Turning Memories Into Memoirs contains countless helpful suggestions for remembering--researching--organizing--collecting and writing memories and family or personal stories. It includes* how-to writing exercises* clear explanation of literary techniques* proven motivational supports and* examples from the workshops. Turning Memories is a useful reference and guide for both beginners and experienced writers who want to write personal and family stories.

Memory into Memoir provides a lively guide for anyone looking to wrestle the unruly past onto the page.

Between the 17th and 19th centuries auto-biographers and diarists invented new ways to write about childhood and children. At the same time, pedagogical ideas about child-rearing changed. This book looks at the connection between these developments. Egodocuments can bring the past alive, and allow us to sketch six intimate portraits. The second part of the book concentrates on the changes. Childhood became more highly valued as a phase of life. Children were taken more seriously. This is shown in chapters on child's play, punishment, wet-nursing and independence. Around 1800, in diaries, parents more openly grieved about the loss of a child, which indicates both a change of literary conventions and changes in the way emotions were felt and expressed. Finally, autobiographers wrote more and differently about their early years, and developed new memory strategies. Autobiographical texts are discussed within a wider cultural setting, using paintings, poetry, pedagogical tracts and novels. This book makes clear how changes in autobiographical style, the concept of childhood and the working of human memory are connected.

There has been a significant growth in autobiographical documentary films in recent years. This innovative book proposes that the filmmaker in her dual role as maker and subject may act as a cultural guide in an exploration of the social world. It argues that, in the cinematic mediation of memory, the mimetic approach in the construction of documentary films may not be feasible, and memory may instead be evoked elliptically through hybrid strategies such as critical realism and fictional enactment. Recognizing that identity is formed by history and what ‘goes on’ in the world, the book charts the historical trajectory of the British independent filmmaking movement from the mid-1970s to the present growth of new online distribution outlets and new media through digital technologies and social media.

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, in both Western Europe and East Asia, towns and cities helped to shape the individual consciousness, against the background of a more traditional society in which collective values remained strong. Towns were centres of stimulus, challenge, and opportunity for residents and visitors, and the identity of the town itself, its character and history, became a strong theme in the formation of the individual. Writing and the circulation of texts played an important part in this process. Towns created artefacts, rituals, and memories that embodied their history and identity, but individuals positioned themselves and their families in the town histories as they wrote them. The seven essays in this volume range in focus from Renaissance Venice to nineteenth-century Edo (Tokyo), and from capital cities (Seoul, London) to provincial towns in France, England, and Japan. They explore the interaction of self, family, and social group and the construction of collective memory, examining autobiographies, letters and “exchange diaries”, family narratives, and urban histories and collections. Together, they challenge the long-prevailing historiography that contrasts the emergence of the individual in European societies with the persistently traditionalist and collective character of East Asian societies in the Early Modern period.

Wayne R. Dynes (born August 23, 1934) is an American art historian, encyclopedist, bibliographer, and gay activist. He is now Professor Emeritus in the Art Department at Hunter College in New York City, where he taught from 1972 to 2008. Dynes spent his early years in Southern California, attending public schools. After extended sojourns in Italy and England, he settled permanently in New York City. He obtained his B.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1956; his Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) of New York University in 1969.

For those that have mastered the basics of memoir and wish to probe this brand of creative nonfiction further, Writing the Radical Memoir uses salient theories about memory and the self to challenge assumptions about how we remember and tell the truth of our lives when we write about it. Innovative in approach and making new critical ideas accessible, each chapter maps out the key principles of such writers as Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Philippe Le Jeune and Joseph Campbell, invokes literary examples to show how other writers have mastered the idea before reflecting on how you can practically apply the theory to your writing. With original exercises and prompts for further reading that bridge the gap between the theoretical and how it might be put into practice, the book is attentive to the multiple facets of the genre of nonfiction writing generally, covering such topics as: - The writer/ reader contract - How to embark on a thematic/ symbolic exploration of themes and incidents in your life - How neuro-scientific theory can inform our understanding of memory and recall and what happens to our memories when we remember them - Character development and the ethics of writing about real people - How constructing your identity in memoir offers a chance to push back against traditional structures - That memoir might not be preservation of your past but a process of self-erasure - How J. M. Coetzee's Autrebiography trilogy challenges traditional biography By bringing together lived experience, post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, praxis and artistic vision as a unique approach to writing memoir, this book encourages you to think the self, how it is portrayed, created, erased and made strange through the process of writing and remembering.

An annotated bibliography and criticism of Gene Wolfe's science fiction and non-fiction writing.

Music, Memory and Memoir provides a unique look at the contemporary cultural phenomenon of the music memoir and, leading from this, the way that music is used to construct memory. Via analyses of memoirs that consider punk and pop, indie and dance, this text examines the nature of memory for musicians and the function of music in creating personal and cultural narratives. This book includes innovative and multidisciplinary approaches from a range of contributors consisting of academics, critics and musicians, evaluating this phenomenon from multiple academic and creative practices, and examines the contemporary music memoir in its cultural and literary contexts.