You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner or a reformed mass murderer to write an autobiography. You can be an ordinary Renton resident who wants to share her life with family.

That’s the message from the Renton woman who has been teaching a “Writing Your Autobiography” workshop at the Fairwood Library the past four weeks.

“My idea is that everybody is important and everyone has important things that they’ve done in their life,” the teacher says.

She says a fear of writing is often all that’s holding back these would-be autobiographers.

The teacher hadn’t written much before tackling her autobiography, just over a year and a half ago.

But her husband had recently died and she wanted to share her story with her children and grandchildren. So she wrote up her memoirs, from birth to her present senior years, and made copies for her three children and two grandchildren. The autobiography is a Christmas surprise present for those family members. That’s why the teacher isn’t sharing her name with the Renton Reporter. Her students know her name, but she’s told them not to spread it around.

The former language arts teacher spent a year and a half writing her tale, which includes a “series of stories” about “pets and special relatives and then just general information.”

She’s teaching the library class because she had so much fun writing her autobiography. If there’s demand, she may teach the class again.

“I really enjoyed writing it and I thought maybe others could enjoy doing the same thing,” she says.

She’s been pleased with her students’ enthusiasm.

“Did you have fun writing?” she asks her students during a recent class.

“Yeah,” answer the six Renton women, all middle aged and older.

“It wasn’t like a horrible assignment, was it?”

“Nope,” they say.

The assignment was to write a piece of their stories. Today’s assignment is to read their pieces aloud, for proofreading. Most start at the beginning. But every beginning is different.

Sandy Spelman writes of her alcoholic mother; JoAn Bates about her tomboy childhood, filled with jacks and dolls. Ethel Hood writes about walking across cow pastures on the way to school in South Carolina. Linda Schick’s start is filled with facts about her birth, such as her height and weight.

“I have lots and lots of information, I’m a record keeper,” Schick says. “I want to learn how to put it down in a readable form.”

That’s the teacher’s job. She helps Schick dredge up memories of swinging on the clotheslines at her triplex. She draws a spider-like mapping chart on the blackboard to help Bates flesh out her childhood experiences.

“Bottom line: I wanted to know more,” the teacher says to Bates. That’s what she says to most students.

“Don’t cut yourself short,” she tells her students. You’d be amazed how interesting life’s little details are to others, she says.

She also boosts her students’ self-confidence.

“Who said you couldn’t write? Who told you that?” she asks after Hood reads her passage. “That was very interesting.”

She also warns the women not to expect a product too soon.

“If you’re going to let people know who you are, it takes a lot of time and a lot of ink,” she tells the women.

“Don’t expect to do this in a week, two weeks, a month, or two months,” she adds. “You won’t be satisfied if you do.”

The intent of the class is to be therapeutic and allow the authors to better understand themselves, the teacher says. The class is also intended to allow the authors to pass their stories to their families. The teacher encourages her students to print their books, perhaps at Costco or Kinko’s. Genealogy charts, pictures and a blank page for comments are nice touches, she says.

Many of the students are writing their stories for their relatives.

“I wanted to take the class to write my autobiography for my kids and my grandkids and myself,” Bates says.

She started writing her story a few years ago but didn’t finish. Hood is writing her story for her three grandkids. Grandkids, and children, are also June St. Clair’s target audience. But Schick and Spelman are writing for themselves.

Spelman’s alcoholic mother is dead. Writing about her has caused Spelman to begin seeing her mother in a different light than she did growing up.

The women’s teacher is proud of her students’ progress.

“I really enjoyed watching the ladies as they were reading,” she says. “They seemed to kind of spark a little bit.”

The class has certainly sparked something in Hood. Before the class, she was trying (and failing) to get motivated to write something for her grandkids.

“This class motivated me to do something,” she says.

Writing sessions

“Writing Your Autobiography” ends Monday. The Fairwood Library is holding writing sessions on the first four Saturdays in November, in celebration of National Novel Writing Month. The free sessions are Nov. 1, 8, 15 and 22 at 2 p.m. Registration is not required.