I came down to my wobbly dock to write about the blurry line between fiction and memoir but find myself distracted by the trees’ reflection in the green-black river and the shimmering green damselflies glittering by. I write about this river often—it’s the reason I bought this property twenty-six years ago.
But now it’s time to talk about writing.
Regardless of an AWA (Amherst Writers & Artists) workshop’s theme, be it focussed on memoir, poetry, or fiction, when it is time to reflect on freshly minted writing, we tell our participants to consider all writing to be fictional. Even if the piece is written in the first person, in our feedback we refer to the narrator or the character, and never the writer. This is to ensure a safe space for all expressions, to give each writer a sense of freedom to write what they need to write, no matter how personal or raw, without any chance of being judged or questioned.
A few years ago, one workshop participant remarked that the practice of considering all the writing as fiction was itself a sort of fiction. “It seems quite obvious when a piece is memoir,” they said. “So we’re just pretending.”
There was something to that, I thought and wondered how I could create and maintain more of a buffer between the written work and the writer.
In Barbara Turner-Vesselago’s retreats, writers spend the mornings writing alone and submit their work to her by noon. In a Herculean feat, Barbara not only reads up to twelve pages of participants’ writing, but she also writes insightful, encouraging, and helpful feedback. When the group gathers in the evening, Barbara reads aloud selected pieces for commentary. The writer’s name is never mentioned. What this offers is a clear path to the writing alone. Elements of craft—perspective, dialogue, structure, imagery, emotional impact, etc.—are the focus.
The writing. Not the writer.
Which makes perfect sense, because the truth is that memory is as wobbly as my dock, and recall as flighty as these velvet-winged damselflies. (Chuffed I was able to fit those in!) In writing memoir, details must be invented and enhanced. In every memoir there’s some fiction. And in fiction a writer must call on personal observations, experiences, and responses in order to write convincingly. My fiction, for instance, is chock full of ‘what I know’ but my stories aren’t my story. And I sure as heck make stuff up when I write memoir.
In AWA workshops, writers read their own freshly generated writing, so I can’t offer Barbara’s wonderful method. So the next best way to keep my writers safe and comfortable when they read is by reminding participants to focus simply on the writing and not on the writer.
All of that makes sense to me, though I will add - I’ve written some intense pieces, the details of which were not part of my life experience. We all feel love, anger, rage, fear, joy, sorrow, and pain in many combinations, over many life events. I would never decide someone’s writing was obviously memoir/memory for that reason. I even cry over my own intense pieces sometimes - not because the facts fit me, but because in some way deep emotions do.