By Beth Kephart
Years ago, when I began to teach memoir at the University of Pennsylvania, I drew a conclusion I had not foreseen: Writing memoir was no longer my job, or my privilege.
Creating a community of trust among truth seekers was. Listening for the pulse and purpose of others' stories. Developing not just an editorial stance, line by line, but a philosophical one about what memoir could be and was not. Reading lists and meaningful prompts. Individualized care and group dynamics. Teaching memoir the way I wanted to teach memoir would leave no room for my own tangled personal explorations. I no longer yearned to tell the story of me. I yearned for—I was galvanized by—the chance to tell the story of a form.
I kept writing, of course, because I'm just awful when I don't—uneasy, disoriented, distracted. But the stories I wrote for the next many years were middle grade novels and young adult fiction, corporate tales, journalism, and picture books. Anything but memoir.
A teacher reads voraciously. I read. A teacher accepts the challenges that are presented by students who aren't so sure that they agree with your premise, your interpretations, your canon, your expectations. I said, Challenge me. Across so many semesters in small classrooms on that campus, the wisdoms I'd summoned and projected were continuously—and wonderfully—shattered.
Until so many of the ideas I had once had about memoir became so many cracks and fissures.
Until I could no longer stop myself from writing truth—from experimenting, in other words, with new possibilities and structures.
By the time I returned to my own writing of memoir, I was obsessed with the art of fragments and juxtapositions, the mastery of choreography and pace, the iterative saturation of images and ideas. As I was grappling with all of this, I received a galley of Margaret Renkl's Late Migrations, and I stopped to read it. Would I be interested in interviewing the author? the publicist had asked. I absolutely was. I was among the first to ask Margaret about a book that would become a memoir-in-pieces standard bearer. Our conversation for The Rumpus remains a highlight of my interviewing career—both of us searching for, settling on terms.
In response to my question about the behind-the-scenes stitching together of the book's many parts, Margaret said:
As a reader, I don't like to have significances spelled out for me, but I don't like obscurity either. I want to be guided right up to the very edge of a place where one thing joins another—the space between image and meaning, the space between story and story—and then I want to be required to make a little leap. But as a writer, I always find it hard to leave the right-sized gap, a space that's not so small as to be insulting to a reader, or so large as to be bewildering.
Edges and joinery. Right-sized gaps. Isn't that what lies at the heart of a true memoir-in-pieces?
Wife | Daughter | Self, the true story that emerged from my own experimentations and desires, is, of course, a book of parts. Not just the three obvious parts announced by the title, but the deliberately meta interplay between the living of a life, on the one hand, and the writing of a life, on the other, not to mention the numerous long and short pieces that were edged together with the hope that the whole would be far more than the sum of the parts. In the final pages of the book, I describe my method:
If you asked about my process, I'd say music.
If you asked for a more scientific explanation, I would say that the aggregation of parts that constitute this memoir reflect my belief that truth is not continuous, that stories live in seams, that we remember in bursts and find wisdom in the juxtaposed, that writing the same story twice is to puzzle out dimensions, that we must follow the telling details through fog and mist, that sometimes we are the teacher but mostly we're the student. The memoir built of parts says Yes. We'll never get it perfectly right; the truth is in the trying.
I'm still teaching writers of memoir. I'm still being shattered by the wisdom of my students, by the questions they ask, by the assertions they make against the assertions I pose. I'm writing alongside my students now—testing, failing, hoping, dreaming. Placing one thing beside another thing and leaning into the gaps.
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Writing new short pieces? Want to coalesce the ones you have? Join Beth Kephart for the CRAFT TALKS webinar, Crafting the Memoir-in-Pieces: Building a Coherent Book from Fragments on June 14th at 2PM Eastern (replay available) $25 (Early Bird $15). More info/register here.
National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. A new memoir-in-pieces—My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera—is due out from Temple University Press in November. More at bethkephartbooks.com.
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