Event: Publish your Micro-Memoir in 30 days | Nov 2026
START DATE: Monday 2 November 2026
A life story. Just not the whole life.
This course is delivered by email, one day at a time, from me to you.
What this is
Thirty daily emails. Fifteen minutes of work a day. At the end, a real book on your shelf – A5, full colour, professionally bound, about 48 pages, posted to your door from the printer.
You’ll write about a person, a place, a time, or a thread of your life that matters to you. Not the whole story.
A fragment, done well.
Words and pictures, not words alone
Your micro-memoir is illustrated. Photographs, drawings, documents, screenshots, whatever you have.
Some books I use as case studies contain fewer words, in total, than a single long magazine feature. That’s because the pictures do half the storytelling, or more.
If you only want to get words onto a page, this isn’t the course.
“Working with illustrations unlocked memories I don’t think I would otherwise have revisited. The course has been hugely valuable, perhaps not always in the ways we expected.” – Richard Vahrman, author of Greenham Uncommon
What the thirty days cover
The daily tasks walk you through the whole thing, in order:
- Working out what you have got – the story and the pictures both – and what to leave out.
- Structuring it across roughly forty to forty-eight pages, so it has a shape rather than just a beginning.
- Making the opening pages powerful, because that is where a reader either takes hold or drifts off.
- Letting words and pictures help each other instead of competing.
- Getting your pictures into a book without it turning into a technical ordeal.
- Uploading to a printer, and turning the finished book over in your hands.
What people make
Richard Vahrman came on the course and wrote Greenham Uncommon, a fictionalised memoir of the 1980s, when he was in a band. It is not a music memoir. He folded that in with something else that occupied him just as much back then, a low-level dread of nuclear weapons – Greenham Common was the airbase where American cruise missiles arrived in 1983.
He didn’t use his old photographs as such but as the basis for new illustrations, showing things a photograph can’t. One shows the band mid-tour, flying across the English countryside astride a missile.
A few weeks earlier the book did not exist. What existed was a person with some memories and some material, and an email each morning with one task in it.
In March 2026 I created a Micro-Memoir myself, on the same 30-day rhythm. The result was A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown – a fragment about one part of my life, not the whole of it.
I read the replies
Especially in the first week, I’ll ask you to write back. Short, specific answers: this course is substantially pre-written, but it’s not automated.
I read every reply for the six weeks from when you sign up. Questions, drafts, stuck moments – send them and I’ll write back, either directly or by folding an answer into later lessons.
One of those exchanges is published, with permission: a participant who was sure her story contained no emotion, and what the two of us worked out between us.
Your micro-memoir may not be perfect after thirty days. It won’t be – almost nothing is! But a real book arrives from the printer with your name on it, which is a great deal to have made in a month. And you can keep tinkering with it for as long as you like afterwards.
“What attracted me to your course was the idea of reaching a clear destination after a defined period, with something finished and tangible at the end.” – Richard Vahrman
Price, and the date
The price for this cohort is £350.
Doors close at 9pm UK on Sunday 1 November.