Where is the line between memoir and fiction? How much can you fabricate in memoir, and how much can you steal from your own life in fiction? In this workshop, students will submit their work—whether it’s fiction, memoir, or a hybrid—for critique, while participating in a discussion about the question of veracity and imagination, using texts that play with the line of fiction and memoir. We will look at each submission with an eye to the points of craft, and to what works in the piece, and what doesn’t, regardless of where it falls on the spectrum of fiction and memoir. There is no required reading, but here’s some suggested autobiographical fiction:

Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Chelsea Girls, Eileen Myles
A Death in the Family, James Agee
history of Violence, Édouard Louis