Robin Hemley
How to Write a Memoir in 25 Years or Less: The Memoir-in-Essays
February 28, 2025
11 AM PST | 12 PM MST | 1 PM CST | 2 PM EST
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Not many people would be excited to know that the book they have started will take them 25 years to complete. In fact, many, if not most writers, would likely abandon such a project for something with a little more immediate gratification. But what if such a book was a stealth project, now quite an accidental book, but one that emerged slowly as the writer concurrently pursued other projects? Such is the case with my forthcoming memoir-in-essays, HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY, A SALVAGE PROJECT. The essays that make up this book, while more fragmentary that chapters in a traditional memoir, still do much of the work that a more cohesive memoir does. It’s not so simple as gathering all of one’s essays and calling them a book. The joints might be subtle, but they still need to be there in a memoir-in-essays.
The memoir-in-essays form has been gaining ground over the past several years, perhaps in part because so many writers have published their essays in literary magazines over a long career and have taken a second look at their body of work. But of course, the trick is partly in the ordering, partly in the obsessions and/or themes the writer sees in their essays over time. The earliest essay in this collection, was written in 1999, the latest a year ago. With such a timespan, you might expect the writer to have changed, their life to have twisted and turned, their children grown. And such is the case in this book, but still the obsessions of the writer remain the same (though these obsessions were not always evident as I wrote one essay after another).
Topics I will cover in our discussion:
- Identifying the themes and obsessions that run from essay to essay
- How to order your essays so that they build towards the kind of arc that a more traditional memoir has.
- How to title your memoir
- How to navigate the passage of time in a collection that might span many years.
- Where to submit such a book?
- Who is the audience for a memoir-in-essays?
Bio
Robin Hemley has published sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021). His forthcoming collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project (Nebraska, March, 2025). His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. He is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction (Specualtivenonfiction.org). He has delivered readings, workshops, and lectures around the world and is a Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa. The Digital Storytelling Lab at The University of Iowa was recently dedicated in his honor.
Robin Hemley’s websites are Robinhemley.com and Oblivion.cafe. Subscribe to his Substack at Robinhemley.substack.com.
Forthcoming Events:
- Reading and discussion with Runar Helgi Vignisson at Skala Bookstore, Reykjavik, Iceland, March 14th, 5pm.
- Reading and discussion, April 8th, University of Wisconsin, Lacrosse, April 8th, 7pm
- Reading and discussion, Northern Iowa University, Cedar Falls, April 9th, 6pm
- Reading and discussion at Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA, July 14th 7 pm
- Workshop leader, Iowa Summer Writing Festival, July (workshops and dates to be announced soon).
- Workshop leader, Table Rock Writing Conference, Wildacres, North Carolina, August 25th-29th.
More events coming soon (Check his website to details and/or signup for his mailing list at https://robinhemley.com (Scroll to the bottom of the page).
