Memoirs are one of the most popular genres for writers today. Thomas Larson says that writing a memoir and joining a small group of other memoir writers can be “transformative.”

Larson will be offering a workshop, “Writing the Memoir,” from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 1) at the Crestwood Barnes & Noble, 9618 Watson Road. It costs $10 for members of the St. Louis Writers Guild, Saturday Writers, Writers Society of Jefferson County and Missouri Writers Guild. It’s $15 for nonmembers.

Claire Applewhite interviewed Thomas Larson, who is the author of author of “The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative,”  Ohio University Press / Swallow Press.  

 Here’s what he has to say:

By Claire Applewhite

Q:  Where were you raised and what schools did you attend? How do you think these factors influence your current writing today?

Q: Why do you feel you are drawn to nonfiction? Also, please tell us about some of your favorite books or articles.

A: I’m an untalented fiction writer who, while growing up, never saw (nor was shown by my teachers in college) the breadth and possibility of nonfiction writing. I believed I had to, a la Hemingway, disguise personal experience AS fiction. That’s absurd when writing memoir is just as good a method at getting into the truth of experience. I’ve never needed fiction - whether it’s religion or politics or the novel - to express myself.

 My favorite books of the last year are Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” and David Denby’s “American Sucker.”

Q:  Do you find it challenging to expose your inner thoughts to a
public you’ve never met? Or is it easier?

A: The hard part about memoir writing is trying to get the truth of the feeling rightly expressed. Because memoir writing is a process by which one gets to the truth. The truth is not known, only suspected and lived, prior to the writing. 

 I think of the truth in nonfiction as a process that has to do with the writing itself as well as the time of one’s life in which one writes. Why write about a divorce 25 years ago today? One is haunted and compelled, after years of trying to understand it, to get a handle on it from the present perspective.

Intimate writing is not hard for me. Reading intimacies on the page to an audience can be intense and nerve-wracking. But honesty and sincerity will come through - and reading your memoir writing to others will tell you if it’s authentic.

 Q: It seems that you have written about some controversial topics. Have you received feedback from the teachers/students on this?

A:  Good, deep, intimate writing will always be controversial. In memoir, one of the chief problems we face is how to we write about loved ones and ex loved ones who are still alive, may be affected by what we write, and deserve to be FAIRLY presented by us.

 There is no simple answer to how to do this, other than to apply the Golden Rule and try to think that other people in our experience are not there for our benefit but our experience has been mutual. Many student writers learn this eventually once they get over seeing themselves as victims or judges. After all, in a book with an I-perspective, how do we represent the world in a way that will both sound and be less biased?

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors? 

  Joan Didion. Nuala O’Faolin. Mary Karr. David Lazar. Philip Lopate. Blake Morrison.

Q: Advice to new authors?

A: Take a class in memoir writing. After the class, organize a memoir-writing group with a good facilitator that meets twice monthly.

Read 10 new pages every month for three years. The writing and the camaraderie will be transformative and lead you to an understanding of yourself and others that you would have never got to without memoir writing. It’s that powerful.

For more details on this author, visit www.thomaslarson.com