The Territory of Memoir with Wendy Salinger (via Zoom)

What is my story and what is my slant?  A four-week exploration of the territory of memoir, meeting weekly on Sundays from 12:30-2:30 PM ET via Zoom, beginning June 8.  An opening discussion of the major questions to be asked in determining the dramatic heart of your story.  In-class writing periods based on prompts focusing on different stylistic elements—scene, dialogue, description, etc.— followed by reading aloud and class discussion.  With additional discussion of samples given from classic and contemporary memoirs.

Wendy Salinger has been published in The New Republic, The Jewish Daily Forward, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other magazines. Her memoir Listen (Bloomsbury, 2006), was nominated for The Krause Essay Prize. Her book of poetry Folly River (Dutton, 1980), was the winner of the first Open Competition of The National Poetry Series. She has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at Yaddo, Centrum Arts Centre, and The MacDowell Colony, where she was awarded the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. She founded and directed The Unterberg Poetry Center’s Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literature Project (formerly The Schools Project), which for thirty-plus years brought NYC public high school students to meet with renowned writers at The 92nd Street Y, She has also completed a memoir in poetry and prose, A Piece of Ground: A Daughter’s Journey, and a poetry chapbook, My Life Displaced. Currently she is finishing another memoir, titled Saving Mother.