays this scene …

• My sister tells me this didn’t happen in winter, that in fact the flowers were blooming, but I remember snow …

• All my siblings wrestle with differing accounts of my father’s violence, and we’ll never fully line up. But one thing we all know is that ….

Memory is a story in itself. Tell that story, as honestly as you can—readers will appreciate your frankness and recognize their own struggles with memory in the way you share your own.
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Are you working with conflicted memories, contested memories, or moments you want to write about that seem entirely blocked out by trauma or time. Dinty will be offering a Zoom Craft Talk next week on how we writers can stop our constant worrying about the imperfection of memory and uncover new narrative opportunities. Details here: https://craft-talks.com/event/navigating-memories/

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Dinty W. Moore is author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell With It, and the writing guides Crafting the Personal Essay and The Mindful Writer, among other books. He has published essays and stories in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Complete Sentence, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction, and has taught nonfiction writing in workshops across the United States as well as in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy.

Walking on Air

By Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

When my partner Emily teaches traditional circle dance to a group of newbies, they go through a predictable progression.

First, they stride easily into the class, unaware of their grace.

Next, Emily teaches a few steps. She’s patient, and the movements themselves are simple and repetitive. But students nonetheless trip over their feet, giggle to draw attention away from their awkwardness, scowl or apologize and sometimes give up. The circle jolts and falters.

Then, if the dancers continue practicing over weeks and months, their effort and self-consciousness fall away. They turn their attention away from individual steps to a shared, collective movement.

I know this learning progression from the inside because I, too, have been Emily’s student.  Despite having two left feet, over time I’ve lost myself in the turning circle; I’ve closed my eyes and become the dance.

The pattern is uncannily similar to learning to write.

Before I teach students how to transition between scenes and reflection in memoir, they zoom easily between the two—we humans do this naturally when we speak, and the skill usually transfers to the page. But when I call attention to the distinction between “showing” and the reflective voice, when I point out the transitions and their effect on the reader, brows furrow, self-consciousness makes their attempts clumsy, and the class ends with everyone writing worse than when they arrived.

Similarly, when I note the power of sensory details, suddenly my students become overly conscious about not using their senses and assume they are failures, or they cram their scenes with cloying incense, tingling skin, and so much flashing neon they really do fail.

Every time this happens, I momentarily feel like a terrible teacher. It’s a wonder anyone comes back. But inevitably, with practice, my students’ hyper-attentive flourish falls away. Nuanced reflection creeps into scenes. Details begin speaking for themselves. Their stories shine.

Learning craft is a matter of becoming aware of our natural gifts so we can make intentional choices. Everyone intuits what makes a story good and most of us come by storytelling skills organically, effortlessly. But at first our stories control us. As we learn to write and as we take pieces through revision, making deliberate decisions about language and perspective and structure and theme, we gain agency. Skill allows us to return to our natural state, only smarter and with more potency behind the pen. Stick with it and awareness becomes a writer’s greatest asset.

Gradually I’ve come to recognize the disintegration of our natural giftedness followed by its incremental recovery as the learning curve for every art form, and (I suspect) for living life well: first we’re unconscious, then we’re self-conscious, and then we’re aware of being self-conscious, which is truly agonizing. Only then can we come into consciousness and make conscious choices. We writers need to recognize when and how and why to use a technique before we can choose to use it. Intention, not happenstance, makes art. And intention makes life itself artful.

At some point, though, even intention sinks into muscle memory and the body takes over. Consciousness makes way for magic. Poet Seamus Heaney describes this writerly phenomenon as “walking on air.”

“We must teach ourselves to walk on air against our better judgment,” he says.

Lately in my own practice I’ve experienced this as a form of forgetting. The literary tools hanging from my belt-loops, my desire to communicate, my own inadequacies, my audience—I forget all these for the sake of the story. I walk on air. When this happens, writing becomes an act of faith. I close my eyes, trusting the broader movements of the dance to carry me and my readers forward. Then the writing process itself becomes as artful as any product, and far more gratifying.

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Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality & Spirit, now in its second edition; the novel, Hannah, Delivered, and three books on writing: Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice; and The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done, forthcoming this fall. She is a founding member of The Eye of the Heart Center, where you can nurture the transformational gifts in your writing with a free microcourse and ongoing online writing community. Connect with Elizabeth at her website and at Spiritual Memoir.

