The instructor—an award-winning author who offers decades of teaching, writing, editing, and publishing experience—will provide encouragement and guidance as you write your own story. Open your mind to new perspectives on writing memoirs.
| Next Session | Nov. 3, 2025 – Dec. 8, 2025 |
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Learn how to write a memoir.
These are just a few of the prompts used in this beginning memoir writing class. We’ll engage in a variety of in-class exercises to help you rediscover life moments you want to capture. No formal writing experience is necessary, just a desire to explore your story and what compels you to tell it. Using key approaches to writing anything—Observation, Memory, Imagination, Research—participants will accomplish the following:
- Identify memories you want to capture on the page.
- Examine ways to tell stories.
- Practice writing through guided assignments.
- Produce a draft of your own memoir.
Participants will also read short examples of memoir and discuss them as a way to develop their own craft.
Who should attend
Community adults, aspiring writers, family documenters or anyone wishing to to create a memoir. No formal writing experience is necessary, just a desire to write.
Instructors
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Patti See has facilitated over 100 presentations and workshops to teenage through senior audiences on topics as varied as leadership and emotional intelligence, creative non-fiction writing, contemporary films, fostering grit, everyday feminism, keeping men in college, Alzheimer’s Disease, kidney & bone marrow donation, and equity-diversity-inclusion.
She is an award-winning author whose work has appeared in Brevity, Salon Magazine, The Wisconsin Academy Review, The Southwest Review, HipMama, Inside HigherEd and many other magazines, journals and anthologies. Her essay collection about life in the Chippewa Valley, Here on Lake Hallie: In Praise of Barflies, Fix-it-Guys, and Other Folks in Our Hometown, was published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2022. She also wrote the blog “Our Long Goodbye: One Family’s Experiences with Alzheimer’s Disease” which has been read in over 100 countries. She is a frequent contributor to Wisconsin Life on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Patti recently retired from UWEC after 31 years in a variety of roles.