Talking Memoir and Life with Friends on the Liars Club Oddcast

What a fun conversation I had with the Liars Club a few weeks ago. I mean, they'd asked questions, I'd start laughing, and then I'd have to think quick to come up with answers.

Because, you know, the pressure was on.

We talked about memoir, Juncture workshops, young-adult literature, life, and what it means to be a writer alive in this world.

With thanks to Kelly Simmons, Jon McGoran, Gregory Frost, Merry Jones, and Keith Strunk. Great writers and people, all. It's lovely to imagine them sitting around a table, chatting. It's lovely to be in their presence.

To listen to the whole thing, go here.

And if you happen to be in Frenchtown, NJ, next Thursday evening, join us for the Frenchtown Empathy Project. Kelly Simmons will be in the house. Keith Strunk will, through our writers, on the stage. And all of those who have joined us for this memoir week will be sharing their words for the people of Frenchtown, who are so graciously hosting Juncture.

Read more...

Juncture Writing Workshops is bringing memoir to Cape May, NJ, in November. Join us?

SEA CHANGE
Cape May, NJ
November 1 – 6, 2016


Cape May, NJ. It’s an island, actually, a National Historic Landmark City that was home to Colonial Era whalers and fishermen before it became a favorite retreat for sea-breeze-seeking Philadelphians. Today the town is famous for its multi-hued “painted lady” houses, its wrap-around porches and rocking chairs, its original boutiques and restaurants, and the trees that canopy its streets. Beyond the white sands, dolphins slice the waves. In the wildlife preserves, bogs, and salt marshes, birds sing, turtles crawl, and muskrats build their funny houses.

I grew up visiting Cape May; my favorite uncle lived there. When Bill and I recently discovered a capacious, newly renovated circa-1872 painted lady just blocks from the beach and the town, we knew we’d found the perfect setting for our November Juncture workshop. A private room for each writer who comes to stay. A sunny gathering place. A wrap-around porch. The sea. The birds.

We’ll learn from some of the greatest memoirs ever written—and write our own. Through a combination of readings, guided exercises, and critiques, we will acquire a firm understanding of what memoir is (and what it isn’t) and work toward the development of meaningful themes and sustaining scenes. We will generate and refine new pages, craft a prologue, and share our work in evening readings. We will walk the beach, find the birds, take photographs, meet formally and informally.

A beautifully designed book featuring the images and words of the week will commemorate our time together.

If you are interested, please do let us know by sending us a message through this Juncture Writing Workshops site.

Read more...

Thunder and Lightning/Lauren Redniss: reflections

Not long ago, my husband and I escaped to Frenchtown, NJ. I taught memoir on a Sunday, then spoke, the next day, to an assembly of high school students. My husband walked the banks of the Delaware and found, he said, great peace. Quietude. The occasional passerby. Fish that seemed to come when called.

Peace. I search for it, too. Shield myself from incipient interruptions, step away from active unkindness, shrink from noise, read deep into the news with a hope for understanding.

And, always, books. Over the last few days, during a storm of work, I've reached repeatedly for Lauren Redniss's glorious Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future—an illustrated (Adam Gopnik rightly calls it illuminated) collage of odd facts, hard science, and Redniss's signature way of seeing.

This is a book so unto itself that it comes to its readers utterly undefended. No introduction. A simmering table of contents. Facts lassoed from a multitude of unexpected sources. We meet the managers of a cemetery who are left with the sweep of dislocated bones, post storm. The secret keepers of the Farmers Almanac. A company called Planalytics, which is apparently right down the road from me and is designed to help companies plan for weather incursions, the spiking needs wrought by heat and hurricane. Weaponized weather experts. The inventors of cloudbusters. The mad-scientist brain of Nathan Myhrvold (now at work on, among other things, solar radiation management), the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (who is popping up in many things I've read lately), and the seeds that burst to life every eight years ago in the desert.

What binds it all is erudition, curiosity, and appetite for the alluringly strange. What makes it so peaceful to hold, to sit with, to ponder is how much it teaches through story, ink saturation, and hieroglyphics.

We see so many books that are "just like" books—books that are, indeed, marketed that way. Peace, though, is the original mind set free. I'll wake at 4 AM for this. I'll read it by a lamp in the lonesome dark.

Read more...

Frenchtown Memoir Workshop, Harleysville Book Club, Radnor High Hall of Fame

I'm not sure I'll ever be very good at simply moving forward with my own life when I am vividly aware of the terrible loss and hurt that has utterly rearranged the lives of others.

It doesn't feel right. But it's the only choice we have. Keep living.

And so, this week, there will be (between pauses, within silence) moments of study, moments of reflection, moments of celebration, moments of friendship, many interesting corporate projects, one unexpected audition, and three hours with some wet clay.

You are welcome to join us for the public events:

Today, November 15, on behalf of The Book Garden in Frenchtown, NJ, I'll be teaching a three-hour memoir workshop. Details are here. There is room. You can join us.

Tomorrow, November 16, at the Delaware Valley Regional High School, I'll be talking about the writers' life to an assembly of students and then providing insights on crafting the college essay.

Tuesday, November 17, I'll return to my work with the fourth and fifth graders of West Philadelphia, who will be refining the essays they began writing last week.

Thursday, November 19, I'll be at the wonderful Harleysville Books for the November Book Club Happy Hour, talking about our city and the power of love, an especially important topic, I think, in these days. The details are here.

On Friday and Saturday I will be at Radnor High School, joining my brother for his Radnor High Hall of Fame induction ceremony. We are, I believe, the first brother-sister pairing on that wall. I am over the moon for Jeff and grateful to all those on the committee who recognized his contributions to his rarefied world of engineering and mathematics.

