January 26-30, 2011
at the University of Oklahoma

This class is full

What makes a good memoir? Is “good writing” enough, or do you need high drama? How does memoir differ from autobiography, and where is the borderline between memoir and fiction? How far can you stretch or embroider the truth? What if you just can’t quite remember what happened?

In this seminar, we’ll explore what makes a memoir memorable. Our approach will be practical rather than academic, oscillating between analytic mind and creative mind. We’ll discuss a number of classic and recent memoirs, appreciating how other writers have played with chronology, character, reality, and the relationship between writer and reader. Our discussions will be interspersed with short sessions of “disposable writing,” designed to quiet the inner critic in order to allow the imagination to come out and play. Students will share these disposable pieces in the seminar setting, but will have individual tutorials on their ongoing work.

Reading List to include (books will be supplied by OSLEP)
*Allegra Huston, Love Child and the Harper’s Bazaar piece “Daddies’ Girl”
*Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
*Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
*Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
*Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life
*Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
*Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

Allegra Huston’s book LOVE CHILD: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found was published in the US and the UK in 2009 to rapturous reviews:

“An exceptional telling of an extraordinary life. I loved it” - Salman Rushdie
"a stunning and unusual memoir… this is simply a wonderful book – part mystery, part journey, part heartbreak" - Liz Smith, Variety
“extraordinary… [Huston] is an absolutely outstanding writer, incapable of writing a dull sentence” – Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph
“[Huston] writes with such clarity and gentleness that, at times, the poignancy is almost unbearable ... a beautifully crafted memoir, written with both tenderness and unsparing honesty" - Observer
“near-flawless” – Miranda Seymour, Daily Mail

In 2010, LOVE CHILD went into paperback in the US and the UK and was published in Spain and Mexico.

Allegra was born in London and grew up in Ireland, Long Island, Los Angeles, and Mexico. After losing her mother in a car crash at the age of four, Allegra was raised by the film director John Huston--only to discover when she was twelve that her biological father was in fact another man, the British aristocrat and historian John Julius Norwich. LOVE CHILD is the story of how she found a sense of identity among the shifting sands of two families, which also includes her actor siblings Anjelica Huston and Danny Huston.

After gaining a First Class degree in English Language and Literature from Hertford College, Oxford, Allegra joined the London publishers Chatto & Windus, then moved to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where she was Editorial Director from 1990 to 1994. She worked with authors including Booker Prize-winners Iris Murdoch and Alan Hollinghurst, Robert Conquest, Jane Goodall, Barbara Leaming, and Edna O’Brien.

In 1994 Allegra became Acquisitions & Development consultant to Pathé Pictures in London, leaving in 1997 to write and edit freelance. Her journalism has appeared in the Tatler, The Independent on Sunday and The Times in the UK, in French Vogue, and in the Santa Fean and People magazine. Excerpts of Love Child appeared in the Sunday Times (UK) and US Vogue. Her article about midwifery, “Catching Babies in New Mexico,” written for Mothering magazine, was chosen for the website of the New Mexico state historian. She is a frequent guest contributor to wowowow.com.

Allegra is currently producing a short film based on her own screenplay, Good Luck, Mr. Gorski. She has also written six feature-length screenplays, including an adaptation of Jill Paton Walsh's Booker Prize-shortlisted Knowledge of Angels and a treatment for an animated adaptation of Kipling's Just So Stories which was optioned by Elton John's Rocket Pictures and the Walt Disney Company.

Allegra is co-director of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops, along with the poet James Navé, who for ten years taught creativity retreats with Julia Cameron, bestselling author of The Artist’s Way. The Imaginative Storm techniques put a premium on playfulness and discovery, generating fresh and energetic writing, and discovering one’s own individual voice. Limited to 15 people per four-day workshop, the Imaginative Storm happens twice a year in Taos, New Mexico. Allegra and Nave have also taken their workshop to Oklahoma University’s OSLEP program, the Savannah Book Festival, and travel to Ireland every November to teach a three-day retreat workshop for the students in the screenwriting program at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Allegra has lived in Taos, New Mexico, since 1999. Her partner, Cisco Guevara, is a noted local storyteller and president of Los Rios River Runners, New Mexico’s oldest and largest whitewater rafting company. They live in a traditional adobe house which they designed and built themselves, with their eight-year-old son, Rafael Patrick Gerónimo Niño de Ortíz Ladrón de Guevara, known as Rafa.