Have you ever thought about writing a memoir? The PEI Writers’ Guild is sponsoring a workshop on this very topic to help you get started. A memoir can focus on many different things: your career, your amazing life experiences, your family history, or crazy adventures in your misspent youth.
This all-day workshop will be led by three Island authors who have each written their own very different memoirs.
Dianne Morrow’s memoir, Fixing Up the Farmhouse: Forty Years of Living, Loving and Lamenting, describes, through essays, journal entries, and poetry, the triumphs and the challenges of reclaiming and refurbishing a century farmhouse, while nurturing children and animals, both domestic and wild.
As well, she has written a poetry memoir, What Really Happened Is This, about her parents and their influence on her life, which won the PEI Book Award in 2012.
Roger Gordon is the author of Starting to Frame which recounts his experiences growing up in Sheffield, England in a somewhat dysfunctional family in the early 1960s, choosing to highlight mental health challenges of the time.
Bruce McCallum’s book, Memories of the Chukuni Lumber Company, includes a history of the company, a look at village life out in the sticks of northwest Ontario, and a collection of tales concerning the mischievous children in town.
The three authors will detail what motivated them to start their memoir projects, how they researched them and set about organizing the information they gathered, as well as lessons learned along the way.
Workshop participants will also be encouraged to discuss their own project ideas and to engage in writing exercises that could be used as a starting point for their own memoirs.
The memoir workshop will take place at the Haviland Club on Saturday, November 18, 2017, starting at 9:30 and finishing at 3:30.
The cost of the all day workshop is $30 to members of the PEI Writers’ Guild and $40 to non-members. Beverages and snacks will be provided, but people must provide their own lunch.