The Truer Telling: Revision in Memoir | Class

The Truer Telling: Revision in Memoir.

Wednesday, January 4, 3:30-5:30, Meditation room, Pine Manor College. Class open to auditors. Sign up on Solstice website. $40.00

Class description: Revision in memoir seems like the journey to a truth we didn’t know we knew. To complicate the process, many memoirists (and other prose writers as well) make this journey by first writing incidents, anecdotes or uncontextualized history—those predicted but ultimately contradicted “self-truths.” We write the andthenandthenandthen version and grab at immediate meaning, only to discover it inadequate as we revise. And to complicate this even further, there’s the question of how much, in the process of crafting a truer truth, we can deliberately alter before we become unethical. We’ll talk about what we write in our first “tellings,” then how, through revision, we discover the “truer telling.” We’ll look at strategies of deep revision as a way to re-enter and rebuild the discovered “story” (the true-er lie?).