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Do you want to write about your life,
someone else's life, life in general?
Then life writing is your genre. It includes autobiography, memoir, travel and sojourn writing, narrative non-fiction, biography and even the personal essay. It is a way of exploring your own experience of life, other people's lives and places, topics and themes. You can write about your year in South America, about your mother's childhood in Romania, about your olive farm in outback Australia, about growing up in the suburbs - or about
any of the experiences of life.
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Life writing is inclusive. Everyone has a story of his or her own experience of being in the world. Whatever your achievements or challenges or pain, your story is worth telling - and worth telling in a powerful and absorbing way.
Time after time, the thousands of Life Stories I have read and worked on reveal that each individual being is miraculous and unique, and that at the same time we share so much as we travel throughour lives.
Patti Miller
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No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
Obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
From People
by Yevgeny Yevteshenko
Full poem
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In life writing, you are facing yourself as much as if you were sailing solo around the world, so it is a pursuit for the adventurous. Memoir and autobiography are not straightforward historical records or exercises in self-justification, but are true journeys of exploration, exciting and sometimes confronting. There is joy and revelation and the creative struggle to find the words to do justice to your experience.
Patti Miller, founder of the Life Stories Workshop, is an established writer and Australia's most experienced life-writing teacher. Her books have been published by Allen & Unwin and Random House. Her passionate and supportive approach to life writing has grown out of her love and knowledge of the art of writing and literature and her fascination with the stories of our lives. She has
taught writing workshops for more than
twenty years, specialising in life writing since 1991 and is the author of the best selling Writing Your Life and The Memoir Book.
Life Stories Services will show you what Patti can do to help you get started on the journey of life writing, or if you have already started, guide you along the most rewarding paths. She knows how to help you write the best possible autobiographical or memoir manuscript. See Clients for a growing list of writers with whom she has worked and who have been successfully published.
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Special events in 2009
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Writing in Paris
Join me this year in Paris for the Memoir workshop organised by the Sydney Writers' Centre and Aureol Tours.. More
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