Blog
Master Memoir Craft: An Interview with Leila Nadir
by Writing Workshops Staff
5 hours ago
Sometimes what separates a memoir that languishes in circles from one that moves steadily toward completion is simply knowing the craft. Leila C. Nadir, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow and memoirist, believes that mastering a few essential techniques can dramatically accelerate a memoirist's process. In her upcoming six-week workshop, Memoir Craft: Deepening Strategies for Life Writing, Nadir offers writers the tools and insights she wishes she'd had earlier in her own journey.
Drawing from her experience as an essayist, editor for Los Angeles Review of Books, and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, Nadir has designed a course that balances rigorous craft instruction with the deeply personal work of excavating memory.
Students will explore the essential narrative structures unique to memoir—including the crucial balance between past and present selves—while gaining practical revision strategies and a shared vocabulary for discussing their work. Nadir creates workshop environments that empower rather than diminish, where feedback buoys writers forward rather than holding them back.
Whether you're just beginning to put your story on the page or seeking new techniques to break through creative blocks, this workshop offers both illumination and community.
Writing Workshops: Hi, Leila. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Leila Nadir: Hi Writers! I'm Leila, and I love working with narrative, story, books, essays, words, sentences, paragraphs—I'm obsessed with all things writing—and I love supporting writers in the sacred and complex work of finding their own voices and stories. I just finished writing my own memoir, and I also write essays, most of which have appeared in literary journals. Though I recently published an op-ed at Salon.com that I'm really proud of because I included all kinds of memoiristic details in the editorial form, which is not usually so memoiristic. I'm all for the power of memoir to transform political, national, even global conversations.
Writing Workshops: What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice?
Leila Nadir: I designed my Memoir Craft class because I see so many of my memoir students and clients writing for a long time—sometimes in circles!—without knowing some of the tricks and tips of writing memoir that could really speed up their process. For example, when you figure out the essential narrative structure of memoir—the balance of past and present selves, or the difference between a situation and the story—suddenly writing memoir proceeds so much more quickly. I know this from experience. My memoir took ten years to write, and if I'd known some of these tricks that I now teach, I think that time might have been cut in half. My Memoir Craft course will provide all kinds of lessons and exercises to help students master the basics of writing memoir, so they can get busy with what matters most: excavating memories and telling their stories.
Writing Workshops: Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
Leila Nadir: There will be craft lectures, generative exercises, and workshops of students' pages. The craft lessons are illuminating for students and the generative exercises allow us to put new craft awareness into practice immediately. But perhaps what I love most is seeing the new memoir craft skills students learn show up a few days later in their memoir excerpts during workshops and to see students develop a common language together to talk about their memoirs.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Leila Nadir: My first literary crush had to be Willa Cather. In my high school years, when I first discovered the classics of American literature, I became obsessed with her and tried to read everything she wrote. I grew up in an immigrant family—I am first-generation Afghan and third-generation Slovak—and Cather's depiction of immigrant voices (from Sweden, Bohemia, Germany, Russia) and her depiction of their alienations from American culture moved me deeply. I even traveled to Red Cloud, Nebraska, and toured the places that appear in My Ántonia. Of course, today I regret Cather's omission of the indigenous people, cultures, and languages of North America, and I see that echoed in other colonial erasures today.
Writing Workshops: What are you currently reading?
Leila Nadir: In the Memoir Craft course, we will be discussing excerpts from some powerful memoirs and dissecting how they are constructed. So I'm revisiting some of my favorite memoirs right now in order to prepare those craft lectures and generative exercises: Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Lidia Yuknavitch's Reading the Waves, Sarah Aziza's The Hollow Half, Grace Talusan's The Body Papers, Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and more.
Writing Workshops: Where do you find inspiration?
Leila Nadir: Reading. Reading is always inspiration. Whenever I'm stuck or needing new energy, I pick up a book, and immediately my mind imagines new sentences I must write down. It's like I must be in conversation with everything I read.
Writing Workshops: What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers?
Leila Nadir: I once had a teacher identify something unique about my memoir voice—that I was able to balance high/low diction at the same time, the personal and the political, the intimate and the geopolitical. She advised me to draw a line around my voice, a perimeter, and guard my voice, because there would be editors who would want to change it. And she was exactly right. I get criticism directed at my voice all the time for not being believable or realistic. But you know what? My voice is also what gets the most praise. People love it. Sometimes what you do the best is what draws the most criticism. Figure out what that is, and don't let anyone touch it.
Writing Workshops: What is the worst piece of writing advice you've received, read, or heard?
Leila Nadir: One time, in a workshop, a fancy editor of a prominent literary magazine told me that my writing was a "word dump," and she suggested I quit writing. I was just starting out, and I was devastated—until a few weeks later when I found out that same essay had earned me a MacDowell Fellowship, which is one of the highest honors an emerging writer can receive. So I spend a lot of time advising my students and clients about how to receive feedback. If some advice or feedback doesn't feel right, throw it away and move on. The feedback you get should always buoy you further—and that's how I teach. Workshops are a necessary part of learning your craft, but they should never be damaging. They should be empowering.
Writing Workshops: What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing?
Leila Nadir: One of my favs is Samuel Delany's About Writing. Not only is it filled with indispensable craft advice, it also was the book that made me realize I don't need an MFA to be an excellent writer. Delany taught me that good writing is a unique story told in a unique way: no MFA program can teach that.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe?
Leila Nadir: Casual and relaxed while rigorous and incisive at the same time.
Nadir's approach to teaching—empowering, craft-centered, and deeply attuned to each writer's unique voice—makes this workshop an ideal space for memoirists ready to move their projects forward. If you're carrying a story that won't stay buried and you're ready to learn the techniques that can transform your writing process, join Leila for Memoir Craft: Deepening Strategies for Life Writing, beginning Saturday, January 10th, 2026.
