Family Secrets Uncovered

I love teaching a workshop called Memoir to Fiction–one of the tricky things that happens when you are writing about your family is that you sometimes uncover truths that no one wants to talk about. Therefore, you turn it into fiction! In this way, you can change names, orchestrate events and smooth rough edges, or, do the opposite–imagine “what if.” Since very often we don’t actually know what happened, we have to imagine what could have happened. In the video below, I share some family photos and talk very briefly about the family secrets that led to my writing Annie Laura’s Triumph.