Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Susan Soper, OLLI@Emory Instructor of an obituary writing class that segued into a memoir writing class

“The Memoir Kit: Your Good Life”

The memoir genre in book publishing has certainly exploded in the past several years. As Mary Karr – author of The Art of Memoir – told an interviewer:

“It’s trashy ghetto-ass primitive. Anyone who’s lived can write one.” True, but many of us don’t know how or where to start—or how to keep going. The Memoir Kit class Ms. Soper teaches for OLLI is an accessible approach to capture life’s stories: the ups, downs, risks, relationships, losses, hurdles, and heartbreaks we have all survived. Motivated by more than 250 prompts, her students have shared whimsical, funny episodes, and charming tales as well as dark moments about death, addiction, abuse, and abandonment. Twelve chapters of these prompts are being compiled into a book, The Memoir Kit: Your Good Life, One Story at a Time.