Finally, the paperback of Going Over, my Berlin Wall novel, is being launched this month, and in celebration there are currently ten copies being offered in this Goodreads giveaway. 

Finally, finally, words of thanks to Chronicle Books and Junior Library Guild. This Is the Story of You has been selected for the Guild's Book Club.

Read more...

a memoir workshop in Frenchtown, at the Book Garden

I spent my birthday in Frenchtown, NJ, this past April and fell so hard for the place that I wrote about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Which led to an unexpected email from Caroline, an owner of the town's indie, the Book Garden, inviting me to return to this river town this November. I'll be conducting a memoir workshop and meeting with students in area schools. The memoir workshop, described above, will be held November 15 from 1 to 4 PM at The National Hotel. It has limited space, and if you are interested, I encourage you to sign up soon.

(For those unfamiliar with my memoir teaching and ideas, I share a link here to Handling the Truth, my book about the making of memoir.)

A link to the page can be found here.

Read more...

In Princeton, at the James Beard blessed Mistral, with them

We met at Princeton, my brother's undergraduate campus, where many happy memories live. My boy was looking his handsome self in a sunny-day colored shirt. He had stories. Posture. A photograph inside a frame.

Together we discovered Mistral, an exquisite "fast pace, small plates, fresh local fare" establishment, whose chefs—Scott Anderson and Ben Nerenhausen—were both named 2014 James Beard Foundation Award Semi-Finalists. I'd lately been watching Chef's Table (watch this trailer!), the sumptuous Netfix series. I wanted a little of that. And so there we were, and such is fine, great happy for me: memories of my brother on his campus, the companionship of my husband and my son, and a restaurant in which everything we ordered was unlike anything I've ever ordered elsewhere.

We watched them make it. They brought it to us. I could do that again and again.

To those who love. To those who are loved. To those remembering. This day.

Read more...

Scenes from The Cake Boss and Skylark on the Hudson

We've been to Hoboken a number of times. Walked the entire length along the Hudson. Wandered into the back streets. Found our way to restaurants and sports bars. Hoboken can strike you as nearly ideal, in certain weather, at certain hours of the day. It is, always, happening.

It's also home to The Cake Boss. Carlo's Bake Shop sits right there, in the center of things, long lines of sweet-seekers at its door. We stood in that line this past Monday morning because it was about time. Bought a few cookies (and, uh, yeah they were good). Took a few shots. Listened as people ordered boxes upon boxes of delicacies. Then we walked back toward the Hudson, through the train station and into Jersey City, where I had this tower of vegetables at Skylark on the Hudson, a fine diner that, with all its fresh foods and lovely towerings, helped me forget the sugary sins I'd just committed.

Forget all those anxieties about book reviews and sales. This is the real stuff of life.

Read more...

Embarrassment of riches: A conversation with Priscilla Gilman, and thank you to Becca, Katrina, and Kelly

Yesterday, dawn. Stone Harbor, New Jersey. We stood on the beach and watched the tangerine-pink sun rise.

Back in Beth Land, extraordinary things were happening. Becca Rowan and Katrina Kenison were finalizing Handling the Truth contests—and engaging in conversations with their many readers about loved books. I am so grateful to both—surprised by Becca's stealth move and overwhelmed by her beautiful thoughts about Handling, and amazed by the choral voices on Katrina's blog—and Katrina's own thoughts on the book. Kelly Simmons, that devilishly fine friend of mine, was also launching her own Handling contest. She's a special lady, that Kelly, and her contest is on, and if you haven't been to her blog lately, then I insist. Go. Cherish.

And then there was Priscilla Gilman, the award-winning author of The Anti-Romantic Child and well-loved teacher, who posted a conversation we had a little while ago about favorite memoirs and the memoir form. We also talked about poetry, a form that Priscilla knows deeply. What is my favorite poem, she wanted to know, and so I said....

Well, you'll have to go here to find out more—and to have a chance at winning Handling.

Huge thanks, then, on this day when the sun rises again, some two hours east, over the shore. May the day bring you goodness. May you feel the burst of tangerine-pink.

I leave you with these words from Becca:

But what I love most about Handling the Truth is that it reveals a side of Beth Kephart I’ve not seen before. She is fierce in this book, like a mama bear protecting her cub. Kephart has written five memoirs of her own, each one astoundingly good, each one proving anew her passion for this genre. And throughout handling the truth she exhorts all of us – we fledgling, aspiring memoir writers – not to take this work she loves and mess it up. In the opening pages, she gives us a forthright and adamant list of what memoir is NOT – not “a lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts.” NOT “a self-administered therapy session.” NOT “an exercise in self-glorification.” NOT a “trumped-up, fantastical idea of what an interesting life might have been, if only.”

Read more...

Encounters with Gerald Stern

I joined my father on an errand to Lambertville, New Jersey, yesterday—a very beautiful, very hip little place with just the right balance of old and new.  "You know," I said, as we drove down one narrow street, "I once interviewed Gerald Stern in a house right near here."  As I was saying the words, recalling that lovely afternoon with the National Book Award-winning poet whose fluid, smart, resonant work has actually been known to cure my migraines, I found myself looking at Gerald Stern himself—on his front porch, in a wide chair, deep in a happy conversation with what appeared to be neighborly kids. 

"Don't stop!" I told my father, but still I craned my head, and later I walked the canal path behind the garden of Stern's house, remembering the conversation we once had. Butterflies were out in force.  The spill of gardens toward rain-soaked gulleys. The white horizontals of brief bridges.

Do you know Gerald Stern's work?  For if you don't, you must.  The opening lines of "He Said," from This Time, here:

Thank God for summer, he said, and thank God the window
was to his right and there was a wavy motion
behind him and a moon in the upper right corner
only four days old and still not either blowsy
or soupy.....

(find the poem, read on)

Read more...