Starting Monday, January 2, 2023, Story Circle Network will launch a brand-new weekly program, “2023 & Me,” for members and non-members. Every other week, we will meet via Zoom to celebrate the transformational powers of true story telling by reading, writing, and reviewing memoirs by, for, and about women. Cynthia Davidson will facilitate.
If your New Year resolutions include more reading and writing, we hope you’ll join us to reinvigorate your relationship with the written word. Together we’ll explore the real stories of change in the lives of memoir authors. We’ll decode sequences operating at the level of our understanding concerning emotions, themes, and the range of possibilities in our own stories, too.
Our reading and writing habits affect us just as deeply as our DNA’s unique chemical code guides our growth, development, and health at the cellular level. We’ll examine how narratives shape our expectations, assumptions, and ambitions. The meanings we glean from shared stories are as much a part of our common ancestry as the intertwining human genome.
To tap into the universal fundamentals, we will investigate twelve memoirs, one per month, beginning with Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch. Grief drove this former environmental lawyer to return to reading, with a passion. We will look at what else changed in her life after she made the commitment to read one book per day.
There is no fee for this program, nor any requirement to post a review. There will be two live Zoom sessions with emails between meetings. Members are responsible for sourcing their own copies of each featured memoir. Below is our schedule for each month.
- First Monday: We meet on Zoom to discuss why the book was chosen.
- Second Monday: An email will be sent asking participants to share insights about what they’re reading.
- Third Monday: Zoom meeting covers the DN
A questions raised by the ending of book.
- Fourth Monday: Via email, we will share our drafts of reviews and the next book title selected.
The “DNA of True Stories” will consider each story’s quality in terms of impact, elemental features, and the overall process of using storytelling techniques. What’s comparable to other stories? The emotions identified, the story arc, the complexity of the writing, and the story’s goal and themes. We’ll look for the insights that make a true story great. Why did it keep us engaged? What makes a memoir transformative?
Facilitator Cynthia F. Davidson is a long-time SCN faculty member. She also teaches the eight-week overview course, “Would I, Could I, Should I Write a Memoir?” A former CBS News journalist, Cynthia’s memoir, The Importance of Paris, won an IPPY award.
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