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).) 

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Art in the Dark, at Longwood (Nightscape)

Next October (2017) I'll be leading a one-day memoir workshop at Longwood Gardens, using the topography and installations as literary prompts. Bill, my Juncture comrade in arms, will be with me, collecting images of the writers at work in those exquisite 400 acres.

We walk Longwood differently now when we go. Last night we went to experience Nightscape, the extraordinary sound and music show that runs from August through October. It's a seduction. A magic experienced in the dark of night among others whose voices you hear, whose passing bodies you're aware of, but whose faces mostly remain obscured. Trees and fronds are canvases. Long walkways. Ponds. Flowerbeds. You find your way. You look up. You stop to see.

To be outside in the dark living art in summer is a very good thing. To have the company of Matthew Ross, one of the most endearingly well-read, widely traveled, smart people you'll meet, is a big bonus. To have the rain begin, a soft pattering, as you walk the lit bridges is sweeter than I can say. The smell of earth rising at your feet. The hush of other passersby. The moon still in the sky.

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Contemplating the change in season, in today's Inquirer

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, I'm remembering a recent day spent alongside my father, at Longwood Gardens. We made our way to the meadow. We stood on the cusp of a season. We thought about the summer we had shared packing up his beautiful home, and about all that might come next.

That story can be found in full here, along with an invitation to join me and Marciarose Shestack at the Free Library of Philadelphia this coming Wednesday evening, at 7:30, as we talk about our love for this city.

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This is my more: on the purpose writing serves, and last day with the Spectaculars

Yesterday Kelly and I walked Longwood Gardens where the tulips were like new crayons in tight boxes and the rose grapes hung from ceilings as if waiting to be pressed toward wine and the trees were actually flowers and the treehouse mirror turned us into a 17th century painting with 21st century iPhones. It was spring, crisp, crowded.

The hours served as punctuation. A period, perhaps a colon marking the end of a long winter of talks and workshops, essays and reviews, teaching and papers, intense client work and client revisions, the quiet launch of a novel and the heart-ish completion of a collection of essays. Tomorrow is my last class with the Spectaculars at Penn. We have worked hard together, grown together, hurt together, soared together, and on this day I sit reading their final work—the profiles they have written about people who matter to them. I believe that writing can serve no greater purpose than to awaken the writer to the world itself—the things that matter—and to, in that way, force love (or call it attention) onto the page. I believe that teaching craft is teaching soul. I believe in the quiet things that happen in the margins. I believe.

It's the kind of belief that won't make a person famous. The kind that simmers just off to the left, that urges with wet eyes, that suggests and does not demand, that says, Maybe. The kind that is noticed by a few but rarely by many. Am I, I am asked often and ever more frequently, okay with that? Don't I, after all these quiet books, all these quiet years, all these words living in the shadows, want more?

There are crayon tulips. There are decorated trees. There are steps leading up to the sky. There are moments. There are students. There are friends; there is family. There is a husband and a son. There are books on my shelves written by authors with far greater talent, wisdom, seeing, stretch—and I see that talent, I am grateful for that talent, I am instructed by it, happy for it, elevated and poem-ed by it.

This is my more. This is my life.

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