We Are the Words

“This is—hands down—the best book on writing memoir I’ve ever read.”
— Judy Goldman, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap

We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class offers a range of provocative and personal essays. Memoir writer and teacher Beth Kephart offers new ideas about locating our past, developing self-portraits, writing the other, generating telling details, refining scenes, and building obsession vessels, among other topics; considers a myriad of memoir forms and writing strategies; relates the privileges, priorities, heartaches, and hopes of the writer’s life; and offers an arrangement of question cascades and exercises designed to carry readers into and through their own true stories. Kephart is a National Book Award finalist and an acclaimed memoir writer (Wife | Daughter | Self), an award-winning teacher of memoir at the University of Pennsylvania, a widely published essayist (Catapult, Literary Hub, The New York Times, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere), and co-founder of Juncture Workshops.