WRITING THE BODY: A MEMOIR WORKSHOP

Course Description

Our bodies are shaped by forces we didn't choose, including sports, medicine, family, culture, and the state. Memoir is one of the few forms that can hold both the experience of living in a body and the structures that have told us what that body means. In this course, we'll read writers who treat the body as evidence, and who use the essay and memoir form to reckon with what has been done to, for, and through their physical selves. We'll attend to how fragmentation, braiding, lyric digression, and other formal experimentation can enact what linear narrative cannot. Students will produce a substantial body of memoir work while developing a craft vocabulary for writing about embodiment that goes beyond sensory detail. We will attend to various questions including, how do you render chronic pain, institutional pressure, or pleasure that's been complicated by context? How do you write the body without reducing it to a symptom or a symbol? This course assumes your relationship to your own body is already complex. We'll work with that complexity rather than around it.