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What a time it has been. What lessons still rush in, at any age.
In the deep mist and midst, we prepare for our nine writers, soon to join us by the sea for the second
Juncture Memoir Workshop. I have read their beautiful early essays. I have learned about their hopes as writers. I have added Springsteen and White and a Nest to a reading list, transformed assignments, reassigned hours of the day, and now we look ahead to waves and weather and community, eager for all the good that will come.
And good shall come.
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.
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?
More and more, I am becoming me.
It took me this long to get here.
Fewer and fewer things in this house. A miniature car, bright orange. No more of
that corporate work that bound me to this desk from 3 AM, sometimes until 10 PM, sometimes, work that made me less than pleasant (but only sometimes, I think, I hope). Only the books I want to read twice or three times in the house, and the ones I buy now are the ones I want, not the ones I feel an obligation to.
The work I do is the work I want to do. Reading
the middle-grade books that carry the grown-up wisdoms. Reading
the memoirs that I will teach. Profiling the people and places that inspire me, like
Elisabeth Agro, say, who has revolutionized crafts in my city. Talking to other writers in real ways about
the real work we hope to do.
I lived decades measuring my life by what I thought of as "real work." I was, I boasted to myself, making the correct sacrifices. I am trying on something new. Living my life as measured by my passions. I don't know how far this will go. But I'd be so mad at me if I didn't try it.
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.
Juncture Workshops has a new web site to accommodate our growing number of offerings. (We've added a Cape May, NJ, workshop; we'll be conducting a one-day workshop in a major garden next fall; and we'll be offering videos and online instruction by year's end. The new site makes room for all of this.)
I share the link
here.And: Those of you interested in joining the conversation are welcome to sign up for our newsletter (through the Juncture web site). The fourth edition features thoughts on the place of poetry in life stories, brilliant commentary by poet/memoirist Brian Turner, new "homework," a reader response, and memoir commentary and critique.
It's free. Existing subscribers, please look for the next issue within the coming 24 hours.
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.
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.
