Juncture Notes 19: Writing to Stay Whole and an Interview with Camille Dungy

In the current issue of Juncture Notes, I reflect on the very necessity of writing, share an interview with the wonderful Camille Dungy (Guidebook to Relative Strangers), and feature the work of three of our readers. I also announce our plans to hold one five-day workshop and three one-day workshops in 2018.

The whole issue can be read (and shared) here. Please pass this link on to others who are seeking a substantive conversation about memoir and the many ways that it gets made.

Read more...

Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt on Launch Week

...I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, "Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?"

"In a heartbeat," he said, "and you know it."

"I wouldn't take any of it back," Mom said, and maybe I don't know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can't figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can't really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place.

Read more...

Storm Mourning

You recognize the pale gray pink before a storm; you know the storm's coming. Even so, when the storm came in this morning, I was unprepared for its volume—thunder like a jet just off the tarmac, hail the size of rock salt, rain in straight white nails driving down.

It is a storm in the wake of a week of losses. The grandson of my mother's best friend, just 24. An ebullient former colleague of my husband's, only 49. A friend's beloved father. The first two taken as suddenly as the storm that just knocked in. They were there, and then they were vanished. They were whole, and then they were gone. The third a man who, his daughter writes, "was my hero and my best friend."

We are silenced by storm. We are made to listen.

Read more...

Sun through Rain

A friend, writing yesterday, described a friend. She is, my friend wrote. She is: a wonderful soul, smart, opinionated, talented, fearless, full of energy and passion and love.

That present tense: is.

And then this: She passed away last week at age 33 in a rock climbing accident.

The is and the was. The impossible breach between. The utterness of loss.

This blog, then, a tribute to my dear friend's dear friend.

Read more...