Aims
This course aims to address the question: what makes an interesting life and how can we tell it? We will look at how the writer of non-fiction can make fact as compelling as fiction. We explore the use of research, memory and imagination that will enable us as writers to tantalise, astonish and satisfy our reader.
Content
Writing about lives has a long and distinguished past. Plutarch was fascinated by the parallel lives of great men; Doctor Johnson maintained it was possible to write the life of a broomstick. Oscar Wilde described biographers as the “body snatchers” of literature, while Virginia Woolf left a vast legacy to life writing through her autobiographical novels, letters and diaries. Sigmund Freud gave biographers the freedom to delve into the psyche of their subject.
A century later, life writing has never been more lively or diverse. And there is a growing demand for unexpected and surprising examples of life writing from a whole raft of new writers with highly original stories to tell. There are books that cross genres or borrow techniques from fiction: Edmund de Waal’s epic family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which spans centuries and continents, and Hua Hsu’s Stay True, a coming-of-age story that addresses the problematic nature of friendship and memory, have both sold thousands of copies around the world. Memoir writing is rushing to embrace our multicultural society with multi-ethnic roots, as witnessed by
Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale, a cradle to grave life story of the author’s Ethiopian grandmother and Safiya Sinclair’s How to say Babylon: a Jamaican memoir.
The secrets of a life might be waiting to be discovered in a musty attic, or in a temperature-controlled annex of an archive. Or, if you are writing a memoir, perhaps you are just looking for the courage and inspiration to tell your story in a way that will grip your reader – whether you want that reader to be your grandchild, or someone browsing in a bookshop. Life writing is a wonderful mixture of research, looking for the right structure on which to hang that research and then, finally, beginning to find the voice to tell that story. This course offers the chance to do all three – and to learn from the experience of other students who are facing the same challenges, but, perhaps, from a different perspective or from within a different historical period. This course will send you home with ideas, inspiration and the tools to start building a life story.
Presentation of the course
The course will be taught through a mixture of presentations, practical creative writing exercises, text analysis and afternoon workshopping of set writing tasks. Great emphasis is placed on discussion to encourage critical thinking.
Course sessions
1. Day 1: A creative approach to life writing Not all stories start at the beginning. Today we examine practical examples from published authors to show the range of possibilities open to life writers in “re-creating” the past.
2. Day 2: The joys of research It can be teasing and frustrating, but research can also be exhilarating and just pure fun. Today we look at the types of historical records available and what they can tell us.
3. Day 3: A sense of place More than backdrops, greater than scene-setters, the locations for our stories infuse them with meaning. And, as we’ll discover today, they can also add depth, colour and understanding.
4. Day 4: Bringing objects to life What can we read into objects left behind by ancestors, eminent people, or things that were precious in our own childhood? Artefacts can be full of humanity; they may be items that have been touched and worn, or worked by skilled hands. Today we see how we can interpret and draw on their emotional power to tell and illustrate our stories.
5. Day 5: Building blocks of a story Memory is key to writing about a life, but how reliable is it? What part should ethics play when you’re delving into the past? And how might you actually tell your story? We conclude the week with thoughts about building your structure.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• an understanding of some of the different ways of researching a life
• an appreciation of the part imagination may play in life writing
• an awareness of the different ways of structuring the story of someone’s life
Required reading
Edemariam, Aida, The Wife’s Tale (4th Estate 2018)
A remarkable evocation of Ethiopia through the 20th century, as the author lets us see through the eyes of her grandmother.
Verzemnieks, Inara, Among the Living and the Dead (Pushkin Press 2018)
An exploration of identity, truth and memory as the US-born author tries to uncover the hinterland of her grandparents’ lives in Latvia.
