THOMAS LARSON

How To Start and Run a Memoir Group

It’s often best to begin by meeting at a coffee house or a local library; once you get to know each other better, you can switch to a person’s home.

Begin informally. The first session you just might discuss how you’d like to organize the group. Once a month, twice a month. Another way to start is to choose a memoir to read, then discuss it at your next get-together. Once you start bringing your writing to share, start with short pieces, say, five or six pages. Eventually you’ll get better at critiquing and can do longer works up to ten pages. If you have more pages than that, pass them out ahead of time.

A good size is four to eight participants. And obviously it’s best to have people who will commit for a time, say, six months.

Please note: Do NOT allow fiction writers in the group. They, along with poets and biographers and historians, need to find their own group. Memoir demands focus on truthfulness, honesty (not fictionalizing, not embellishing), emotional intimacy, the psychology of writing about personal joy and hardship in our most important relationships. This is not what fiction writers deal with.

Here is a list of memoirs I (mostly) recommend. These titles are in addition to the 125 books I list in the back of The Memoir and the Memoirist. Click on the link for either the Amazon page or the author's website.