Kickstart Your Memoir! Robert Anthony Siegel, Instructor

This course is now full. You are welcome to join the wait list.

 

IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL

 

Spring 2025

 

Kickstart Your Memoir! (Five-Week Workshop)

 

Robert Anthony Siegel, Instructor

 

Dates/Time

 

Tuesdays on Zoom, April 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 

 

• 6:00 pm–8:00 pm Iowa/Central Time
• 7:00 pm–9:00 pm Eastern Time
• 4:00 pm–6:00 pm Pacific Time
• 5:00 pm–7:00 pm Mountain Time

 

 

Fee: $550

 

 

Course Description

 

You have a memoir to write—a true story seized from the beautiful chaos of everyday life. The question you face now is how to uncover its shape and give it full-throated voice, the ability to sing. Do you just start at the beginning and write through to the end? What is the beginning, anyway? And once you’ve finally got moving, how do you keep going? 

 

This five-week online course introduces students to the basics of memoir writing, including scene, structure, and narrative arc. Classes combine lecture, discussion, and short exercises that we will write on the spot and share with the group, reading aloud. And I will meet with each student for a half-hour conference outside of class to discuss your project in greater depth. The goal is to help you kickstart your memoir so that you can begin making progress right away. 

 

Learning objectives 

You will learn how to conceptualize and plan a book-length memoir. This includes: 

 

• How to discover and explore your material by “writing outside the story.” 

• How to outline, organize, and plan.  

• How to do research. 

• How to think about conflict, plot, structure, and theme. 

• How to write scenes. 

• How to create a writing schedule and set goals. 

 

You will take home: 

 

• A “conflict statement” describing the conflict at the heart of the narrative. 

• A plot outline. 

• A scene list. 

• Character arcs for your protagonist and other important characters. 

 

 

Instructor

 

Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from Harvard. Find more at www.robertanthonysiegel.com. 

 

 

Registration & Fees

 

The fee for this course is $550. Payment in full is required to register.

Registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Class size is limited to 12.

 

Note: Your credit card payment will be processed by an external provider and will appear on your credit card statement as “UI Writing—Magid Center.”

 

Refund & Cancellation Policy

 

If you need to cancel your enrollment, please let us know as soon as possible. We can only offer full refunds if you cancel one week prior to the start of class. After that, before the start-date of class, we can offer a 50% refund. We cannot refund day-of cancellations, and we cannot refund or partially refund registration fees once the class has begun.

 

Terms & Community Policy

 

1.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a program for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to enroll in Festival workshops.

 

2.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a community built on an assumption of shared enterprise, in the spirit of mutual respect. We reserve the right to a) revoke the registration of or b) dismiss from the program any person who disrupts the learning/working environment of others. Participants in the Festival are subject to all University of Iowa policies governing conduct in our community, whether online or in person.

 

Questions?

 

Contact the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: iswfestival@uiowa.edu. Phone: (319) 335-4160.

 

Our small staff is out and about. If you phone and we miss you, please leave a detailed message!