The business of teaching memoir, excerpt from a work in progress

As the semester begins, I look back on a work-in-progress:

This is no casual enterprise—this business of teaching memoir.  We are speaking, after all, about voice.  We are speaking about how we shape what we have lived, what we have seen.  About how we honor what we love and defend what we believe in.  Makers of memoir dwell with ideas and language, with themselves.  They counter complexity with clarity.  They locate a story inside the contradictions of their lives—the false starts and the presumed victories, the epiphanies that rub themselves raw nearly as soon as they are stated.