On a chilly Halloween morning, I attended a memoir writing workshop with author Lily Dunn, and students from the MA Creative Writing course. After all, what says spooky like baring your soul?
Lily is a memoirist, author, and teacher of creative nonfiction at Bath Spa University. I was grateful to receive a proof copy of her latest book, Into Being, courtesy of Manchester University Press. Into Being is, in her own words, “a hybrid craft memoir/book on how to write memoir.” It discusses extensively how the act of writing memoir, of putting your experiences on page, can “rescue you from the insidiousness of unprocessed experience, and help make you into a more complete human being.” (page xii)
Her own memoir, Sins of My Father, released in 2022, details her complicated relationship with her father, who left their family when Lily was six to join a religious cult, and then his subsequent decline into alcoholism. In the workshop, she describes a memory of his return, seeing him visibly thin and dressed in religious garb, announcing that he had been reborn and was not her father anymore. She uses this as an example of a “moment of being” – a memory that reveals something other than the moment itself, a key pillar of your selfhood.
She describes how she felt a deep need to write Sins of My Father, likening the writing process to an exorcism of sorts. In Into Being, she talks about how writing allowed her to let go of her father, saying “when I was finally able to see my father clearly, I did not have to be his puppet any more. I was ready to write my final draft. In Sins of My Father I rose above as I laid his ghost to rest” (page 15).
It is this philosophy that guided the class. Lily, first of all, made us all write why we write, prompting a range of responses from finding it therapeutic, to desiring to understand things we have felt and experienced throughout our lives. Everyone in the workshop had their own personal philosophy, and some (like me) were totally new to memoir writing, whereas others were in the first stages of writing their own. It felt comforting to be in the presence of other people working out their own authorial compulsions.
Into Being serves as a gentle guide for the potential memoirist, gently taking the reader through various key features and pitfalls faced by the writer. It has sections on structure, on using imagination to illuminate memories, on radical deconstruction, all the way up to the final chapter navigating the prickly world of the ethics of writing about traumatic events, especially involving other people.
It is a beautifully gentle guide, using her own experiences as well as a series of conversations with other memoirists to give a broad perspective on writing the genre. I particularly liked a section at the back of the book, comprised of her favourite quotations from her conversations with other authors such as Noreen Masud and Marina Benjamin. It’s a joy to read so many conversations with people who love their craft this much.
At this point in the workshop, we are encouraged to choose our own moment of being and write about it in as much detail as we can. She asks us to embellish it with our imagination but to be honest with where our memory fails us, describing memoir as primarily an “excavation.” A range of moments are chosen, some painful and thorny, some more comforting. My own is a treasured childhood memory of the village I grew up in.
We go back over these moments two or three times, adding more detail each time. She asks us to distinguish them between moments of being and inciting incidents in our life, saying that those two things are not the same. Moments of being are much gentler and take more digging out. As she writes in Into Being, “Writing comes from within, the feeling self, from the heart; the hard work is mining the self, to tap into the complexity of existence, beyond one’s everyday self” (page 34).
I’m guilty of forgetting about my own writing, of letting life get in the way, and the workshop served as a nice reminder to treasure my own writer’s self and to not be afraid of letting personal experience into my work. At the end of the workshop, I asked Lily to sign my copy of Into Being. She addressed it to me and wrote, “The heart of what matters” in looping pink script. A reminder to me to not lose sight of the important stuff; our own memories.
Proof copy and access to the workshop gratefully granted courtesy of Manchester University Press.
