In this week-long memoir workshop, our focus will be your personal stories: how to bring them alive on the page and make them as compelling as they can be. Through writing exercises and rigorous (but friendly!) feedback, we'll talk about issues like perspective, character-building and scene-setting, as well as what to do when the people you are writing about happen to be the people you live with. While our focus is on the creation of new work, you're welcome to bring a piece in progress if your goal is to explore new approaches to it. This class is appropriate both for those who have been writing autobiographical pieces for a while, and those who need a boost to get them started.

The Memoir workshop will be taught by Alison Lobron. Since 2005, Alison has been a regular contributor for The Boston Globe Magazine, where she writes personal essays, as well as features about education, urban life, and relationships. She has also been a columnist and reporter at CommonWealth magazine, where she won several awards for her political writing. Until moving to the Berkshires in 2011, Alison taught Memoir and the Personal Essay at the Grub Street writing school in Boston. A graduate of Brown University and the Bread Loaf School of English, she is also this summer’s workshop director.

The Memoir class is now filled. If you'd like to add your name to the waitlist, please email Alison at alobron@simons-rock.edu.