Program Details
108 Hours of Instruction
- For most of the 12-month program, students meet for three-hour workshops on Tuesday evenings via online Zoom sessions. Workshops are led by instructor Xujun Eberlein, who also provides written feedback and lectures on various elements of the craft of memoir-writing. These classes will include analysis of published memoirs and impromptu discussions about the memoir-writing process. The workshop schedule includes breaks to allow for vacation time, especially in the summer and over the winter holidays. Because workshop participation is crucial, the full 12-month schedule will be available to students soon after students are notified of acceptance into the program.
Individual consultations with the instructor
- After each workshop, students whose manuscripts were workshopped will meet with the instructor individually on a mutually agreed-upon date and time. The goal of these meetings is to allow the writer to synthesize the multiple perspectives students have heard at the workshop meetings, as well as strategize more specific plans for their work. Each writer will receive a minimum of 9 hours of individual consultation, including meetings following each workshop, amid breaks, and after the writer’s editorial consultation with the Second Reader (see below), as well as a 2-hour meeting after their Manuscript Mart meeting. These hours are student-directed and project-focused, designed to augment the curriculum with instruction that is particular to each student's specific projects and goals, and help the writer to come up with a concrete plan for next steps.
Weekly word count check-ins
- To ensure that your manuscript develops, you will turn in 2000 words of rough draft or 3000 words of revised material every week the Incubator is in session. These words will not be workshopped, but everyone will be required to complete them. The more you write, the easier it is to write!
Additional full memoir consultation and meeting with established author
- As part of the course, students receive detailed written feedback on their revised memoir draft as well as a one hour face-to-face or phone/Zoom discussion with an established author who will act as a Second Reader. This meeting is typically scheduled to occur during the third phase of the class, depending on readers’ availability. The program considers this outside voice vital in providing a well-rounded response to the memoir as a whole.
Manuscript Mart appointment and invitations to exclusive events with industry professionals
- The Manuscript Mart is an opportunity to have five pages of the student's manuscript read by an agent or editor, who will meet with the student for twenty minutes to provide critical feedback. GrubStreet also holds various events (either in-person or online) that connect our Intensives students with key industry professionals.
Growing Alumni Program
- GrubStreet is in the midst of developing a more robust programming specifically for its Intensives alumni. We’re in the middle of gathering ideas and thoughts from graduates of our programs to fuel events and workshops tailored specifically for their needs to continue supporting them in a more sustained way on their writing journeys. Stay tuned for more!
Tell-All Boston Reading Series
- Students are invited to submit to Tell-All Boston, a seasonal nonfiction reading series run by graduates of the Memoir and Essay Incubator Programs. After graduating from the Memoir Incubator students may join the Tell-All committee or work on other alumni initiatives. Graduates of the program also join a supportive community of alumni, who share and celebrate one another's publishing successes, discuss writing in social groups, and help curate post-program activities.
The General Schedule & Timeline
The year begins in June, and will be divided into three phases, each explained in more detail below. In the first phase, writers will read a memoir and a craft book in common and will engage in weekly craft discussions. Each writer will also have their manuscript intensively workshopped one time. The second phase will be devoted to in-depth analysis of the memoir form, with special attention paid to structure, world-building, and scene versus summary. Each writer will be workshopped twice. In addition, the writers will read a published memoir in common, to be determined in advance by the instructor. In the third phase, each writer’s full set of manuscript pages are again workshopped. This phase will also focus on identifying sections of the manuscript that could stand alone as excerpts or essays. Visiting guest speakers will help illuminate issues around the marketplace, including writing query letters, and pitching editors and agents.
During breaks between phases–typically periods of intense writing–each student will read a book that is particularly helpful to them in crafting their own memoir, and write a short craft paper. And as the year unfolds, with the instructor’s assistance writers will continue to identify books that will be particularly helpful to them in crafting their own memoir. Each writer will be expected to read regularly and widely.
The Memoir Incubator contains three phases.
