It’s week three of our micro-memoir session and challenge. Time to read, write, and talk all about food. Please read the following micro pieces on food:

“Taste” by Judith Beck, published in Brevity using only 168 words
“Oatmeal” by Patricia Twomey Ryan, published in Brevity
“Morning Ritual” by Virginia Foley, published in Five Minutes One Hundred Words written using exactly one-hundred words

For our discussion, we’ll focus on “Taste” by Judith Beck. Beck does an amazing job communicating emotions in so few words. Identify the emotions portrayed in “Taste” and be ready to tell what she did to convey each feeling.

After we finish our discussion, I’ll open the floor for brief comments on any of the other micro-memoirs in this week’s reading assignments.

Once you’ve read the selected micro-memoirs, write your own using 300 words or less, not including the title or your name.

IMPORTANT: Would you like to replace either our Inside Life Writers or Q&A/Help a Member sessions for the next few months with a micro-memoir feedback session? For this, you’d bring any one of your micro-stories to read and receive feedback. You’d be placed in groups of two or three people, similar to what we do in our monthly feedback session, but with this one, you would not need to submit your pieces in advance. Please complete this two/three-question survey, and let me know your thoughts.

This week, we look at the list structure of writing micro-memoir. You may not think you can tell a story simply using lists, but you can. There are books devoted to and written in list structures.

Even many newspaper and magazine reporters have taken to writing articles in list form, so much so that a new word was created to describe them, the listicle. 

It’s perfectly geared for today’s culture of skimming and absorbing content in bite-sized portions.

I love what Deborah Thompson says about the listicle in her piece in Brevity titled “Ten Things You Need to Know About Listicles,” which, of course, is written as a listicle. She writes, “Listicles can’t develop an argument, complicate it, revise and refine it.  It’s the mode not of cause-and-effect but of oh-and-another-thing.” I like that description because it depicts a type of listicle, but for our purposes, I believe a list can build and unfold into a coherent story.

The list structure of writing personal stories takes on many appearances.

The lists can be numbered like “What Bad Owners Say at the Dog Park” by Lise Funderburg or not, as in “The Shopping List You Left on the Counter” by Matthew Merson.

Each item in the list may begin with the same two or three words, such as “When You Meet My Father” by Jordan Wiklund or not.

Last week’s Life Writers vlog topic, I Remember, focused on writing stories in list form. I gave a prompt with instructions to write your response as a list. People came back with some great pieces, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to do so.

Then, write a list that tells a story. You can double dip, write a list micro-memoir on food, and post it on the vlog and our week three page.