Memoir Writing & Reality T.V.

I started teaching a writers workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about eight years ago, which I called Writing the Memoir. I'm still not sure why I felt inspired to develop that workshop. I had done some ghost writing recently for a couple of people who wanted to publish their version of their life's successes and failures, which probably helped lead me to the concept. It may have been that I saw a niche and needed some extra money. Certainly, there was a bevy of inspiring writing instructors in Santa Fe at the time competing for the aspiring writers attention, most with wonderful credentials and equally wonderful workshop ideas.
I remember that poet Joan Logghe was facilitating an on-going free workshop for people touched by AIDS called Writing from the Heart. I thought it a brilliant and generous concept. Also, I think there was a fair bit of buzz about journaling, journaling workshops, combining self-examination and creative writing, coming out of our decade plus with Natalie's Writing Down the Bones and following on the heels of the Artist's Way,which may have motivated me. At this point, you maybe thinking, ho-hum, this blog is about how sluggishly my memory is this morning, and that you would recommend I pop a gingko and get myself to the Santa Fe Baking Company for a shot of caffiene.
While the gingko and Santa Fe Baking Company caffeine couldn't hurt, I am actually puzzling this morning on how movements of thought develop universally and drop out of the collective consiousness on to unsuspecting individuals like myself. Knowledge grows on itself; ideas have a snowball effect. Nothing new there. Memoir and biography have been with us in literature at least since the Bible, right? But, it appears to me that interest in this genre has grown considerably in the last decade and the subject has become more and more the life of Everyman, rather than of extra-ordinary man or woman. Recently, I've become aware of a new term in the writing industry to cover, I guess, memoir,journaling, steam of consiousness and some forms of poetry...personal writing. The poet and novelist, Karen Blomain, uses it in her upcoming Santa Fe writers workshop title Personal Writing; Memoir and Poetry. I like the term. I think it is inclusive and gives everyman the comfort zone he or she may need to bring out the writer within. However, I can't help wondering what our apparent growing interest in memoir writing means to fiction.
"Truth is stranger than fiction," it is said and we seem to be living more and more in a world focused on the strange, the bizzare for entertainment. Take prime-time television. There are actually week-nights in some areas, when the only scheduled situation comedies or dramas are re-runs. Have fictionalized versions of the life of everyman become too tame for entertainment? What we seem to appreciate collectively is the bizarre as demonstrated through reality television and the ordinary man or woman, willing to do anything for that 5 minutes of fame. Where does that leave literature...has literature always been just memoir in sheep's clothing? Was Everyman, the 15th Century morality play we slogged through in English Literature 101, really a memoir?