Biographical Fictioning, an Art Writing Spring School Open Masterclass (7-8 April 2022), focused on creative approaches to biographical, memoir, and life-writing. Led by writer, editor and Art Writing Programme Leader Dr Laura Haynes, and including contributions from artists and academics from the Art Writing programme and invited guests including Kate Briggs (This Little Art, Fitzcarraldo Editions), Paul Mendez (Rainbow Milk, Dialogue Books), Stephen Sutcliffe (Much Obliged, Book Works and at Fifty, Sternberg Press) and others, the Masterclass drew on alternative modes of biographical writing including autofiction, mythobiography, New Narrative, fictocriticism and epistolary or diaristic forms of art writing.

In Audre Lorde’s 1982 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, ‘biomythography’ was proposed as a new (auto)biographical form ‘combining elements of history, biography and myth’. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, published in 1987, was a cross-genre, multi-lingual work combining poetry, theory and philosophy, similarly based ‘loosely’ on the author’s own life. In The Red Parts (2007), a biographical story detailing the murder of her aunt, Maggie Nelson wrote of falling out of a story, of the story. Numerous examples, among them Fernando Pessoa, James Baldwin, Robert Glück, Gary Indiana, Peter Handke, Dodie Bellamy, Édouard Louis, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus, demonstrate that the (auto)biographical is not absolute, that it is, by necessity, provisional, unanchored and contingent. As Eileen Myles has declared, biographical writing is ‘of course about me’ as much as it is about the ostensible ‘subject’. Biomythography, ‘biographical fictioning’ and related approaches allow writers to generate radically subjective narratives in response to ‘real’ or ‘factual’ historical and contemporary events in their own lives and the lives of others (both real and imagined). Such approaches allow writers to control the extent and manner of self-exposure and negotiate complex ethical considerations through the adoption of the guises, slippages, diversions and decoys characteristic of quasi-biography.

The Spring School Masterclass included a series of presentations and practical workshops in which participants worked with established and emergent writers, artists and academics as part of an intensive writing workshop to learn, develop and apply expansive and alternative modes of biographical writing and/or visual practice. The workshops supported participants to compose, experience and evaluate new writing as part of an iterative learning experience. The skills developed included writing short form essay, critical writing and creative fiction/non-fiction and publishing/readership knowledge exchange.