Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and University of Massachusetts professor of Journalism Madeleine Helena Blais spoke to a crowd of about 200 people yesterday at Memorial Hall.

Her lecture, titled “Personal Narrative in an Impersonal World: Finding the Story in Your Experience,” was the second installment of the UMass Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series this year.

The lecture series was created to showcase four faculty members each year who have made outstanding contributions to the University, either through personal research or through teaching. After giving a brief talk in their field of expertise, the lecturers receive the Chancellor’s Medal, which is the highest award bestowed by the campus.

To open her talk, Blais introduced herself as a “hard-core memoir-reader.”

“My career as a writer began as a reader,” she went on. Blais then listed several of the books that had been influential to her as a young girl. The Diary of Anne Frank, she said, “was my first introduction to memoir.”

The book was so important to her, she said, that it became an historical artifact as well as an enjoyable read. “In my mind the full horror of the Holocaust and preventing it from recurring were involved in preserving this one text,” Blais remembered.

She also gave a brief background of her childhood in Granby, Mass., and of the struggles she and her five siblings went through with their mother after their father died.

“At that time in Granby, there were no broken families,” Blais explained. “There were no households headed by single parents.”

The story of those times is chronicled in her third book, Uphill Walkers.

“Growing up I got a lot of rude questions,” Blais said. “Things like, ‘Do you remember your father?’ ‘Did your mother ever remarry?’ And from the time it became clear that my older brother had [a mental illness], ‘what’s wrong with your brother?'”

She said that she usually dismissed the questions with “a short answer,” and joked that she became a reporter because “I wanted to be the one asking rude questions and getting paid for it.”

More soberly, she added that there are longer, deeper answers to the “rude questions.”

“The long answers formed the basis for Uphill Walkers,” she said.

Blais told the audience that, after the death of her father and the discovery of books, her interview with the aging playwright Tennessee Williams was her most pivotal experience.

“He had the air of an aging lion,” Blais remembered.

Williams had been in the news because he had been mugged, robbed, found his gardener dead in his apartment, and then discovered that the gardener had been stealing rough drafts of his work from his wastebasket. Blais said that his broken spirit “made me review my own writing life. I was determined to start writing something more substantial, to focus on people [like Williams] who walk along on an edge, curiously unworried.”

Now that she has released several nonfiction books, including her memoir, Blais has turned to reviewing the writing lives of undergraduates at UMass. Her two rules for good writing, she said, are that it must be both literary in quality and substantial in content.

“I tell my students, no sunsets. No beaches. And especially, no sunsets on beaches,” she said. “Because it takes more than pretty language to tell a good story, and more than a good story to write well.”

Blais said that at this time of crisis and unrest in the country, memoir is that much more relevant. There is a general lack of trust among some in official institutions, Blais said, and this leads to the conclusion that “the self is the only remaining trustworthy institution.” Writers then seize control of making their narratives known and interpreted, she said, resulting in an explosion in the genre.

After the lengthy applause following Blais’ lecture, interim Chancellor Marcelette G. Williams stood and presented Blais with the Chancellor’s Medal.

“You have been an extraordinary example to all of us,” Williams said.