Get Your Memoir Off the Ground at Northwestern this Summer

As writers in the memoir classes I lead master the art of writing about their lives, they find themselves with a new challenge: assembling finished stories into book form.

Still time to register at earlybird rates.

Many of my students have met that challenge. Some collected their essays into self-published books for their families, a few worked with an online company called blurb.com to assemble their essays and photos into a hard-cover book, and one couple in class is combining the essays they’ve written for class with scrapbooks they’ve assembled in their 50+ years of marriage.,

And then there’s this: one of my writers, Anna Perlberg, had her memoir, The House in Prague published in 2016 by Golden Alley Press, an independent publisher in Pennsylvania. Now Regan Burke, a writer in another class of mine who many of you know from her guest posts here on our Safe & Sound blog, has arranged her work into book form, too. Her forthcoming memoir, How I Want to Be in That Number, will be published early next year by Tortoise Books, an independent publisher here in Chicago.

I am busy now combining all I’ve learned from the successes of writers in my classes with my own experience in memoir writing to put together a memoir workshop for The Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference this year on the university’s Chicago campus.

In its 15th year now, the Summer Writers’ Conference is a three-day extravaganza of workshops, panels, keynote speakers, networking events, and literary readings. One very cool thing about the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference is the personal attention writers get there: as long as six people register for a workshop by the time registration closes on August 11, 2019, it’s a go, and each workshop is limited to 18 participants. “Learn how to escalate your plot, write a gut wrenching story, motivate your characters, and turn your nonfiction into narrative,” the web site says. “Hear keynote presentations from award-winning authors, including Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers) and get advice from publishers, agents, literary editors, critics, and published authors in all genres.”

The conference starts August 15, 2019 and runs until August 17, 2019. My 90-minute workshop, called Getting Your Memoir off the Ground meets from 2:00 p.m. To 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 17, 2019, and the web site describes it like this:

Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground
with Beth Finke

Attendees of this 90-minute workshop will take away something useful to help them start, continue, and finish their memoir project. We’ll talk about the benefits of getting personal stories down on paper, do a short in-class assignment, and discuss techniques to get past whatever it is that is stopping us from getting our work done–from finding time to write to facing issues that come with writing about people we love…and those we don’t! The overall emphasis will be on craft and on overcoming the barriers that keep us from writing and assembling our stories. The session will end with a Q&A session focusing on what to do when we feel ready to publish–everything from agents to marketing and the merits of self-publishing vs. finding a traditional publisher.

You can learn more about tuition cost and registration here, and good news: if you register before July 12, 2019 you’ll get the early bird rates!