Writing the Hybrid Memoir
In your hybrid memoir, you might engage with science writing, literature, pop culture, history, digital media—really any cultural product or phenomenon that you want to explore in the same frame as your personal narrative.
A 6-week nonfiction workshop. Hybrid memoir asks us to look at once at the self and at the world, seeking resonance between different themes, motifs, and ideas. In your hybrid memoir, you might engage with science writing, literature, pop culture, history, digital media—really any cultural product or phenomenon (hint: that just means “stuff”) that you want to explore in the same frame as your personal narrative.
Together we’ll explore different modalities of research and writing that inform the hybrid memoir, including memoir and personal narrative, immersion journalism, cultural criticism, science writing, academic and literary research. We’ll delve deeply into the form and craft of memoir, immersion research, and cultural criticism.
Writers will gain and deepen their familiarity with narrative nonfiction, using personal narrative to inform and resonate with outward-looking work. We will explore content and craft and will spend time researching and generating braids of memoir, experiential research, and secondary research/cultural criticism.
We will share practical techniques (like how to use index cards and your wall or floor to visually represent ideas and structures, and how to use the sonic rhythms of poetry to link disparate chunks of text), we will workshop rough pages, and we will serve as sounding boards for each other’s new work. The generative component of this class will be roughly split between mutual writing during class time and prompts to be responded to between classes.
Writers will leave the class with a rough/sketched draft and revision suggestions to guide you toward its completion.
What You Will Learn
We will share practical techniques (like how to use index cards and your wall or floor to visually represent ideas and structures, and how to use the sonic rhythms of poetry to link disparate chunks of text), we will workshop rough pages, and we will serve as sounding boards for each other’s new work. The generative component of this class will be roughly split between mutual writing during class time and prompts to be responded to between classes.
Who Should Take This Class?
The course is open to nonfiction writers (or aspiring nonfiction writers) of all experience levels. Some general familiarity with the hybrid memoir form is recommended.
Instructor
Margo Steines
Writing Institute Instructor
Margo Steines is a native New Yorker and a journeyman ironworker. She serves as mom to a wildly spirited small person. Margo holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and lives and writes in Tucson. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Brutalities, published in October 2023 by W.W. Norton. Margo is a creative coach and facilitator, and is faculty at the University of Arizona Writing Program. Read more about her practices at margosteines.com.