Description
Whether you’re writing for your family or for a publisher, discover and pass along the stories from your own life to your children or to the world. This course will have you write stories from your life from memory.
The aim of the memoir is not to nail down facts, but to remember what has happened over time, to the tantalizing, dismaying, broken bits of our life’s history.
Such personal writing is an “attempt.” It is a try at the truth. The truth of the self in the world [Patricia Hampl].
Memory is often enhanced by fast writing, allowing the subconscious to give up its secrets. Thus, we will be participating in timed-writings, and reading these aloud to each other.
Ann Cannon and I will teach two hours of the class together and then split up for our individual classes.
About Louise Plummer
Louise Plummer is a noted author, young adult fiction writer and a retired associate professor of English for Brigham Young University. She and her husband Tom have four sons.
The Plummers moved from Boston to Minnesota in 1971 when Tom took a position at the University of Minnesota. While there, Louise earned a master’s degree in English. They both took positions at BYU in 1985. The same year her first novel, The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier, received the Delacorte Press First Young Adult Novel Contest, leading to its publication. The book later became a children’s choice book with both the New York Public Library and the International Reading Association.
Awards received by subsequent books include her second novel – My Name is Sus5an Smith. The 5 is Silent – ALA Best Book, a School Library Journal Best Book, Utah Arts Council Best Young Adult Novel, Association for Mormon Letters Best Young Adult Novel, and New York Public Library Children’s Choice Book. Her book The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman was also an ALA Best Book, a School Library Journal Best Book, an Association for Mormon Letters Best Young Adult Novel. In addition, her A Dance For Three was an ALA Best Book.[4]
She has also written nonfiction books specifically for the Mormon audience and is a popular LDS lecturer.
She currently writes a blog called “The Chattering Crow”, which has a large following.
