Consequential Truths takes a deep look at the profound questions facing the memoir writer. How do we write with power and integrity about the others in our lives? What do experimentations in form—the braid, the collage, the prose poem, the extended suppose, the memoir in essays, the non-memoir—teach us…
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A memoirist’s guide to the role paper plays in our construction of ourselves My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera Beth Kephart Temple University Press, November 3, 2023 Paper both shapes and defines us. Baby books, diaries, sewing patterns, diplomas, resumes, letters, death certificates—we find our stories in them. My…
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“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…
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Wife | Daughter | Self (March 2021, Forest Avenue Press) is an intimate exploration of our composite selves as well as a reflection on the ways we seek and write the truth, by one of the nation’s leading memoirists and memoir teachers. “Kephart’s wife/daughter/self: a memoir in essays passes the…
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When a girl in a homemade hot air balloon falls out of the sky in rural Gilbertine, there are questions: Who is this girl, where exactly did she come from, why won’t she talk, and what has she risked to live in a country that does not seem to want…
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The Great Upending won a 2020 Parents’ Gold Choice award and was given a Booklist star. “A meandering, gentle, lovely tale of a deeply bonded family, replete with a clever mystery.” — Kirkus Reviews Twelve-year-old Sara and her brother, Hawk, are not to bother The Mister, who just moved to…
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Let’s start in sunshine. Let’s start with the absolute true: My uncle was wild beauty in motion, and I was the one who knew. You couldn’t trench a fence around him. Couldn’t box him with a frame. He was in and out, there and here, a blaze of Day-Glo glory.…
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Blue, for example. Like the color the sun makes the sea. Like the beach bucket he wore as a hat, king of the tidal parade. Like the word I and the hour of nobody awake but me. I thought blue was mine, and that we were each ourselves, and that…
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It is night. A piano moans. In the apartment above, someone lights a sweet cigarette. Puff clouds. Down in the alley behind the restaurant, the waiters smoke, and the cooks share a jug, and one of the restaurant girls is dancing in tall silver shoes. The moon is a lantern;…
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We live with ghosts. We live with thugs, dodgers, punkers, needle ladies, pork knuckle. We live where there’s no place else to go. We live with birds—a pair of magpies in the old hospital turrets, a fat yellow-beaked grebe in the thick sticks of the plane trees. A man named…
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