What if you could translate that vacation or the way your Uncle Robert’s hair receded or the feel of your first phone call into writing that would survive you, that would take the reader on a trip with you?
You can. “Write About Your Life” creative writing training teaches tools that writers use to close the gap between what they witnessed and what the reader sees on the page.
Write About your Life was created by Laynie Tzena, MFA, Director of Ideas Made Real. When the University of Colorado debuted its Creative Writing program, Tzena was among its first students; her teachers included Padma Perera, Alan Dugan, and Richard Hugo. After a brief hiatus, Tzena transferred to the University of Massachusetts to work with James Tate (later to win the Pulitzer Prize).
She considers Tate the spiritual father of Write About Your Life. He gave one of his classes the assignment of writing a poem about their home town. “’Plainfield,’ I thought, ‘What on Earth am I going to write about Plainfield, New Jersey:?’” Tzena remembers. “Many young writers assume, as I did, that sweeping landscapes and grand statements are the only ‘real stuff.’ But Flannery O’Connor said that those who have survived kindergarten have acquired enough raw material for the rest of their lives.”
That writing assignment took Tzena into new territory. “I had ridden my bicycle to school that day. On the way back home, the piece started writing itself in my head.” The resulting poem, “Plainfield,” was one of the most powerful pieces of writing Tzena had ever done. She was hooked.
Today, she comments, “Paul Valery wrote, ‘There is another life, but it is in this one.’ That assignment helped me discover my own neighborhood. I found that the Jersey street corners and stores, my Aunt Anna’s Brooklyn accent, were treasures I’d totally missed. But I still spin stories out of the air; I just pull in a neighbor now and again.”
Write About your Life is the only training of its kind, in that it has an autobiographical focus without being limited to nonfiction. Writers engaged in Write About Your Life training choose the form in which they want to work: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, song, solo theater, humor. “The only requirement for the training is that the seed for the material come from the writer’s own life,” says Tzena, “something s/he heard or saw, something s/he witnessed. From there, the forms are open.” As someone who wrote her first song when she was nine, and has since written and been recognized for her work in a variety of forms, Tzena is certainly qualified to help.
At Michigan, where she got her MFA in poetry with a concentration in short fiction, Tzena’s work received several honors, including an Avery Hopwood award for poetry (following in the footsteps of one of her heroes, Frank O’Hara), a Cranbrook Writers Guild scholarship for fiction, and a Creative Artist grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. After seeing Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s Search for Signs of Intelligent life in the Universe, Tzena moved to San Francisco to pursue solo theater.
Tzena performs regularly around town. One of the pieces she has performed most had a painful beginning: “Welcome to the Promised Land” is based on the story of Richard Harcos, a cabdriver friend who was murdered in the Sunnydale housing project in 1992. Another autobiographical piece had a happier antecedent: “A Scavenger Hunt in My Own Life,” the column that won the 1992 San Francisco Column competition, describes Tzena’s experience as a post office box holder. Tzena’s work has been published in several literary magazines, including the Sonora Review and Helicon Nine. She has been featured at the Marsh Café, The Austin International Poetry Festival, and on Michigan Public Radio.
