Magical Memoir Moments
Prairie Lights Bookstore, Faulkner, Carol Bodensteiner, and Me
Stuart and I are on the road again. This time we are driving instead of taking Amtrak. The prairie is our playground and this Sunday October 19 2-3 p.m. Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City will be our destination. In the meantime, we visit friends in various Wisconsin cities and Kalona, Iowa. Finally, I will…
Combining Service, Learning, and Memoir: An Intergenerational Approach and Syllabus
Since I am preparing to teach memoir to college students, I’m anticipating a question: How write about a life when it does not yet contain a long timeline with twists and turns in it? There are many solutions to this problem: Memoir thrives on the short view anyway. It is not the chronicle of a…
The Power of Narrative: Another Memoir Class Syllabus
Since my own book order is due to the bookstore by April 15, I need to start thinking hard about my own choices for the course I’ll be teaching in the fall. So here is one more syllabus to study. Every time I look at a syllabus created by Richard Gilbert I want to sign…
Who Wants to Take a Memoir Class? Tantalizing Syllabi from Pro Teachers
I’ve been a teacher since the age of three. That’s when I became a big sister. Ready or not, poor Henry got to pitch me softballs while I learned to bat. He was the first pupil in my classroom and the Watson to my Sherlock. Next fall I will be teaching again, and I’m excited….
A Free National Tele-Conversation on Place in Memoir–Sign Up!
Friends. Here’s a chance for us to hear each other’s voices, literally. I will be speaking on a roundtable along with the fabulous authors Tracy Seeley and Linda Joy Myers, whom you may have met in previous posts and comments on this blog. Linda Joy will interview Tracy and me on the tantalizing subject of…
Two Memoir Course Syllabi from Poet and Professor Jeff Gundy
Melanie Springer Mock contributed our first course syllabus, and now, I am happy to say, we have two more from Professor Jeff Gundy of Bluffton University. Jeff has published numerous books and poems. His latest collecton on Amazon is Spoken among the Trees, which you can check out by clicking on the book cover. Jeff’s…
The One-Hundredth Name for God: A Foreword to A Hundred Camels
Now that Dr. Gerald L. Miller’s memoir, A Hundred Camels: A Mission Doctor’s Sojourn & Murder Trial in Somalia, has been published, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, I will share with you the foreword I contributed to the book which I hope can do double duty as a book review. This book contains…
Mini-Memoir: How Long Have I Been Teaching Memoir?
How long have I been teaching memoir writing? On its face, the answer is, “not very,” but I can also truthfully say “about 40 years.” How can both be true? The recent teaching comes in the form of workshops I have blogged about previously– three sessions at the Fetzer Institute and two about workshops given…