Guided by Teresa Piccari, learn to craft memoir pieces that invite you to view your life journey through a broader lens in this interactive memoir writing class for all levels.

There are no available registration dates at this time.

Memoir as a Journey 1 - Online, photo by Gail Priest at Cape May Point
Integrating elements of the hero’s journey can help you to better understand the life path you have chosen. Photo by Gail Priest at Cape May Point.

This class takes the elements of heroic quest, often seen in fiction works, and applies them to your real-life stories, to craft memoir pieces that invite you to view your life through a broader mythic lens. Writing from a place of the hero, versus victim or villain, invites you to witness an archetypal, evolutionary arc of your personal development over time, and experience your own humanity and life purpose more deeply and honestly.

Writing from a place of journey can help you to gain clarity around decisions that have informed your life, and to better understand how choices have contributed to outcomes. It also encourages you to cultivate a more objective perspective and enhanced understanding of the people in your life, who appear to have helped or hindered you on your life path.

As a result, you will be better able to generate stories that speak to readers in universal terms that allow them to better comprehend and make meaning of their own life stories.  Applying a wide lens overlay, or mythic understanding, of how we live our lives can help writers create more expansive stories that lead to greater satisfaction and make better peace with the lives they have chosen.

For those that have taken this class, we also offer Memoir as a Journey 2, an advanced class that invites students to wade more deeply into the process of writing their life stories and personal essays.

This workshop features a half hour 1-on-1 session with the instructor to review the work you have generated and receive suggestions on how to improve and expand it.

Header image by Gail Priest at Cape May Point.

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Instructor: Teresa Piccari

Teresa Piccari is a lover of the written word across all genres. She is a career journalist and columnist, feature writer and also writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Piccari is at work on a poetry manuscript entitled Laying Down Armor. She has read at Tenants Harbor Poets and presented her nonfiction at several events. Piccari has been helping people tell their fiction and nonfiction stories for 25 years through a diverse palette of workshops including Memoir as a Journey 1, Memoir as a Journey 2, Return to Essence, If Not Now When, Creative Writing Toolbox and Sensory Writing. A native Philadelphian, she has called coastal Maine home for 18 years.