About

Welcome to Memoir Pool. I am your host, Tamim Ansary,  writer and writing teacher. Here at Memoir Pool I intend to focus on memoir—what it is, how to write it, what it signifies, why it’s vital….Yeah. Big stuff.   

I’ve been a writer all my life and I’m old now, so we’re talking about maybe fifty years of wordsmithing. I’ve written news stories, history, cultural criticism, columns, textbooks, you name it.  In Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece The Unforgotten, gunslinger William Money is accused of having killed women and children, and he takes another shot of whiskey and says,  “I’ve killed just about anything that ever lived or moved or crawled, one time or another.” Substitute “written” for “killed” and that’s me: the William Money of writing.

My writing took a dramatic turn, however, after 9/11, when I published a book called West of Kabul, East of New York, about the fault line in world culture between the Islamic World and the West, a line my life happened to straddle, since I was born and raised in Afghanistan, the child of an Afghan father and an American mother.

Two years after that book was published, I wrote another memoir, this time someone else’s: The Other Side of the Sky, by landmine survivor Farah Ahmadi, “as-told-to” Tamim Ansary. A couple of years after that, I got a grant to work with young Afghan Americans writing about their lives, which resulted in an anthology of pieces called Snapshots, This Afghan-American Life—memoir, most would call those works. A few years after that I published Road Trips, another memoir. Like West of Kabul, this one focused on my own experiences but recounted none of the same events. Same life, different story. How can the same life be a different story? Well, that’s the question central to this website.  That question, I contend, holds the key to something big.

While I was writing these books, I was running the venerable San Francisco Writers Workshop (which was founded in 1946, and is still going). In 2015, I stepped down from that role and launched a writing workshop focusing exclusively on memoir. 

It was a small workshop—six participants max.  Over the years, some 50 writers passed through it. They came from a multitude of places. They had a stunning variety of stories to tell.  And each week, we sat down together for a couple of hours to discuss what people had written since last time.  When someone decides to write a memoir, it’s because they have some story they’re burning to tell.  Each meeting of the workshop was therefore like a party in which there was no introductory chit-chat, no small talk about the weather. No: the conversation went immediately to matters that were deep and important in the lives of the people sitting around the table.