In Retrospect: The Art of the Memoir

How does a life get translated onto the page? Delve into the construction of the personal narrative with a discussion group and writing workshop dedicated to the memoir. Each month, meetings will focus on a different example of memoir, exploring the motivations and techniques behind some of the genre’s most notable works. For those aspiring to tell their own story, sessions will also offer the opportunity to participate in writing exercises and to workshop original material in a constructive, collaborative setting.

Join us the 1st Friday of each month for writing exercises and workshopping.

Join us the 3rd Friday of each month for discussion of memoir examples and workshopping.

This month we will be reading and discussing H is for hawk by Helen Macdonald

An award-winning best-seller from the UK recounts how the author, an experienced falconer grieving the sudden death of her father, endeavored to train for the first time a dangerous goshawk predator as part of her personal recovery. As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel ... on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals