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Memoir, Creative Nonfiction and Fiction
July 17 - July 28


Everyone has a story to tell. Whether a life is unconventional or relatively normal, there’s bound to be something fascinating about it. However, unless you’re a celebrity or a famous person with an automatic readership, you need to strive to engage the reader in the same way you would with good fiction. A good memoir uses all the same elements used in fiction-- plot, dialogue, characters/development, sensory detail/description, imagery, etc. A memoir is based on truth, as defined by the writer’s memory. However, sometimes it is hard for the writer to remember every exact detail (especially, for example, in writing dialogue) or she may want to change names to protect privacy. Then the essence of the truth is what a memoir writer needs to turn to. These are just some of the aspects of memoir (overlapping with fiction) writing that we will discuss and apply to your own work. The criticism will be constructive.


Nahid Rachlin attended Columbia University MFA program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then went on to Stanford University MFA program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, Persian Girls (Penguin), four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P.Dutton), The Heart’s Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Her individual stories have appeared in about fifty magazines. One of her stories was produced by Symphony Space, “Selected Shorts” and was aired on NPR radio stations around the country. Her work has received favorable reviews in major magazines and newspapers and translated into Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, and Farsi. She has written reviews and essays for The New York Times, Newsday, Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. She received many awards, including the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has been interviewed in magazines such as Poets & Writers and AWP Writers Chronicle, and TV such as Channel 13, and on NPR’s, including Fresh Air, Terry Gross, and All Things Considered. For more please click on:
  www.nahidrachlin.com