Memoir writing is a creative genre, yet the events and the characters in it are drawn from life. This poses several challenges for the memoirist, whose relationships with the people in their stories can be impacted by the way they are represented. In this workshop, we will discuss some of the dilemmas that memoirists face when writing about families and friends and come up with strategies to write both ethically and truthfully about people who are a part of our life stories.
Kirsti Sandy teaches creative writing at Keene State College. Her memoir essay collection, She Lived and the Other Girls Died, was awarded the Monadnock Essay Collection Prize in 2017 and her essay, “I Have Come for What Belongs to Me” won the Raven Prize for Nonfiction, an award sponsored by the Northern New England Review. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction can be found in Split Lip, the Boiler, Under the Gum Tree, Book of Matches, Haus: An Anthology of Haunted House Stories, among other publications.
