Fishtrap--Memoir Course with John Daniel

Fishtrap is offering its second yearlong writing workshop, "Telling the Truth in the First Person," a memoir course with John Daniel. Registration for this yearlong course is open now.

In John's words, "Memoir means, in essence, writing from memory. If only it were as simple as that sounds. The memoirist must locate the story he wants and needs to tell, discover by writing his way into it the constellation of experiences that compose the story, and bring the story alive on the page, shaping it there as painstakingly as any fiction writer shapes a novel. It is a difficult voyage of discovery, but an exciting and rewarding one."

The aim of this course is for each participant to bring into being, in a period of twelve months, a substantial draft of a book-length memoir. The course is modeled after a year in a low-residency MFA program. It begins and ends with a one-week workshop at summer Fishtrap, 2009 and 2010, and the group convenes once for a briefer session in January 2010. Between these workshops participants correspond with the instructor individually, each sending 25 to 30 new pages per month for critique and discussion.

For complete details on this yearlong course in memoir with John Daniel, go to www.fishtrap.org/yearlong.shtml. Registration for this yearlong course is open now.

Author of three memoirs, two volumes of personal essays, and two collections of poems, John Daniel has won two Oregon Book Awards for Literary Nonfiction, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and James T. Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State
University, Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His most recent books are "The Far Corner" (April 2009) and "Rogue River Journal."