11 classes
"A poet writes always of his personal life… [but] he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” – W. B. Yeats
The aim of this phase of the class will be to learn to see and separate what Vivian Gornick calls the “situation” of the memoir (the plot, or the events the memoir is strung together from) from the memoir’s “story” (“the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say”). Making story from situation is key to reaching for the kind of truth that makes one person’s life interesting and illuminative to the reading stranger, the fundamental obligation of the literary memoir. This process also requires that the writer fashion herself into a literary persona, with enough distance to shape the memoir to be shared with a wider audience.
The first class meeting will cover introductions and logistics. In the following week, we will discuss the idea of the central question and the craft book read in common, beginning to isolate concepts that will be explored in greater depth in the weeks to come and beginning to establish a common vocabulary and set of aims for the literary memoir. Throughout the remainder of the phase, exercises may be assigned and discussed.
Each of the ten weeks to come will be split between a craft discussion (on topics such as theme, voice, character, etc.) and intensive workshop of a single manuscript.
All writers will also meet with the instructor one on one after their workshop. The one-hour meeting will take place on Zoom at a mutually agreed upon time. This time is used to discuss class feedback and to devise a revision plan for the writer.
Over the summer break between phases one and two, in addition to working on their manuscripts, writers are asked to each read a memoir that is structurally similar to their project. The instructor will have provided suggestions on this before this point in the year, as well as discussed how to find other structurally or thematically similar memoirs. The class may meet once more mid-summer as desired.
11 classes
One of the most important skills the memoirist must learn is to see their book as a book, and understand how the parts will work in concert with each other. This involves not being wedded to a particular plan or vision for the book, but a willingness to see what the story really is, even if it means work ahead. Often, as the memoirist writes and digs deeper into the material of their life, they will realize that the story means something other than what they first thought, and so they must rethink the structure to highlight the new understanding.
It is, therefore, not the plan for the book that is important, but rather the ability to plan, for it is the latter that keeps the memoirist writing. Successful memoirists are the ones that engage in a symbiotic process of creating and assessing. To this end, a class will focus on structure, one of the most important and least understood aspects of the literary memoir. We will read one memoir in common during this class period, but also look at the structure of many other memoirs, through analytical synopses provided by the instructor.
During this class period, the idea of excerpting a smaller section of the book for publication as an essay will also be introduced. Doing so will provide the writer the chance to practice structure on a smaller scale, as well as make use of material that may be moving to the background of the larger work. All students will work on creating an excerpted or adapted essay, which they will workshop alongside their chapter submissions.
We will workshop each writer twice over this period. Students will meet with the instructor individually following each of their workshops. Instructor attention will be focused on spurring each student towards a complete manuscript. Students are expected to write intensively throughout the class year.
11 classes
The first session in this period is designated to review everyone’s progress and final development plan. During each of the remaining ten weeks, we will workshop one writer in full. Writers will be encouraged to submit a full manuscript, and they will have been working with this goal in mind throughout the year. Workshops will focus on the art of the storytelling at both the macro (book) and micro (sentence) levels, continuing the arc of the course that began with the first period.
Class time will also be devoted to discussion and exercises on effective synopsis writing, agent query letter writing, guest speakers, and further discussion of revision, including line-editing. Each student will meet with the instructor one time during this period, at a mutually convenient time scheduled after their workshop.
Also during this period, each writer will have developmental consultations with their Second Reader. This Second Reader will offer objective developmental guidance on the draft. The student will then incorporate that feedback into the plans for revision. After the consultations, students will confer with the instructor to come up with a personalized plan for further revision.
The dates above may shift a week or two forward or back depending on student and instructor availability, as well as the Manuscript Mart and industry events schedule and deadlines.
Class meets on Tuesdays, 6:00 to 9:00pm EST, online via Zoom
- Phase One: June 3, 2025 – August 12, 2025
- Phase Two: September 23, 2025 – December 9, 2025 (skipping Thanksgiving week)
- Phase Three: January 27, 2026 – April 7, 2026
- Final Classroom and Individual Meetings: Dates TBD
- Graduation: Tentatively May 5, 2026, 6:00 to 8:00pm ET via Zoom