Memory Workshop

Maybe you want to preserve the stories of your life for your family, maybe you want to write them solely for yourself. Maybe you feel you have a story to tell that the wider world needs to know. Memory Workshop offers practical insights about memoir writing and a series of writing exercises to help you identify the moments of your life worth telling and find the voice to bring them to life on the page.

This workshop is presented in partnership with the Indiana Writers Center. Check out other writing workshops at library branches this season!

Instructor Barbara Shoup is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, most recently An American Tune, and About Grace, and a memoir, A Commotion in Your Heart. She is the co-author of Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process and Story Matters. Her short fiction, poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in numerous small magazines, as well as in The Writer and The New York Times travel section. Shoup is the recipient of numerous grants from the Indiana Arts Commission, two creative renewal grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the 2006 PEN Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship and the 2012 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Regional Indiana Author Award. Her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Vermeer's Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults. Currently, she is the Writer-in-Residence at the Indiana Writers Center and a creative writing faculty member of Art Workshop International in Assisi. She hosts the Substack newsletter Book Pilgrim.

Get ready for this writing workshop with suggested reading lists about writing: Writing and Creativity; Creative Writing Inspiration; Best Books for the Aspiring Novelist; The Muses' Rolodex on the Literary Craft.