24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
LIVE via ZOOM: 9am-11am (Eastern)
In this one week intensive workshop we will work together to help you jumpstart your memoir. Whether you’re stuck in a draft that isn’t working, having trouble organizing your story, or just unable to get started, this workshop will get your ideas on the page and set your memoir into motion.
During our two hour daily zooms, we will read the opening pages of successful memoirs and discuss what makes these openings work, read and critique possible openings for your memoir, and write and revise pages with the goal of being well on your way to your first chapter. We will also discuss and practice strategies for how best to use writing techniques such as flashbacks, back story, and chronology so that they enlighten our stories rather than become obstacles to them. In addition to the opening pages that will jumpstart your memoir, we will have a one-on-one conversation at the end of the week to help you create a solid plan for going forward and, as James Baldwin said, recreate art out of the disorder of life.
As Dani Shapiro said, memoirists must look through a single window in a house full of windows. We choose a view and pick which story to tell. Our workshop will help you find which story you want to tell within a lifetime of lived stories.
Biography
Ann Hood
is the author of over a dozen novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her debut novel, the bestseller Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, has been in print since 1987. She has also written five memoirs, including Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which is the story of her five-year-old daughter Grace who died from a virulent form of strep in 2002. The book was a NYT Editors’ Choice and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly.
Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, and many more.
She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing awards, a Best American Travel Writing award, and a Best American Spiritual Writing award,
Hood’s most recent book is her memoir, Fly Girl, which is about her eight years as a TWA flight attendant from the late 70s to the mid-80s, spanning the Golden Age of Flying through deregulation and the beginning of vast system wide changes.
Ann Hood splits her time between Providence, Rhode Island and New York City with her husband, the food writer Michael Ruhlman.
