Memories and Other Half-Truths: Writing Autofiction

Thanks to the emergence of autofiction (think memoir, essay, notes, and fiction all rolled into one) life writing has never held so many possibilities. Autofiction is at its core experimental, but to go there, you need to interrogate the process.

Bringing yourself into a story opens the potential for deep thinking. whether you’re literally using a first-person narrative to do that or creating a clever mask for the ‘I’ through character.

In this workshop you will examine autofiction as a fluid, conceptual form and look into various definitions to get an understanding of where it currently sits and where it has the potential to go.

Heather Taylor-Johnson writes poetry and prose on Kaurna land. Her essays on art and the body have won the Island Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize. Her latest book, Little Bit, is a work of autofiction about generational trauma, told from the points of view of Heather, her mother, and her grandmother.