Little and Fierce: The Micro-Memoir

 The show will go on! Jeffrey THomson has flown in - let's make him feel welcome! Saturday's workshop will continue as scheduled - walk-ins and last-minute online registrants are welcome. 

Often our experiences beg us to retell them—these crux moments of meaning and necessity.  But our lives are often messy and wild and capturing the whole story is daunting.  The micro-memoir takes our personal stories and distills them to their purest essence using the tools of nonfiction, poetry and fiction. In this workshop, we will work on essays that create and convey the full range of human experience in just a few paragraphs.  We will read a short selection of examples and explore the possibilities of the form and create our own micro-memoirs in response.

Jeffrey Thomson is the author or editor of nine books across genres including fragile, a
memoir, Birdwatching in Wartime, winner of both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing. The Complete Poems of Catullus: an Annotated Translation, and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. His newest book is The Belfast Notebooks: Poems and Prose. Alice James Books will publish Half/Life: Poems Selected and New in October 2019.  He has been the recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship, a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a Distinguished Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellowship at Brown University.  He has read his work widely across the United States and Europe and is currently professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine Farmington where he teaches poetry and nonfiction.