Crafting the Memoir

Crafting the Memoir is a 6-week-long workshop with award-winning memoirist, author, and producer Sarah LaBrie. The class will take place on Zoom on Saturdays from April 12 until May 24 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. PST. The course will skip class on April 26 and resume the following week on May 3. Each participant will be able to submit one (1) piece of writing for workshop and receive written feedback from the instructor.

A Lichtenberg figure is a branching, treelike pattern found across natural and engineered phenomena in lightning, river deltas, human anatomy, and architectural design. In this workshop, we’ll use this shape as a model for structuring the book-length memoir. How can multiple stories emerge from a singular origin point? How do we organize our manuscripts according to the natural forces that govern the development of everything from trees to airports? We’ll read work across genres and eras as we seek out the appropriate forms for our own nonfiction manuscripts. This workshop is open to memoirists at every stage, from those still in the idea phase and just starting to think about structure to those with a partial or complete draft ready for revision. 

This workshop is $480. For more information, please contact workshops@lareviewofbooks.org.

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Sarah LaBrie is the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart, a 2024 New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Pick and a best memoir of the year according to NPR, Elle, and Esquire. Born in the Bay Area and raised in Third Ward in Houston, she lives in Los Angeles where she works as a TV writer. She was most recently a producer on the HBO Max and Starz television show Minx. She also wrote on Blindspotting (Starz), Made for Love (HBO Max), and Love, Victor (Hulu/Disney+). Her work appears in The Guardian, Guernica, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater. She’s held residencies at Yaddo, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds an MFA from New York University, where she was a Writers in the Schools Fellow.