Last updated: 28 August 2026
Recently, I received a finished piece of work from Richard Vahrman, a participant on the Micro-Memoir course.
His book Greenham Uncommon is a fictionalised memoir about the 1980s, when he was in a band, but this wasn’t a straightforward music memoir. He’d folded that in with something else that occupied him back then: a real, low-level dread of nuclear weapons. (Greenham Common was the airbase where American cruise missiles arrived in 1983, and where women camped outside the fence in protest for years afterwards.)
Fictionalised – which raises the question of what a memoir writer is allowed to invent. I’ve written about that.
Richard had put a lot of effort into the writing, obviously, but also into the pictures. Many participants rely heavily on old photos, but Richard used those as a basis for new illustrations, showing things that no photo can.
One image brilliantly conveys the book’s dual interest: it shows the band mid-tour, flying across the English countryside astride a missile:
Picture by Richard Vahrman
You may be interested to know that he wrangled this and other images from AI. It works beautifully, but I should add that that was Richard’s choice, not something the course asks for.
Just a few weeks earlier, Richard’s book did not exist. What existed was a person with some memories and some material, and a daily email arriving each morning with one task in it, designed to take about fifteen minutes.
One other thing about Richard: in describing his process to me, he specifically mentioned how valuable it was to read the writing out loud.
“Reading the writing aloud was genuinely invaluable – it revealed awkwardness, repetition and false notes that I simply didn’t notice on the page.”
Having circulated the book to several readers, Richard is now working on a new revision incorporating their comments and some newly recovered memories. He’s also planning a companion website, for interested readers to explore further: links to recordings of music, information about what has happened to the airbases since 1983, photographs and illustrations, and other background material that would overwhelm the story if it were all included in the book.
“Thank you again for the course – it’s quite something to think that only a few weeks before that finished version arrived, the book didn’t exist.”
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If you want to see the same process from inside, here is an exchange with another participant who was sure her story contained no emotion.
I teach this as a thirty-day course by email, one task a morning, ending with a printed book. What it involves.
If you have a fragment of your own that has been waiting, write and tell me about it. jp at this domain name