Encompass everything from the complete life to the day-in-the-life.
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When: 5 x sessions, Monday 29 April - Friday 3 May, 9:30am - 1pm
Where: The University of Auckland, City Campus​

Course outline
Writing memoir involves an intricate interplay between writing down and preserving your own memories and constructing biographical accounts of the people, including the ancestors, who have left an imprint on your life. On this course, you will receive tuition on the fundamentals of writing memoir and biography and its ethical implications along with techniques that will assist you to write with flair and originality about the key figures, both living and from the past, who have influenced and helped shape your life. It is suitable for participants who have not yet completed Life Writing 1.

Who should attend?

• People who have completed Deborah’s Life Writing or memoir courses.
• New writers interested in discovering their writing voice through writing about themselves and the people who frame their life.
• Writers already engaged on a life story project who are wishing to deepen and revive their writing content.

Identify key writing strengths and continue developing those skills through journaling.

When: 6 x Tuesdays 19 February - 26 March, 6:00 - 8:30pm
​Where: The University of Auckland, City Campus

Course description
We are living through increasingly turbulent times, in an age awash in online content much of it edifying and conducive to creativity but some of it disruptive to concentration and to maintaining a more contemplative approach to living and being.

This journal workshop, presented by an experienced tutor and journaller, offers a quiet writing sanctuary where you can reconnect with your inner life and discover what is on your mind and what you deeply care about and also deepen your experience of the present. The course includes an introduction to the pleasures of the journal form, with writing techniques and triggers for a series of writing exercises along with discussion and analysis of writing samples from some of the great proponents of the genre: Henry David Thoreau, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, Thomas Merton, Etty Hillesum, John Keats, Samuel Pepys, Sylvia Plath, May Sarton, Joan Didion, Anais Nin and Kate Llewellyn.

This six week course will appeal to people wanting to use the journal for self-exploration, or to develop formal writing skills for other projects, or to chronicle and preserve your daily observations of the world, from the humble and small, to the splendid and sublime.

Under Deborah’s gentle guidance you will have five blissful days to indulge your dream and begin your life writing project in a collaborative and supportive environment.

Where: The University of Auckland, City Campus
When: 5 x sessions, Monday 21 - Friday 25 January, 9:30am - 1pm

Learning outcomes
On completion of this course, participants will be able to: continue the reading programme established on the course, using my bibliography and read memoir critically sit down and write with confidence write for online publication continue writing their memoir for book publication, for blogging, as an essay, for a family history project and perform the writing at the monthly Inside Out Open Mic forum.

Who should attend?
This course is designed for: new writers, people who are interested in writing and are newcomers to the genre people who want to discover their writing voice people who want to record their stories for their family people who want to write and publish their life story people who want to explore their inner world and express their thoughts and feelings and observations and transform them into literature young and older writers people who have written in another genre such as fiction or poetry, or non-fiction and who want to explore memoir.