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.