Writers Workshop: Strange experience becomes memoir
Published on January 26, 2022
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman uses her own bizarre experience as an aspiring violinist in a professional music ensemble to exemplify how factual aspects of our lives can be turned into an amazing narrative.
“Many people believe there is only one path to becoming a famous violinist,” Hindman says in a video introduction to her memoir. “I am here to report that there are actually two.”
The first option involves a lot of talent, hard work and dedication to be accepted into a highly regarded school on your way to making it in the music world. The second – the one she survived – involves playing softly in front of turned-off microphones as the audience hears a CD of another orchestra. That second option included a 54-city tour during which she paid her college tuition and New York City rent, so not all was lost.
She tells that story in Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir, one of those stranger-than-fiction experiences where a mysterious mastermind known as The Composer gaslights audiences with prerecorded music that sounds like the Titanic movie soundtrack. The audiences don’t notice, and respond as if they’re witnessing an amazing live performance.
While hers is not a common experience, her process for writing a memoir can be helpful for anyone wanting to document their lives in an effective way. A memoir, by definition, is a format in which writers use their life experience to support a larger theme or idea. An autobiography, on the other hand, is when usually well-known people share unknown details of their lives.
Hindman will guide aspiring memoirists on a journey to separating their past-selves in order to better write about their lives with insight and wisdom. Her Writers Workshop presentation is set for 6:30-8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 3, at the Southwest Regional Library, 4001 Library Lane. Participants may also join the presentation virtually via Zoom.
The program will include a discussion on how to separate one’s past from their present writer-self, review experts written by writers who have successful separated the two and then complete a writing exercise to help drive home the method. There will also be an opportunity to share for instant feedback and encouragement.