Write About What You Can’t Remember with Laura Davis

Laura Davis

5-Week Intensive Zoom Master Class for Memoir Writers: How to Write About What You Can’t Remember with Laura Davis

Five Monday Evenings, May 12 to June 9, 2025
6:30 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern time
3:30 to 6:00 pm Pacific time
Class is limited to 30 participants
$450, due in full at registration

Is vivid recall essential to writing memoir?

Many of us believe that writing memoir requires us to accurately remember our past and then transcribe our memories. This belief stops us before we begin because we are appalled at how much we don’t remember. Sometimes it feels as if whole years of our lives have been wiped out. And so, we believe our writing is doomed because there is so much that we don’t remember.

In addition to personal stories you long to write, you may also carry family stories that haunt you—stories you can never know the truth about because the people involved are dead, unreachable or unwilling to tell the truth: your mother’s breakdown when she was a teenager, your grandfather’s desertion of the family, the dead child nobody talks about. These family secrets and untold stories can be transformed into gripping stories, essential scenes in your personal narrative.

But how? You may be wondering, “How can I possibly write about what I can’t remember?”

This interactive workshop, with master teacher Laura Davis, will teach you how to transform scraps of memory into a rich written legacy. You’ll learn to capture the memories you do have, enhance recollections that are vague or unclear, and write effectively and powerfully about the parts of your history it is impossible to know for sure. You will walk away with five versatile strategies for writing vividly and evocatively about parts of your history is it impossible to know for sure.

This workshop is appropriate for anyone wanting to learn more about the craft of memoir and personal storytelling, especially those struggling to fill in gaps in their narrative. It will be a participatory class; we’ll do writing exercises and share work in every session.

Laura Davis is the author of The Courage to Heal, The Burning Light of Two Stars, and five other groundbreaking books. In addition to writing books that inspire, the work of Laura’s heart is to teach. For more than twenty-five years, she’s helped people find their voices, tell their stories, and hone their craft. Laura has been published in Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Digest, CrimeReads, Brevity, and The New York Times, featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on QWERTY, Write-Minded, The Only One in the Room, and dozens of other podcasts. She’s been a featured speaker for The National Association of Memoir Writers and an acclaimed teacher at The San Miguel Writer’s Conference and at Esalen in Big Sur. A passionate traveler, Laura takes writers on international adventures every year. She’s brought writers to Scotland, Greece, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Peru, hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and next summer, to Bali to study with traditional healers. This spring, she’ll be leading a writing retreat, Flourishing as We Age, in Santa Cruz, California. You can learn about Laura’s retreats, online classes and international writing adventures at www.lauradavis.net.