Longwood Gardens, One Day Memoir Workshops, Camille T. Dungy: coming soon

In a month, 20 writers will join us at Longwood Gardens for a sold-out, one-day workshop called Seedlings.

Yesterday, in the rain, Bill and I walked the conservatory and grounds again, finalizing our plans.

Always go to Longwood Gardens in the rain.

The acres of beauty seemed to belong just to us. The upward arcing water, the platters of rain, the desert silvers and rocks, the pads and ponds. We had the orchid room to ourselves for a long five minutes. We stepped into the ballroom to hear (along with just a handful of others) the organ play. A kind volunteer urged us to lean and smell the lotus pods. The experimental garden was end-of-season deep with color and risk.

We can't wait for this day in October. We have so much we want to share and do, remember and write. We'll be creating more of these one-day events, and we'll be announcing them in the months to come here, and in Juncture Notes, our memoir newsletter featuring the top working memoirists of our time.

(Next up, in a few days, an interview with Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton).) 

Sign up for the free newsletter, if you haven't already, and stay in touch.

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The Frenchtown Empathy Project

Next week, nine writers from across the country are joining Juncture Workshops in Frenchtown, NJ, for a week of memoir writing. We'll be discussing the works of great memoirists, reviewing the in-progress books of our exceptional writers, seeing what happens when we expand the work with new prompts, and celebrating the whole town in a Thursday evening Empathy Project event.

The event is free. If you live nearby, I hope you'll join us.

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I Hear America Talking: My Memoir Interview, with Birtan Collier

My conversation with Birtan Collier, on the I Hear America Talking radio show. Thoughts on the form itself (in today's anti-truth world) and on the method-behind-my-madness teaching, both at the University of Pennsylvania and at Juncture Workshops.

The link is here.

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all ready for the sea (Juncture Workshops)

What a time it has been. What lessons still rush in, at any age.

In the deep mist and midst, we prepare for our nine writers, soon to join us by the sea for the second Juncture Memoir Workshop. I have read their beautiful early essays. I have learned about their hopes as writers. I have added Springsteen and White and a Nest to a reading list, transformed assignments, reassigned hours of the day, and now we look ahead to waves and weather and community, eager for all the good that will come.

And good shall come.
 

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Juncture Workshops: One Final Spot Left in Cape May, NJ

We may still be riding the waves of our Field Notes memoir workshop but we're also eagerly anticipating our time by the Jersey shore, this coming November.

We have one spot left in this gorgeous painted lady.

Write to us here, if you have interest.

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the past cannot be grasped, and yet we memoirists try

Starting tomorrow, at a farm in Central Pennsylvania, it will begin. The inaugural Juncture Workshops memoir program.

The cows and the pigs and the chicks and the peacocks and the horse are ready for us, we're told. The sky and the hills. The fresh air and the peace. Those writers.

We will spend one day focused on uncertainty and time, as all memoir writers must. Recently I read Olivia Laing's gorgeous To the River and found, nested within, this paragraph. It will be shared with the writers, but also, I'm thinking, why not share it here, with you. For this is how it feels to be alive. To have hoped for something. To have almost had something. To have lost something. To allow that lostness to linger.

This is life, and this is memoir, with thanks to Olivia Laing:

It felt as if my blood had turned to mercury. I lay on the bed almost weeping, suddenly overwhelmed by the past few months. I hadn't thought I was running away, but now all I wanted was to turn tail and fly, back into the woods, the dense, enchanged Andredesleage where no one could find me or knew my name. Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one's corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?

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reading and writing memoir: announcing the release of our video shorts on Udemy

It's been nine months since Bill and I began to dream about, plan for, and make quiet declarations about this company called Juncture. 

We haven't had this much fun in years. Our first memoir workshop, at a central Pennsylvania farm, is five weeks or so away, with writers coming from around the world to join us. We have another workshop planned in November, a seaside gathering in Cape May, NJ. We're feeling pretty lucky about the memoirists who have stopped by to talk with us for our free monthly newsletter—and grateful when we read the newsletter-inspired work that comes our way. And this coming weekend, in the Currents section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, we tell the story of our transition from corporate America to this something brand new.

Now we're ready to release our first series of video shorts designed for readers and writers of memoir. There are six filmed essays here that braid classic and brand-new memoirs around themes ranging from writer's block to kitchen lives to time and mortality. Tillie Olsen, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Mary-Louise Parker, Diana Abu-Jaber, MFK Fisher, Chang-Rae Lee, E.B. White, Terrence des Pres, Abigail Thomas, Annie Dillard, Sarah Manguso—they, and many others, are here. So are lessons and prompts.

"The Stories of Our Lives" can be accessed through Udemy, at a discount, using this link: Juncture16. Click the link to preview both the introduction and one full essay for free. Hopefully you'll be inspired to take the (very reasonable) plunge and watch the complete series.

Please consider passing the news on.

For a (humorous) behind-the-scenes look at the making of this series, please check out Cleaver Magazine and this conversation between the content producer and the director.

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living this life new

More and more, I am becoming me.

It took me this long to get here.

Fewer and fewer things in this house. A miniature car, bright orange. No more of that corporate work that bound me to this desk from 3 AM, sometimes until 10 PM, sometimes, work that made me less than pleasant (but only sometimes, I think, I hope). Only the books I want to read twice or three times in the house, and the ones I buy now are the ones I want, not the ones I feel an obligation to.

The work I do is the work I want to do. Reading the middle-grade books that carry the grown-up wisdoms. Reading the memoirs that I will teach. Profiling the people and places that inspire me, like Elisabeth Agro, say, who has revolutionized crafts in my city. Talking to other writers in real ways about the real work we hope to do.

