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We may still be riding the waves of our Field Notes memoir workshop but we're also eagerly anticipating our time by the Jersey shore, this coming November.

We have one spot left in this gorgeous painted lady.

Write to us here, if you have interest.

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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.

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I have written here of our upcoming memoir workshops—Juncture Workshops—and friends, they are indeed coming. We have completed our visit to our first planned gathering place—a working Civil War era farm in central Pennsylvania. We have spent time with our hosts—an historian extraordinaire and his wonderful wife. We have slept in the Yetter cabin. We have walked the farm, talked to the peacocks, climbed up into the surrounding hills, watched the baby calf get loose from the barn.

We think it will be exceptional.

We're looking to launch this in the second week of September.

We are finalizing details and will be announcing more on this blog and on this site.

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I have spoken here of our plan to launch five-day memoir workshops in beautiful, memorable places.

A working farm.

A seaside resort.

A lively river town.

Workshops that mean something—and deliver lasting value.

We're putting the final touches on all of that now. We're taking our final exploratory trips and designing the web site. We'll be launching that site in three weeks or so.

We just wanted you to know: it's coming.

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Over the past many days I've been building memoir workshops—the five-day, traveling, unusually unusual workshop that I will launch next year (if you are interested, leave your name here), an online program being developed with a radically effective book-coaching friend, a two-evening program for the fourth and fifth graders of North Philly, the syllabus for my 2016 memoir course at Penn, and the two workshops I'll be delivering next Sunday and Monday in Frenchtown, NJ—one for Book Garden (you can still register) and one for the local high school.

That building looks like this.

And it is far from done.

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