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Finding Your Voice in Memoir

Tone, structure, and rhythm on the page

Half-day workshop for memoir and personal essay writers

In this interactive half-day workshop designed for memoir and personal essay writers at all experience levels, we will look at the importance of finding our voices on the page and matching that voice with the stories you want to tell. In the workshop we'll do the following:

• Explore the tone and emotional impact of both short (flash) memoir pieces and excerpts from book-length memoirs
• Complete a series of in-class writing exercises
• Review sentence structure and flow to fit the mood of the stories you're trying to tell
• Develop several drafts of new work based on these topics

Judah Leblang is a storyteller, memoirist and writing teacher. His essays and commentaries have been broadcast throughout the US on more than 150 NPR and ABC-network radio stations, as well as several Canadian stations. He is a regular columnist for Bay Windows, Boston’s gay newspaper, and an instructor at Grub Street. The 2nd edition of his memoir, Finding My Place: One Man’s Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond, was published in 2013. His second memoir, Echoes of Jerry (2019), is about his Uncle Jerry, an orally-educated deaf man, as well as Leblang's own struggles with his sexuality and trying to find his place in society, finally coming out in the mid-1980s, and becoming a writer in the late 1990s.Clips of his performances and writing are at judahleblang.com.