This course is designed for writers who are well along in their projects but who need help with structure as well as deciding what to include and what to get rid of and other typical problems facing the memoirist.

While all writers have to follow Faulkner's famous advice to kill your little darlings, memoirists' darlings are often their relatives, and the danger is too often that your darlings are going to want to kill you when they read what you've written about them. Likewise, when you're writing about your own life, you run the risk of writing a prose blob that includes much more than what you need.

And how do you incorporate other people's texts into your memoir? Photographs?

Most importantly, are you writing about your life with imagination and a stylist's attention to language and detail or are you more interested in a kind of literal transcription of life (as if that were possible).

Over our brief time together, we'll discuss what your story is about and what it's really about because in my view a good story should be about more than one thing. We'll discuss prologues and road maps and other strategies for writing something that you can finish and that deserves to last.

Everyone should bring to the workshop a prologue of up to seven double-spaced pages as well as ten pages from their first chapter and a two-page single spaced synopsis or road map of their project.

This workshop is limited to twelve participants. Admission is juried. Mail ten pages of your manuscript by June 1, 2012, along with your registration form and conference fee payment, plus a separate check for $100. The $100 will be refunded if you are not among the twelve.