Awakening Memory: How to Use Memoir Writing to Explore Where You Have Been, Who You Are, and Where You Are Going

Awakening Memory is a practical, encouraging guide to exploring your life experiences and expressing these in your own voice through memoir writing. Based on workshops for non-professional writers led by the author, this book will inspire you to start writing, help develop your writing skills, explain the roles of storytelling and personal essays in a memoir, guide you step-by-step from writing first drafts to producing your final, satisfying memoir, and even help you start your own memoir writing workshop.

What really sets Awakening Memory apart, however, is the author's view that memoir writing, fully realized, is far more than the retelling of one's familiar life stories. It is a unique opportunity to awaken your memory, explore your life experiences, and learn anew about where you have come from and who you are. What is genuinely significant among your experiences, and what do you mean by 'significant'? What life stories do you hear when you listen to the voices of your single-bodied, sensate life—your creaturely life—with its pleasures, loves, aggravations, furies, vulnerability, wishes? Do your viewpoints and stories change as you explore the tensions between your life in society and your inner life? Awakening Memory is an invitation to approach your life with renewed curiosity—to feel, question, listen, investigate, reflect, wonder—and to use the gift of writing to express the truths of your creaturely experience in your own voice.