Memoirs in Fragments

Since the publication of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return in 2001, there has been a steady proliferation of memoirs that use the fragment as its main literary unit. These include The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch (2011), The White Book by Han Kang (2017), In the Dream House (2019) by Carmen Maria Machado, and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden (2019). Many of these nontraditional memoirs explore issues such as displacement and diaspora, gender and sexuality, grief and the body. Perhaps, the fragment as a form affords imaginative inquiry into these issues in ways that linear narrative cannot.

In this 6-week generative seminar, we will close read excerpts from these books and write fragments inspired by them.

Throughout, we will explore answers to questions like:
-What are the literary possibilities of the fragment? What do fragments do that chapters and stanzas don’t?
-How does the fragment serve authors of memoir differently than prose forms like the braided essay? Other genres, like fiction and poetry?
-How have different writers gathered fragments into a whole in book-length works?

About Julie

Julie Moon is a writer, translator, and teacher from Seoul. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing and Literary Translation from Columbia University, where she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of English. Most recently, she taught as a Lecturer in writing at the University of California, San Diego. Her writing and translations have been published in Public Books, Catapult, EssayDaily, MENT Magazine, Arkansas International, The Rumpus, Brooklyn Rail, The Margins, Black Warrior Review, The Evergreen Review, and more. She is currently at work on her debut memoir, which received the 2025 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction, was a finalist for the 2022 Megaphone Prize for Writers of Color, and a semifinalist in Essay Press's 2021 Book Contest. Her honors include an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, a MacDowell Fellowship in Literature, a Literary Translation Institute of Korea Translation Grant, and a Miller Audio Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review.