Audio Interview with Donald Antrim, on Workshops: Fiction and Memoir: “Writing Ourselves”
This past Spring at the Blue Met Writers Festival, Donald Antrim conducted a workshop entitled: Fiction and Memoir: "Writing Ourselves" It was designed to explore the ‘challenging and often frustrating process of reading into one’s own work;’ and to identify aspects of that work which may have been underdeveloped, unnoticed, or even, avoided. As the syllabus put it:
"Fiction and memoir are not, as a rule, brought together in workshops. And yet many of the concerns that are most important to all of us—the technical production of form; the experience of psychological drive within the narrative; and the tangible-seeming, built-from-scratch, moral or immoral world our characters inhabit—are experienced by writers of fiction and memoir. Whatever we write, we may all have cause to wonder about the overt and the embedded evidence of our own experiences, even in works in which autobiographical material is scrupulously occluded. Perhaps, in opening the class to writers of non-fiction and fiction, there will be a fruitful exchange."
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel, The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist: A Novel. His latest publication is The Afterlife (2006). He lives in Brooklyn, New York. We talked about workshops in general, and what happened in Montreal specifically. Please listen (may have to crank it a bit) here:
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Related posts:
- Audio Interview with Donald Antrim by Nigel Beale: On a son’s relationship with his mother, alcoholism, anger and book collecting.
- Audio Interview with Andrew O’Hagan: On Determination, Memoir, Israel, Martin Amis, Islam and Coloured Doors
- Ottawa Writing Workshops Spring and Summer 2008
- Audio Interview: M.G. Vassanji Responds to Attacks on Giller Prize, and his Writing
- Memoir Hoaxes caused by Publishers Favouring ‘Fact’ over Fiction
August 28th, 2010 at 4:20 PM
Thank you for generating such an interesting conversation about narrative form with Donald Antrim.
Back in June of 1976, I found I found the form for my first book on Day One thanks to the good luck of being a friend of Marge Piercy’s.
“Use your psychoanalysis as a frame,” said Marge. “That way, you have your beginning, middle, and end.”
Sound advice. (See Sea Run: Surviving My Mother’s Madness, Seaview Books, 1981).
Despite countless workshops and an MFA in 2006 from Lesley. the form for my second book still eludes me.
Like you, I agree that readers of good novels and memoirs change. I also believe that the writers change, too.
When Donald Antrim referred to his mother as “narcissistic.” he reminded me of my struggle to see my parents three-dimensionally, a problem more of insight than craft.
When I move beyond what I thought I knew about my parents, I see my children differently – and my relationship to them.
While each draft is both educational and therapeutic, the work that remains is to afford my alcoholic, incestuous father (long dead) the chance he could not give me
It was Camus, I think, who said that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Thanks for helping me push “the rock” today. I am happy. I to stand in a new possibilitiy.
Mary Lou Shields
Arlington, MA
September 2nd, 2010 at 12:09 AM
My pleasure Mary Lou. I’m pleased to hear you gained something from it.
October 2nd, 2010 at 10:33 AM
I’m picking up speed so I’ll keep you posted.