Smitten with Memoir: An interview with Sari Botton

And a Valentine to you, to me, and to sloppy first drafts

Welcome to this month’s newsletter in which you will find:

• information on my March-May memoir class through the University of Washington’s extension program

• a preview of my interview with memoir luminary Sari Botton

• a writing Valentine to sweet, wonderful you

Let’s get memoir-y together

If you’re looking for a longform writing course focused on memoir only, check out my online course enrolling now through the extension program at University of Washington.

This is a 10-week noncredit course where we'll workshop your writing, generate new material, read and analyze work from acclaimed memoirists, build a supportive and productive writing community, and cover myriad aspects of the memoir writing process including how to strengthen your plot, write about others, and build complexity in your material.

We will meet Wednesday nights from 6:00-9:00 Pacific time March 12-May 14. The course caps at 25 students and registration is now open, at this link. You can message me here if you have questions or would like more information.

An interview with Sari Botton

Sari Botton is the editor of not one, not two, but three publications here on Substack which you probably already know and read. She is the editor at Adventures in Journalism, Memoir Land, and Oldster, and I was lucky enough to sit down with Sari for a conversation about how she became smitten with memoir and how she balances her role as an editor with her life as a writer. Sari interviewed me in the Memoir Land Questionnaire in December which you can read here, and I loved being able to have her as my guest on Let’s Talk Memoir.

In Let’s Talk Memoir Episode 148: Shedding False Identities and Being Our Own Best Champion we talk about Sari’s mid-life coming of age memoir in episodes And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo, and how as memoirists we often wrestle with what to share. Also in this episode: putting ourselves in our story, leaving the perfectionist out of the room, being our own best champion, growing into the truest version of ourselves, setting boundaries with people, and lowering our standards for first drafts. Also, the audiobook for Sari’s memoir has just been released and you can order it here.

Talking with Sari was like a morning at the warmest coziest coffee shop. This conversation filled my memoir cup. Thank you so much for being my guest, Sari and for all the work you do for and in this genre.

A Valentine to you, to me, and to sloppy first drafts…

…to uncovering what lies within us and embracing who we are without the fear of making sense or meeting a word count. I’ve been thinking about how I’ve sometimes approached my writing life with this idea I have to wrestle with my material and hammer it into shape; how that so often obliterates the joy of discovery. Of course when we’re on deadline it’s hard to avoid feeling pressure and the need for a measurable outcome. But, as I often coach my students and writing clients, we really do gain so much from allowing ourselves to wander, to run, to drift, and to dream.

One of the great gifts of pursuing a writing life for nearly twenty years is that, more and more, I’m embracing my desire to rummage around in my brain, to free float and follow a hunch. I’ve realized that giving myself permission to make a messy first draft is like writing self-care; a kind of self-love.

When we give ourselves the mental, emotional, psychological, creative, and even physical space on the page for our unfiltered, unedited writing, we are able to discover, more fully integrate, and harness our creative selves. Later, we whittle down and revise so that others better understand what we mean, but we won’t really know what we have, what we are trying to say until we unabashedly explore. Writing in unbridled ways enables us to become expansive, attuned to our instincts, even more vulnerable. And, that is especially important for memoirists.

When you have a little bit of time to yourself here’s a question you can ponder and write about to exorcise resistance you might feel about writing in an unstructured way. You might even find good essay material in the answers you discover.

I’m afraid that if I let myself write without direction and focus that _________________

I hope you enjoy my Let’s Talk Memoir interview with Sari. If you have a memoir writing question that I can help with please leave it in the comments or you can direct message me. I’d love to answer it in an upcoming newsletter.

Until next time, here’s to writing with soft, fierce, open hearts.

xo,

Ronit