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Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir QUOTES

Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir QUOTES

1 " When I ask my students to journal daily, I ask them not to judge and not to filter. Just put it down, I say—whatever you think of, however you want. A week goes by, and I send along a copy of Joan Didion’s short, classic essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” Write three paragraphs about the notebook pages that you have been keeping, I say. What is the value of the notes you have kept? What did they teach you about yourself? How honest are the pages, and what do you expect they will mean to you ten or twenty years from now? What shouts back at you about your voice and the sentences you leave behind? "

― Beth Kephart , Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

2 " There is the who they thought they were and the who they wrote down, the something lost and the something gained, the discrepancy, now easily measured, between the voice they hear in their heads and the voice they find on their paper. “Our notebooks give us away,” Joan Didion observes. And they do. They also provide, to memoir makers, a shelf and a foundation, "

― Beth Kephart , Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

3 " But listen: The weight of the camera reminds me to see. It helps me decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or newly announced. I look for water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond in winter with delirious force. If I can’t see, then I don’t know, and if I don’t know, I’m not writing, and while some may question the value of words, or of memoir in particular, I will again make this claim: Words rendered true spook and spur us. They expect of us. They expect for us. Photographs do the same thing: “Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees,” said Paul Strand. "

― Beth Kephart , Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

4 " Empathy smartens you "

― Beth Kephart , Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

5 " Teaching memoir is teaching vulnerability is teaching voice is teaching self. "

― Beth Kephart , Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir