Summary - Writing Family: The Craft of Memoir

Family is often where our most enduring stories begin, and where writing those stories can feel most complicated. In this two-day intensive, participants will learn the craft of memoir writing through the lens of family, exploring how to transform lived experience into vivid, emotionally resonant work. Through selected readings, in-class writing exercises, discussions, and guided workshops, participants will generate new work while learning techniques for creating memorable scenes, writing complex characters drawn from real people, balancing specificity with reflection, and finding emotional truth on the page.

Taught by an uncle and his niece, two authors who have written about many of the same family experiences from different perspectives, this course offers a rare opportunity to examine the ethics of memoir as both the writer and the family member being written about. Together, we'll consider questions at the heart of the memoir genre: How do we write honestly and ethically about real people? What is the nature of truth in memoir and what is our responsibility to uphold it? How do we handle multiple perspectives, multiple truths? How do we leave room for the inevitable complexity, uncertainty, and contradiction of family in our work? Participants will leave with an early draft of one or more personal essays, a deeper understanding of memoir as a literary form, and practical tools for continuing to write about family after the course ends.

Materials:

Participants should bring a laptop and/or a notebook & pen

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

Develop memoir techniques for transforming family experiences into compelling scenes, characters, and personal essays.
Write with greater specificity, emotional honesty, and narrative clarity through guided prompts and close readings.
Navigate the ethical and creative challenges of writing about family, considering questions of memory, perspective, and uncertain truths.
Give and receive thoughtful workshop feedback while refining new work generated during the course.
Leave with the beginnings of one or more memoir essays and a practical toolkit for continuing a family writing practice.

Jessie Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart Prize winning writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, her Substack, “Claiming Writerhood,” and elsewhere. She has been selected as the winner of The Kenyon Review’s Short Nonfiction Contest, the Indiana Review’s Half K Prize, and the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her debut memoir-in-essays, “This Middle Living,” is a finalist for the Sarabande Prize in the Essay and the Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. She is the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship at The Kenyon Review and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale Residency. Jessie studied Psychology and Chemistry at Duke University. She is currently a Director of Strategy at The New York Times and the Writer in Public Schools Fellow at New York University’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Steven Petrow is an award-winning journalist and book author who is best known for his personal essays on aging, health, and civility in The Washington Post and New York Times. Steven's TED Talk, “3 Ways to Practice Civility” has been viewed nearly two million times and translated into 16 languages. Steven’s latest book, “The Joy You Make,” was published by The Open Field, Maria Shriver’s personally curated imprint at Penguin Random House. His previous book, “Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old,” was published in 2021 and named one of the New York Times’ “favorite” books of the year. He’s currently working on a memoir (tentatively) titled, “The Troublemaker: A Story of Sibling Love and Loss.”He’s a past president of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists and a current board member at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Duke Student Publishing Company. He’s received support from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ucross. Steven is also the 2024 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate and lives in Hillsborough, N.C.

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Writing Family: The Craft of Memoir

Center for Documentary Studies