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Writing from Life
How do you see the world? Do certain experiences from your life call you to write? And how will you cull the stories you need to tell from the complicated tangle of memory?
In this program on writing creative nonfiction with author and educator Ellen Herbert, we'll explore what is “true writing.” Memoirs can be described as a collection of stories about one’s life that have a focus, such as: food, poverty, disability, difficult parents. We'll consider memoirs we’ve read and enjoyed or not. What makes a memoir memorable?
Related LibGuide: Find Your Next Book by Fairfax County Public Library (Admin)
- Date:
- Saturday, May 3, 2025
- Time:
- 2:00pm - 3:30pm
- Location:
- Thomas Jefferson Meeting Room 1, Thomas Jefferson Meeting Room 2
- Library Branch:
- Thomas Jefferson Library
- Categories:
- Make/Create > Creative Writing
- Audience:
- General Interest Older Adults
About the Author:
Ellen Herbert’s short stories have won more than 10 awards including a PEN Fiction and a Virginia Fiction Fellowship. One of her short stories was read on NPR. Her writing has been published in women’s magazines, literary magazines, and The Washington Post. Her historical novel, The Last Government Girl, published by Loyola Press, won the Maryland Writer’s Prize for Best Novel. She won The Flint Hills Review Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her novel, Don’t Hide from the Night, will be published in May 2025 by Melange Books. Her website is: http://ellenherbert.info.
On Memoir:
According to the writer, David Foster Wallace, the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction is this: “Both genres are scary; both feel like they are executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how and why, etc."
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