“I cannot always control what goes on outside,” wrote Dr. Wayne Dyer, “But I can control what goes on inside.”
Memoir is, in essence, an act of creative control.
This month, Write the World is excited to host a memoir writing competition sponsored by the Wayne Dyer Family Foundation. Open to students ages 13–19, the challenge invites young writers to craft a memoir excerpt of up to 1,000 words. While it connects to the personal essays many students write in class, memoir asks of them something deeper: to distill meaningful moments from their lives, place a single story within a broader personal narrative, and experiment with techniques like backstory and foreshadowing to hint at the larger story still unfolding.
Teaching memoir is a wonderful way to meet US Common Core State Standards for narrative writing, scaffold students’ college essay writing, and/or teach metacognitive skills. When students reflect on their identities and experiences, they engage in meaning-making that can shape their lives long after a single writing assignment. To get started, try out the activities and strategies below.
Teachers often use George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” poem as a mentor text to inspire students to think about their lived experiences, origins, and intersecting identities. Its brevity invites students to think about sensory details and concrete nouns that shape and/or represent who they are. Scaffold memoir writing by inviting students to first engage in this creative poetry activity. What sounds, shapes, smells, tastes, landscapes, or activities illuminate their lives? Once they’ve written their poems (and, optionally, participated in a class open mic to share them and identify connections/differences), engage in a whole-class discussion about how to transfer these craft elements to the memoir genre by building stanzas into scenes.
To harness multimodality—a key tenet of Universal Design for Learning—invite students to create Identity Charts to map the myriad facets of who they are, where they come from, and what is important to them. Students can consider many identity categories as they create: their physical and cultural identifiers; activities and hobbies; geographic origins and ancestry; values and beliefs; personality traits; strengths and areas for growth; memories and future goals; and more. Use this opportunity to introduce the term “intersectionality” and invite students to consider how their identifiers intersect and/or how some become more salient in certain environments.
Once students have completed the Identity Map activity above, invite them to engage in a Gallery Walk activity in which they create an “identity museum,” posting their maps around the room or in a virtual folder.
As they circulate through the gallery, invite them to write responses to at least 3 students’ works (you might tape chart paper alongside each student’s identity map station to facilitate this response process). Ask them to share appreciations and make connections between and across identity maps. This activity can scaffold deeper discourse about self-reflection, metacognition, perspective-taking, and classroom culture.
Of course, given the personal nature of this exercise, sharing/posting should always be optional. Invite students to keep their map(s) handy when starting their memoir draft, using each node as inspiration for developing scenes, backstory, and foreshadowing in their memoir excerpt.
Looking for more resources? Download the memoir lesson plan!
“Any memoirist’s false selves (plural) will take turns plastering themselves across his real mouth to silence the scarier fact of who he is,” writes author Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir, “...False choices based on who you wish you were will result in places where the voice goes awry or the details chosen ring false.”
Memoir opens up a compelling opportunity to examine voice, tone, and the construction of the self in writing. Invite students to consider and critique the theme of truth in memoir writing by using the Personal Narrative Sample Openings linked in Write the World’s memoir writing competition resources. What voices and tones do students notice authors using? Which feels most engaging, and why? Which seems most truthful, and why? How do students know when they are writing authentically—when they are crafting prose both beautiful and true, versus protecting their appearance on the page?
Using these texts, facilitate a Think, Pair, Share (see 16 adaptations on this discussion format here), then a whole group Socratic discussion on these themes, topics, and texts—before refocusing students on their own submissions to the memoir writing competition.
Looking for more teaching resources? Use our library of free lesson plans and middle- and high school teaching strategies.
This content is made possible thanks to support from the Wayne Dyer Family Foundation. The Wayne Dyer Family Foundation is a family‑run nonprofit dedicated to carrying forward Wayne Dyer’s legacy by supporting education, opportunity, and personal growth.
"Transcending labels, particularly those that have been placed on you by others in your past, opens you to the opportunity of soaring in the now in any way that you desire." -Dr. Wayne Dyer