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The Stories of Our Lives
Highest Rated
Rating: 4.5 out of 5(24 ratings)
95 students

The Stories of Our Lives

reading and writing memoir
Highest Rated
Created byBeth Kephart
Last updated 8/2016
English
English [Auto],

What you'll learn

  • Apply the lessons of extraordinary memoirists to your own life and writing.
  • Build your personal library with recommended classics and brand-new memoirs.
  • Create your own writing journal, with the help of our writing prompts and guide.

Course content

1 section • 7 lectures • 55m total length

  • Introduction3:37
  • Get Over It10:26

    Thoughts on living with and moving past writer’s block. How does a memoirist begin? How does a memoirist move past the inevitable barriers that stand between her and her material.

    An essay and prompts featuring Tillie Olsen, Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Sallie Tisdale 

  • The Urgent Intimacy of Letters7:52

    Thoughts on writing memoir to a single reader. What do we learn from memoirs that have been written to a single person or thing? How does such single-focus writing enhance both the cogency and power of our work?

    An essay and prompts featuring Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Mary-Louise Parker 

  • Dinner is Served8:12

    Thoughts on what we learn about families through kitchen stories. What does the architecture of a kitchen tell us? What do meals tell us about the people we are and love? How do recipes carry family genes and dreams?

    An essay and prompts featuring MFK Fisher, Lavinia Greenlaw, Mary Gordon, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Chang-Rae Lee.

  • Unwell8:02

    Thoughts on writing with grace of illness and loss. How do we write of the illnesses and the losses that have threatened to overcome us? How do we carry grace to the page?

    An essay and prompts featuring Sarah Manguso, Paul Kalanithi, Jenny Diski, Lucy Grealy, and Abigail Thomas 

  • It’s Only Natural8:38

    Thoughts on the writing self in the natural world. Geoff Dyer suggests that there are three ills that nature writers must avoid. Listen in to find out what they are and what the great nature writers have done to avoid them.

    An essay and prompts featuring Geoff Dyer, Annie Dillard, Helen Macdonald, Angela Palm, Sy Montgomery, and Terry Tempest Williams 

  • The Ever-Present Past8:17

    Thoughts on memory, time, and mortality. E.B. White, in his essay "Once More to the Lake" imagines himself wholly young again. Terrence des Pres remembers youth. How can their different approaches to managing time on the page inspire the remembering and writing that you do?

    An essay and prompts featuring E.B. White and Terrence des Pres 

Requirements

  • Grab a pen or a keyboard and get ready to write.

Description

All writers stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. All writers benefit when exposed to classic and groundbreaking texts ... and to careful, unexpected analysis. In this six-part, nearly one-hour course, Beth Kephart, an award-winning memoirist, teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, celebrates the form. She explores the work of Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, Mary-Louise Parker, Alison Bechdel, Helen Macdonald, Maggie Nelson, and others as she defines what great memoir does and how it gets written. Each video is organized around a theme. Silence and writer's block. The art of the intimate letter. Lessons from the kitchen. Writing of loss. Writing the natural world. Memory and mortality. Each theme yields a series of writer prompts. The entire package is accompanied by a PDF writer's journal that recaps key lessons and prompts.The series is perfect for writers, of course. But it is also just right for avid memoir readers who are seeking to better understand the books they read, as well as instructors at the high school, college, and workshop level.

Who this course is for:

  • Avid readers of memoir
  • Beginning, intermediate, and advanced writers of memoir
  • Teachers of memoir

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