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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?
First of all, he's beautiful. You see him once, you know that. Second (since I'm already counting), his calm ways calm me. I can be out in the world, under assault, confused by the assault, and he's with me. You don't need to deal with that, he'll say. And it's true, I think, I don't. We'll have dinner, watch a movie, and the wounds of the day will be gone.
Third, and I promise that I'll be stopping here, he cares about the things he does, and I love how much he cares. Launching
Juncture Workshops was Bill's idea. Crafting its image, its material self (a bank, a PO box, tax filings)—that was all his doing. The branding, the web work, the advertisements, the photography, the discovery of and interactions with the farm, the Cape May painted lady, the garden where these workshops will be held: that's all Bill. So is building the teleprompter that enabled
the filming of these videos we'll soon be releasing through Udemy—videos that celebrate great memoirs, videos that suggest new ways to write—not to mention the positioning of the lights, the filtering of the camera, the selection of the music, and all the post production.
Bill is in possession of uncountable talents. He's bringing all of them to Juncture. Every day he finds a new way to do even more. So that much of this weekend and part of last week he's been researching and designing one of the very special gifts the workshop attendees will be receiving. So that all this weekend and part of last week, he's taken extreme pleasure from doing just that.
Bill's joy in co-creating Juncture is contagious. His faith in me as I build the content, ready the agenda, write the scripts, and prepare (also joyfully) to teach makes this thirty-year marriage feel brand new.
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.
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.
It occurs to me that you might have noticed that I'm posting less frequently on the blog these days. In part, that is to spare you.
(You're welcome.)
In part it's because I'm devoting so much time to reading and planning the Juncture memoir newsletter, which is sent out to our list once a month. Juncture Notes is free, and you can sign up
here to read my interviews with memoirists, my reflections on the form, and the work that our readers send in, among other things. (Juncture Notes also features the original work of my multi-media artist husband. His clay. His photographs. His 3-D images.)
But much of my absence here on the blog can be directly tied to the image above. I call these the Juncture Workshop files. It is a long-ongoing project—a massive effort to cull, save, sort the memoir thoughts I have, the excerpts I love, the exercises that occur to me in the middle of each night—all so that I can teach most effectively both at Penn and at the five-day Juncture memoir workshops we're conducting in McClure, PA, in September, and in
Cape May, NJ, in November. (More details on both
here.)
I'm not close to done. I'll never be done. I've just ordered eight more books—and a new bookcase. In fact, within two weeks one room out of the seven rooms in my house will be devoted solely to memoir—to the hundreds of memoirs that I own, to the files I am building, to the essays of those who are joining our workshops.
Call me obsessed.
It's all right.
I get that all the time.
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.
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.
We escaped to the mist and hills of the Shenandoah Valley and pondered the days and years ahead. The what next (again) of life. With the wind blowing and the rain pouring and the rivers swelling we imagined a future spent creating and delivering something new—a one-of-a-kind workshop exploring the many ways we find and represent the truth.
We're in the earliest planning stages, of course. But if you think you'd be interested in a program that would come to where you live and work with you and 14 other writers and seekers, please do let me know.
We think this idea has promise. We would begin delivering the program next year.
