It's Me, Hi!
& I'm writing a book
Hello, I’m Alyssa. :)
In five weeks, I’m graduating with my MFA in creative nonfiction! I’ve had an amazing experience in the program, and the main project that I’ve worked on is writing a memoir.
Why would I write a memoir? Isn’t that just navel gazing?
Perhaps.
However, most people’s understanding of memoir is closer to that of autobiography. Autobiographies tend to be written about famous people and span their entire lifetimes for no reason other than to tell their story.
Memoir is a little bit different. Memoir (at least contemporary memoir) is less about capturing someone’s entire life, and more about capturing one element or time period of their life, and then using that to connect to a larger, more universal audience.
When you finish an autobiography, readers are usually left thinking about the writer. When you finish a memoir, a good memoir, you’re left thinking about yourself.
What do I write about anyway?
My memoir in progress (the manuscript is done and now I’m querying agents!) is a coming-of-age about a childhood and adolescence as a Mormon girl in Utah. I write about my experience as a Mormon child, and how the lessons that I learned through the church (such as obedience, purity, and striving for perfection) became a major factor in my development of anorexia when I was a freshman at BYU.
After I left BYU, I married an RM (a returned missionary for the church), and the relationship immediately became deeply unhealthy, much of which was confirmed by the doctrine of the church.
And so, I write about what a young Mormon woman does when all she wants is to follow the teachings that will lead her to Heaven, and what happens when the Plan of Happiness isn’t so joyful after all.
Why subscribe?
I see Substack as a bridge. A bridge between readers and writers and people who consume literary magazines and people who don’t. It’s a bridge between Mormons and exMormons and religious people and non religious people. A lot of social media I see is all about niching down into one personality trait. Most of the published writing in literary magazines isn’t read by people in the regular world. These discrepancies have been weighing on me lately, and I’ve been feeling a little stuck. So here we are.
Here, I just want a place to share myself. :)
I’ll make posts about writing, reading, Mormon stuff, maybe a bit of crochet. Sometimes I’ll offer writing tips and analysis, and sometimes I’ll just share photos from one of the best days of my life at the The Eras Tour. (And yes, I’ll be riding that high for a while.)
Love,
Lys