How A Student’s Hostility Helped Me Become A Better Writing Workshop Facilitator

By Laura Gaddis

When Greg came into the writing workshop that I run at my local community arts center, I was excited to have a new face. For the past two years, I had filled a niche in Oxford, Ohio where the writers exist but are hiding like ants deep down in their mounds. To coax them out of their holes, I worked hard to recruit students. Some sessions I have five or six students. I’ve also had two or three (where most weeks only one shows up). But this particular spring session was filled with several repeat, satisfied writers. And Greg.

I always try to make the writing classroom accessible to everyone. I begin each new session with round-robin style introductions–tell me what you like to read? And write? What projects are you currently working on? This particular session started as usual. Greg shared that he wrote short pieces and wanted to find the motivation to finish a collection. Great! He wrote fiction and nonfiction pieces. Wonderful! So far, so good with Greg.

Week two we began workshopping people’s writing. When a student brought in a chapter from a fantasy book she was working on, Greg sat and listened to others’ praise, thoughts, and questions. He even contributed a question.

Week three we heard from another student who was working on a historical novel set during the Civil War. Greg wondered if some of her details about how heavy a wagon wheel would be, and could that silversmith really carry it back to the wagon while riding a horse? This led to a wonderful discussion of when to get details correct, when to worry about how many details to include, and when taking liberties might be okay.

Week four was Greg’s turn. A few days ahead of time, he emailed us a nonfiction essay. He preempted it with a note that this piece had been submitted to a humor contest and it hadn’t won. I took this to mean he wanted guidance of how to make it work better for publication—contest or otherwise. But, as I always do, the day of class I clarified with Greg what his end-goal was for the piece. He began talking about McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and I knew that perhaps what we had was a good opportunity to discuss humor writing as a genre.

When he stated one of the contest judges rated my piece a 10/10 and a second one a 5/10. I don’t think they were right about that 5… I started to suspect we were in for a bit of an uphill battle. How do we discuss and workshop a piece when someone seems set on its brilliance?

The conversation progressed. What was working well? (The dog in the piece was great!) Greg agreed that his dog was awesome. But, when others asked to see more about the dog, his response was I write about him a lot in other pieces, so I don’t need that here. And why does this nonfiction essay not quite work as a humor piece? He didn’t understand the question. It’s hilarious, he said. When a writer of color suggested that the actions Greg took by removing his clothes in public for his nightly dog walking is something that others in society may not find as funny—and, in fact, others may fear getting arrested for lesser crimes—Greg shrugged his shoulders. When a woman spoke up saying that for her, personally, it was a bit uncomfortable trying to find how the nudity was funny, Greg grumbled something under his breath. Even when a male student about Greg’s age suggested that, while it may not be a piece for everyone, there is likely still an audience out there for it, Greg disagreed. Everyone should find it funny. I do.

What ensued only worsened until Greg’s face reddened and he finally muttered I shouldn’t have shared this piece.

When I facilitate a conversation like this, I am insistent that it remains thoughtful and respectful. Both of these (in my opinion) were achieved. In fact, by the end of the discussion, the group had collaboratively come up with ways to turn this piece into something humorous that might achieve what Greg wanted. When I later emailed him saying how much I loved the conversation, he responded with I did not love it and a few choice expletives.

Two days later, Greg dropped my class.

What does a creative writing instructor do with this? How do we balance the desire to help everyone get to the writing they want while also protecting the other students who are reading pieces ahead of time, writing out thoughtful feedback, and engaging in a vibrant conversation?

What I realize from this experience with Greg is that I have much to learn from my students that goes beyond how to give good feedback. Or how to talk intelligently about genres that veer away from my own preferred memoir (I’m looking at you, fantasy). I learned that I can be assertive when students are disrespecting others. I learned that I can steer a conversation away from the cringy, like the content of Greg’s piece, to craft topics that benefit all. I learned that I can still help those willing to be open-minded use this space and time to learn about writing even if one person is unwilling.

Will this experience make me a little more intimidated the next time a new face shows up at my door? I don’t think so. Greg showed me that I have more confidence in my abilities as a workshop leader and creative writing teacher than I even believed I had (and this is one thing in life that I pride myself in already).

And, I like to think Greg took something away, too. Perhaps he’ll rethink that humor piece. Maybe we’ll see more of his dog. And who knows–maybe I’ll see more of Greg again, too. And just like before, I’ll welcome him to the table.
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Laura Gaddis holds an MFA from Miami University (in Ohio). Her memoir Mosaic is forthcoming March 2025 with Unsolicited Press. Her essay published in Ligeia Magazine was nominated for a Pushcart Award. She has published other literary nonfiction and poetry in Thin Air Magazine, The Avalon Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, Pif Magazine, Vita Brevis Press, Kitchen Sink Magazine, Evening Street Review, 805 Lit + Art, Stonecoast Review, The Weekly Humorist, Scary Mommy, Tiny Buddha, and The Mighty. Laura teaches writing at Miami University and runs a community-based writing course. She resides in Oxford, Ohio with her husband, daughter, and pug Rocky.

