Join us for a KWF Writers Studio master class with Beth Kaplan!
ABOUT THE CLASS:
Writers often launch excitedly into a memoir project, with a vital story to tell, and then reality hits. Or, as the great Wayson Choy used to say, “The honeymoon ends”. Many questions and doubts arise. Who am I to write a memoir? Who cares what happened to me? Where to start? What tense and POV to use? What to include and what to leave out? What about the others in my life who are part of the story – how can I write about them without hurting or alienating them? And more.
These questions are often paralyzing, and the manuscript, or the first tentative scenes, end up in the drawer. This class will open that drawer and explore seven general principles of good memoir writing, and where the fears, snags, and dead ends arise. These steps include:
- Why good memoir matters, not just to the writer but to the reading world.
- How to choose the right tools — where, when, with what, the importance of research.
- Dealing with fears — hurting others or our own self-doubts; how to defeat the negative voices.
- Confronting truth, writing the painful stuff — when to take the plunge and when not to.
- What’s next? How to take the work into the world — or not.
This class suits both emerging writers stuck or unsure how to proceed, and novice writers exploring the possibility of memoir. Participants will walk away with an important reminder of why they are chronicling their most important scenes, and why, once they go deep to the universal story underneath, the writing matters not just to them, but to the world.
Fee: $50
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR:
Beth Kaplan, in her twenties a professional actor, left the stage at thirty to earn an MFA and become a writer. Scores of her essays have been published in newspapers and magazines or broadcast on CBC radio. She’s the author of a biography, two memoirs — one a finalist for the Whistler Independent Book Award — and a guide to creative writing, now being translated into Simplified Chinese (which is the textbook for a memoir course she has taught for over three decades at two universities). The winner of U of T’s Excellence in Teaching award, she produces a curated nonfiction reading series for her students, and both a podcast and a Substack newsletter about memoir writing.
“I feel privileged,” she says, “to have spent many years doing two things: writing and teaching. I love making sense of the most important events of my life by turning them into story, and then helping others make sense of their own.”
Her recent memoir-in-essays Midlife Solo: Writing Through Chaos to Find My Place in the World chronicles her chaotic twenty-five-year journey to find peace and home. For Kaplan, a single mother starting afresh in her forties, struggling to come to terms with the messy complications of middle age, including teenaged children, elderly parents, and her own aging, writing keeps her sane. A Toronto newspaper praised the book as “an extraordinary life, written with tremendous heart, insight, and humour.”
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