Stanza to Paragraph: Craft Notes for Poets Who Are Memoir-Curious

I think many people who come from other literary backgrounds assume that the transition to writing effective creative nonfiction will happen fairly quickly.

When I started writing memoir, I knew it was its own art and respected it as such, but I was already a writer—of poetry, critical essays and reviews, sure—but how much different could it be? For me, part of this self-deception was probably necessary. When I start a new writing project, and even though I know better, the long, cold road to its completion is often blanketed by a fog of denial. That way, I can imagine the end is much closer than it really is. If I faced how hard it is to finish any writing project, would I be able to write the first word? But learning a whole new artform–let’s just say the fog was pretty thick. 

Expanding my practice to memoir-writing has meant years of learning the conventions of the genre and entirely recalibrating how I approach my writing process. I am currently wading through what people call the “messy middle” of the manuscript, so I’m still deep in the learning—reading, taking classes, listening to podcasts. As an experienced teacher of creative writing, I have a sense of what my fellow learners and future students might urgently want to know. I will be sharing some of my observations on this page.

These notes on craft and process could appeal to anyone starting out in memoir, but they may be especially useful to writers working at the intersection of memoir and poetry—or just to poets who are memoir-curious.