on teaching memoir (the Juncture Workshop files)

It occurs to me that you might have noticed that I'm posting less frequently on the blog these days. In part, that is to spare you.

(You're welcome.)

In part it's because I'm devoting so much time to reading and planning the Juncture memoir newsletter, which is sent out to our list once a month. Juncture Notes is free, and you can sign up here to read my interviews with memoirists, my reflections on the form, and the work that our readers send in, among other things. (Juncture Notes also features the original work of my multi-media artist husband. His clay. His photographs. His 3-D images.)

But much of my absence here on the blog can be directly tied to the image above. I call these the Juncture Workshop files. It is a long-ongoing project—a massive effort to cull, save, sort the memoir thoughts I have, the excerpts I love, the exercises that occur to me in the middle of each night—all so that I can teach most effectively both at Penn and at the five-day Juncture memoir workshops we're conducting in McClure, PA, in September, and in Cape May, NJ, in November. (More details on both here.)

I'm not close to done. I'll never be done. I've just ordered eight more books—and a new bookcase. In fact, within two weeks one room out of the seven rooms in my house will be devoted solely to memoir—to the hundreds of memoirs that I own, to the files I am building, to the essays of those who are joining our workshops.

Call me obsessed.

It's all right.

I get that all the time.