Review:
Writing in Paris 2011 with Patti Miller and
the Sydney Writers’ Centre

By Thel Wawrzonek, 2011 participant

“Writing is living out loud” is one of the first quotes Patti Miller used when our group of twelve would-be writers met for the Memoir Writing Course in Paris. That passionate dictum was an apt description of the vibrant excitement we all felt with just being in Paris, a city that values literary and artistic pursuit like no other.
 
Patti Miller is a delightful person, incredibly engaging and connecting with people. She is the observer of others, a teacher who draws the best from her students, totally open and non-judgmental, and gently, sensitively giving constructive feedback.
 
She precipitated the extraction of my buried and burning memories, facilitating them into words that I can share as meaningful memoir. She always made me feel that my work had value even if it can only be used as background material or as “secret writing”, to be thrown out after it served its purpose as necessary purging of angst or over-indulgence. As an ardent editor of so much writing material she quickly discerned what material could be worthy of publication or where it could possibly find a home.
 
Each day Patti used various writing exercises illustrating methods that tapped into our memories and got us writing about them. She kept reminding us “to follow the heat”, to grab onto the things that make us passionate in life – events, things or images – and write about them using the narrative making process.
 
Looking back on those two weeks I can see that she in fact incorporated this very technique  herself. Each day, as we used another way of looking and writing, it was like a little surge of passion for a memory or thing of meaning, and then it culminated in the crescendo of discovery, with the vital something to pull it all together.

Essentially, she had orchestrated a dynamic way of illustrating to us how to get writing our memoir. She had made the very structure of the course a separate narrative story in itself, of a group learning to write memoirs in Paris with Patti Miller – a story for her and a story for each of us.
 
This course has been a big stepping-stone to getting what I need to write down onto a page. It spurs me on to keep writing and applying what I have learnt.
 
When I started writing this page I didn’t fully realise the impact of Patti’s course but the very writing about it using her technique of teasing the memories of these past two weeks and finding the words to describe the process has re-awakened that lesson.  Ah, 'tis the power of writing the memories seen through the lace-screen that she talked about.
 
I believe it was indeed her personality and passion drawing us out, compelling us to write it down in Paris, that made this Memoir Writing Course with Patti Miller one of the most worthwhile experiences of my life.