I lived decades measuring my life by what I thought of as "real work." I was, I boasted to myself, making the correct sacrifices. I am trying on something new. Living my life as measured by my passions. I don't know how far this will go. But I'd be so mad at me if I didn't try it.

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Juncture Workshops takes yet another step forward

When I left the vagaries and (often) cruelties of corporate America behind this past May, I wasn't only leaving something. I was stepping toward something new. We've called it Juncture Workshops. You know what it is—an intense focus on memoir and how it might be taught in ways that radically reinvent both community and self knowledge, literature and the single sentence.

Over the past few days we've been laying the groundwork for a new Juncture element—a series of brief video interludes that introduce (in Series 1) paired memoiristic essays (unexpected pairings, pairings that delight me, pairings I've not taught before) that reveal both the inner workings of memoir and the essential eruptions of memory.

We're filming our first one tomorrow. We'll be releasing the whole as a set on a teaching platform toward summer's end. I post this now because it's exciting to me—to discover these connections, and to share them.

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the Juncture ad

We continue, at Juncture, to reach out beyond our own borders. Here is our first full-scale ad, which will run at a large conference in August.

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Juncture has a new web site (and our next newsletter is launching soon)

Juncture Workshops has a new web site to accommodate our growing number of offerings. (We've added a Cape May, NJ, workshop; we'll be conducting a one-day workshop in a major garden next fall; and we'll be offering videos and online instruction by year's end. The new site makes room for all of this.)

I share the link here.

And: Those of you interested in joining the conversation are welcome to sign up for our newsletter (through the Juncture web site). The fourth edition features thoughts on the place of poetry in life stories, brilliant commentary by poet/memoirist Brian Turner, new "homework," a reader response, and memoir commentary and critique. It's free. 

Existing subscribers, please look for the next issue within the coming 24 hours.

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on bringing literary thinking and heart to corporate leaders

Yesterday, on behalf of Leadership Philadelphia, I stood among 120 corporate and organizational leaders and talked about literature, language, and life. Our topic was home, but it might have been any number of things. Our process was embellished by words from James Agee, George Hodgman, Jacquelyn Woodson, and Katherine Boo, an excerpt from Love: A Philadelphia Affair, the thoughts of a West Philadelphia fifth grader, this Beltran recording on home (a composite reading from my Penn students and colleagues), readings about loss from This Is the Story of You and Flow, and conversations about gain.

We listened. We wrote. We shared. We talked to one another. We isolated telling details and pondered how the best of life can be transported into the best of work.

Having spent nearly three decades writing for corporate America, it was extraordinary to write, at last, with it. To reach toward the heart, and hearth, of lawyers, strategists, account managers, senior vice presidents, chief financial officers, portfolio managers, presidents, directors of communications, franchise managers, risk managers, school principals, art leaders, and civic leaders, to name just a few.

The lesson is this: literature—the act of naming the things we love and want, the act of putting want into words—is not an exclusive, excluding art. It is our art. Our shared humanity. Making as much difference in the workplace as it does on the family stoop.

I plan to bring these multi-media workshops to other organizational gatherings in the future, as part of the expanding realm of Juncture Workshops. Happy to talk, if the idea intrigues.

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Launching a monthly memoir newsletter; let us know if you are interested

 
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We know when we start to exaggerate.We know when we “lie” to make things fit or to make the story turn out a certain, perfectly symmetrical, deeply self-congratulatory way.We know when what we write will not resonate with others who have lived the adventure alongside us.We know what we are doing.

Next Monday, we'll release the first issue of a monthly newsletter dedicated to the art of memoir.

I'll be sharing thoughts about essential memoirs (you must read this), about the making of memoir, and about the things I continue to learn as I teach and write the form. And I'll be sharing (with the authors' permission) some of the work we produce at Juncture Workshops.

Interested? Share your email address in the comment form here, or through the private messaging of my Facebook or Twitter accounts.

NOTE: To those kind souls demonstrating such interest — I'm able now to pick up your email addresses without them ever showing up for public display. Trust that I have you. If you don't see the newsletter by end of day Monday, circle back around. I want to protect your email privacy. 

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Juncture Workshops—learn more about our September gathering on a farm

We've been so blessed by the response to our announcement regarding the launch of Juncture Workshops, our series of memoir workshops.

Recently we put together an informational brochure for those who think that the inaugural workshop—which is taking place from September 11 - September 16 on a farm in McClure, PA— might be just right for them.

Interested? Please contact us through the Juncture Workshops web site, and we'll send a PDF your way.

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Juncture Workshops announces (officially) its first five-day workshop, coming this September. Join us?

I've been alluding to our landscape-emboldened five-day memoir workshops for quite some time now.

We're rolling this thing out.

Here, at last, is more information about what we'll be doing, why we're doing it, and what those five days on a Central Pennsylvania farm (an hour from Harrisburg) will be like, come this September.

If you are interested in learning more, please send us a note through the contact form—or any other way that works for you.

All photos and web design are courtesy of my artistic husband and partner in this venture.

Read the full web site to find out how his artistry will be part of the program.

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At the Farm: Five-day memoir workshop, coming this September

I have written here of our upcoming memoir workshops—Juncture Workshops—and friends, they are indeed coming. We have completed our visit to our first planned gathering place—a working Civil War era farm in central Pennsylvania. We have spent time with our hosts—an historian extraordinaire and his wonderful wife. We have slept in the Yetter cabin. We have walked the farm, talked to the peacocks, climbed up into the surrounding hills, watched the baby calf get loose from the barn.

We think it will be exceptional.

We're looking to launch this in the second week of September.

We are finalizing details and will be announcing more on this blog and on this site.

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