Workshop Reap: Writing a Literary Memoir with Jean Feraca

Jean Feraca began her workshop, Writing a Literary Memoir, by discussing memoir as a way to develop one’s craft and open up other writing. “It’s about what you don’t know you already know you know,” she said. With timed exercises and questions, such as “What calls to you? What do you really want to write about?” students’ writing began to emerge. They wrote; they read. They talked about next steps.

Jean Feraca advised “When you write poetry, less is more…whittle down to essence…what you pull out can be another poem and another and…” She told her class to be ruthless. “All good writing is well-edited,” she said, “You (if you are lucky) are the editor.”

Reading examples of personal essays and memoirs, from Primo Levi to Vivian Gornick to her own I Hear Voices, Feraca guided workshop participants into the essence of what writing and memoir, in particular, are about. “What makes it worthwhile is you become aware of yourself. The only real reason to write is to find the truth of your life— and to tell it.”

“Organizing comes later…get it down on the page,” she pushed. “The idea is to generate yeast— germs that can sprout later.” Feraca wanted students to understand the generative process of rewriting; “ It’s as Natalie Goldberg says, ‘Write it. Rip it up. Write it to write it again.’”

“The most important thing is to allow the thing to unfold in it’s own time…you don’t need to know everything in advance.” She urged them to tell their stories without agenda and without over or under-valuing their meanings; “That’s the way you have to deal with it: as a metaphor for our time, not just a memoir of your time.”


In case you missed it, check out:

• Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg
• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
• I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio by Jean Feraca