Publish Your Memoir: East Haven High School May 1

The Writing Continues...

Mr. Doug Gardner, English Literature teacher at the East Haven High School, teaches workshop participants two different online publishing tools with three different publishing options. The first tool, www.blurb.com, allows its users to create their own book and publish it using software templates downloaded directly from the site. Blurb is an excellent publishing source for combining a lot of photos with text. Blurb offers two options for book creation. One is an online software called Bookify and the other is a downloadable software called BookSmart. By clicking on "Apps" on the Blurb website, you can choose Blurb BookSmart or Bookify Online. Bookify is designed for photo books but it can be used for text focused books as well.

The second online publishing tool and a third book creation option is called CreateSpace: www.createspace.com. CreateSpace is owned by amazon.com and is a great tool for text focused books and memoirs. Once you have created an account in CreateSpace, the site assumes that you have already written and titled your memoir. It is designed so that you can upload your written and formatted text and images in one step. CreateSpace is also very low cost. The cost to create a book using this tool is only between $3.00 and $10.00!

Mr. Gardner went over all of these tools during session three of the workshop. There were 13 High School student volunteers who worked directly with the workshop participants to set up accounts with either Blurb.com or CreateSpace, and help download the necessary templates and software for the option chosen by the workshop member. Several students scanned photographs and saved them onto a USB flash drive for the participants so that these photos could later be inserted into the final books.

The student volunteers are part of the honors program and were credited with Community Service hours for participating in the workshop. This inter-generational partnership between the students and workshop participants provided enrichment and learning for both.

Mr. Gardner's presentation for Writing Your Life session three can be found here.

Writing Your Life Workshops April 3 and April 10, 2012

Welcome to Hagaman Library's Writing Your Life Workshop Series Blog! This blog chronicles the exciting stories told and written by participating members of our memoir writing workshop. The library received a Public Humanities Challenge Grant from the Connecticut Humanities Council to provide a Memoir Writing Workshop to members of the East Haven Community and residents of  East Haven's Village at Mariner's Point Senior Living Community. To accomplish our goals for the grant project, the library partnered with the East Haven High School and the Village at Mariner's Point Senior Living Community.

The Connecticut Humanities Council awards Public Humanities Challenge Grants to help partnering agencies develop and pilot programming ideas that reach new audiences, sustain cultural literacy, strengthen community ties, and explore common threads among the state’s diverse peoples. This year, the Council awarded a total of $16,945.00 to nine organizations that impact a statewide audience.

Writing Your Life Workshop Sessions One and Two:

Freelance writer and teacher Marcelle Soviero teaches resident participants at the Village at Mariner's Point and participating members of the East Haven Community how to begin writing a memoir. She begins session one by having each member of the workshop talk about their background and some topics from their lives that they may wish to write about.

Marcelle asks participants to write down several life changing events as well as images, scenes and characters from the events. She then asks attendees to pick one of these life changing events and to define at least five scenes from that time in their lives. She discusses how to craft main characters and dialogue from the scene. Once these writing exercises are completed, Marcelle asks participants to talk about what they wrote and offers suggestions on how to structure their topics. Participants read from their memoirs at the second workshop session and Marcelle gives them feedback on how to expand and continue their work.

Here are some of their stories: 

Harriet spent her young life in New York and she feels she has lived the lives of three different people in the same body. She writes about her life as a teenage girl dreaming of going to college, but the opportunity to do this came later as a young adult when she went to college at night, majoring in accounting.

Barbara describes a "black and white photo, a 3 X 5 of a little girl " with her back facing the camera. The little girl has a "mop of curls" and a sailor dress on. Barbara realizes that this little girl is herself at age five. The little girl is watching the neighborhood kids play baseball while sitting on the steps of her paternal grandmother's porch, too shy to join the group. The year is 1939. Barbara moved to East Haven at age 7 and vividly describes the impact of the Great Depression and World War II on the her lifestyle as a child.

Claire remembers herself at age 11 having a piano lesson. It is August of 1934. Her father arrives home from work carried into the house by two men. He dies a week later of a blood clot. She remembers kissing her father's cheek at the wake.

Ann was a young shy student. She remembers a tree falling while driving home with her father during the hurricane of 1938. She describes her schooling and how later she became a teacher.

Marcelle explains to participants that it is important to have a reader in mind for a memoir: “Your life is old news for you,” she says, “but not for the reader.”  She goes on to explain that it is important in writing memoir to use concrete words to "show" and not "tell" the reader your story. Memoir is storytelling using character, (the main character is you), scene, setting and dialogue.