WD Editors

Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life Into Literature
By Bill Roorbach
ISBN: 978-1-58297-527-6
Coming in June 2008!

Have you ever looked at your life and thought, “That would make a great story”?

Turning the engaging, untold stories of one’s life into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs is both an art and a learned skill. Bill Roorbach’s friendly instruction and stimulating exercises teach writers how to open up memory, access emotion and discover compelling material; shape scenes from experience, as life events become plot lines; and populate stories with the fascinating, silly, and maddening “characters” that surround them.
Writing Life Stories appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi; students and teachers write, phone, e-mail, and fax the author—from around the world, including Australia and Japan—to say thanks. (The book has been translated into Japanese.)
Roorbach elaborates on the many elements involved in writing creative nonfiction, including memory, scene setting, ideation, character development, and research.

About the Author

Since 1998, Bill Roorbach has published six books (both award-winning fiction and nonfiction) and increased his appearances at colleges and conferences across the country. He holds the Williams H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass. (a substantial leap in academic credentials since 1998).