A Village Approach To Removing Roadblocks

By Ann Kathryn Kelly

I thought I had written a gripping memoir. (Don’t we all?)

My story is about the mysterious and ongoing neurological issues I’d experienced from childhood into adulthood. A limp. Crossed eye. Severe headaches. Smaller and weaker muscles on my left side. An ice-cold foot.

After decades without answers, punctuated by doctors’ theories and workarounds, all I could do was adapt—until my symptoms worsened. Nonstop hiccupping for weeks. Dry-heaving every morning. Tingling in my left foot, ankle, and calf.

When I finally found out what had been behind my long history of pain, I faced a frightening choice that would either save my life or put me in a nursing home at age 40.

An irresistible story, right?

I started writing my memoir eight years ago, finished what I thought was a solid draft two years ago, and began querying a year and a half ago. But I got zero interest—though, admittedly, I’d queried only 50 agents.

I set my sights on the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, held in Kansas City in February of this year, hoping it would reignite my passion to begin querying again. Shifting my focus to small and university presses, I reasoned, might be my answer. Several were scheduled to give panel presentations and others had booths in the Book Fair exhibition center.

Invite Insights From Others

I was finishing breakfast on the first day of the conference when another attendee took a seat across from me. We discovered we both wrote memoir. I shared my dismal agent querying stats and said I was at AWP to learn more about opportunities with smaller presses. Sofia agreed that broadening my targets was worthwhile. 

Sofia’s memoir had been published through a Big Five a few years earlier. I asked how she had piqued the interest of her agent and such a sought-after publisher. What she told me made me shake my head. Of course! Why hadn’t I realized this up to now?

Sofia had researched and braided in themes with universal relevance—immigration, discrimination, social justice. She had turned her personal story into something bigger.

We’ve all heard how we need to strive for universality in our writing. But, how many of us take the time to research—in depth—the impacts of a universal theme, and how it can be specifically braided throughout our memoirs? Research is often woven into personal essays, but in memoir? Not so much.

Sofia’s approach landed her not just an agent and publisher, but more readers able to see themselves within the context of her story. Clearly, my memoir was lacking that “something bigger.” Trouble was, I’d been too close to see it.

I felt renewed excitement stirring. Sofia, a stranger minutes earlier, was helping me see that my story contained mostly personal information and not enough universal significance. But how, I pondered, could I thread a universal theme into my draft in a natural way that would complement my arc?

Sofia mentioned a friend whose memoir was also published with a Big Five a year ago. Her friend’s story, like mine, examines a personal health crisis made more devastating because doctors could not name what was causing years of pain and exhaustion.

She promised to introduce us. With that, it was time to head off to our respective sessions.

Back home again, I followed up with Sofia’s friend and learned that she had widened the lens on her personal “mystery illness” story to include research on environmental impacts on sickness, along with gender bias.

Jennifer Lunden’s memoir, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, now sits on my nightstand. I’m reading it for pleasure and to study how she handled braiding her personal story with universal relevance.

It took more pondering before I understood the larger frame I had to offer. I could braid my personal story with the tug of war between independence and dependence, and the vulnerability it introduces. In sharing the toll my illness took on my family and me, I could also bring in the national impact of caregiving. All of us fear losing our independence, yet it’s something many will encounter through illness or accident. And at some point, many of us will also be caretakers.

I was sitting on two powerfully universal themes with the capacity to entice more readers—and possibly an agent.  

Be Intentional About Networking

Though I went to AWP to attend panel sessions, it was the spontaneous conversations with other writers that proved the most valuable.

We writers can sometimes find networking difficult, but what worked for me was being intentional about what I wanted to learn (querying)—and having the curiosity and flexibility to pivot when introduced to something not on my radar.  

Next time, I’ll go further. I’ll prepare a “script” of issues I’m working through, perhaps my top three. I’ll rehearse, and when I find common ground with a fellow memoirist, whether walking down the hall or standing in line for coffee, I’ll ask about their roadblocks. That will open the door to discussing my own, where I may find yet more aha! moments.

Networking is an opportunity to turn strangers into allies on this shared writing path we travel. My experience at AWP added two people to my village, who helped me see that my memoir has a larger story to tell. After revising based on insights I uncovered through networking, I may just find a portal that leads to agent interest.

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Ann Kathryn Kelly writes from New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine and a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals. Learn more at her website.