Syllabus by Beth Kephart
It started and then it couldn’t be stopped, them calling you Prof, though every now and then you’d be summoned Beth by the ones who seemed older than the rest, more secure in the democracy of learning, more prone to the sly harassments of insurmountable questions, more skilled in the electrovalence of teacherly attention. The ones who said, Be hard on me. The ones who gibed the handwriting you left in the margins of their pages then walked you halfway to the train and practiced, as you together walked, the people they were becoming.
*
Shouldn’t the strength of your years be the strength of your years? Shouldn’t you, yourself, be bedrock?
*
Everyone, in the end, ends. The curtain, in its rings, on its hooks, is sibilating—drawing across, drawing to, drawing away, you are drawing away, you are losing the window, you are losing your reflection in the window, you have lost the frame.
Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Getting Closer to the Bone of Things
English 135.302
University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2011
We’ll be asking questions throughout this section of Creative Nonfiction, and we’ll be writing and reading our way toward answers: What do we owe our writing, and what does it owe us? What is the role of imagination in memoir? How is the persona of our nonfiction different from the person we know ourselves to be, and how different should it be? How important is it, really, to distinguish between story and situation? We’ll be provoked and inspired by the work of such authors as Patricia Hampl, Lia Purpura, Joan Didion, Julian Barnes, Natalie Goldberg, Grace Paley, William Fiennes, Michael Ondaatje, Vivian Gornick, and Terrence Des Pres. We’ll workshop essays, memoirs, and profiles.
Creative Nonfiction
English 135.302
University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2015
“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected…” the poet-novelist Forrest Gander has written. “To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.” In this creative nonfiction workshop, we will be thinking about what it means to tell our personal stories, and how that telling gets done. We’ll be reading writers contemplating the act of writing, writers writing their own lives, and writers who reflect on the lives of others. Failure—what it is and how it shapes us—will be a recurrent theme. Students should be prepared to read, to reflect, to take photographs, to find stories inside music, and to write two key papers—a memoir and a narrative profile—as well as a number of small papers and in-class assignments. Our guest writer this semester will be Daniel Menaker, who was the fiction editor for The New Yorker for many years and the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House. His most recent book is the memoir, My Mistake.
Creative Nonfiction Writing: Writing Home
English 135.302
University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2016
In this creative nonfiction workshop we will be thinking about what it means to tell our personal stories and how that telling gets done. Home will be a centralizing theme. The ways in which we define home and the ways in which it defines us. The necessary remembering that both roots us in and suggests a means of escape. We’ll be reading Michael Ondaatje, George Hodgman, and Helen Macdonald, among others. Students should be prepared to reflect and discuss, take snapshots, and find stories inside music. Two long projects—a memoir and a narrative profile—will be required, as will a number of small pieces and in-class assignments. Students will also be contributing to a home-themed chapbook (as part of the Beltran Family program at Kelly Writers House) and will be invited to a special evening with Margo Rabb, A.S. King, and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.
Creative Nonfiction
English 135.302
University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2017
Memory is mysterious; we can’t always remember; we often remember wrong; narrative time gets jumbled. And yet many of the best stories ever written erupt from remembered moments, considered “truths,” writers who wrangle episodes into place. In this creative nonfiction workshop we will be thinking about what it means to tell our personal stories and how that telling gets done. We’ll be reading some of the writers who do this best. Paul Lisicky. Heidi Julavits. Joan Wickersham. Mary-Louise Parker. Sallie Tisdale. Students should be prepared to reflect and discuss, take snapshots, and find stories inside music. Two long projects—a memoir and a long letter—will be required, as will a number of small pieces and in-class assignments. Students will also have the opportunity to meet and talk with the great Paul Lisicky.
Essays, Fragments, Collage: The Art of the Moment
English 135.301
University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2021
Memory arrives in fragments. Truth erupts; it finds us. A button on a sweater flashes us back to a day of gift giving. A childhood book recalls the one who read the tale out loud. In this class we’ll explore the moments of our lives through prompts that range from the tactile to the auditory, the documented to the whispered. We’ll produce and share miniature essays. We’ll create, as a final product, a curated memoir-in-essays. We’ll take inspiration from writers such as Margaret Renkl, Charles D’Ambrosio, Durga Chew-Bose, Elissa Washuta, Brian Doyle, Marc Hamer, and Alexander Chee. The writer Arisa White will join us.
Yearly, With Adjustments
Writers engage with the world around them, and with one another. In this class I will look to you to complete your assignments on time, to participate fully in conversations, to give your all, and to grow. You will be asked to read the assigned material in timely fashion and to complete a series of short pieces—some of them written in the fury of class time and some of them written on your own time. I want you to pay attention to what you are learning and how you are applying what you’ve learned. I will ask you to look for and defend essays that fall outside the curriculum. After 2022, upon my sudden and heretofore unforeseen retirement, which will be my choice, entirely, which will come as the result of zero administrative pressure, I will no longer be adjusting this message, though I will be perpetually missing the Lovely Ladies, and will be grateful that Brenda Miller was able to join us.
*
Sometimes there were so many in the teaching room that you ceded your seat at the table and stood for the three hours, softening the patent in the leather of your pink Doc Martens. Sometimes, the distance between the chairs and the walls was no distance at all, so that a student, urgent with pee, would crawl beneath the table, excuse me, excuse me, and regain their height on the other side, and make it out the door on time, to the bathroom down the skinny corridor, and we would just keep talking, we were so sure that the student would return to us, we were so sure the student was ours, belonged to us. Once we found a mouse in the trap and once a formation of fly husks on the sill, like somebody’s winged soldiers, and whenever we jiggered the windows open they would slam shut, spitting their chipped, loose teeth of paint into the room, and this is not a scene, only a situation, and this was that one room only, the room of most your years, the room that doesn’t exist anymore, taking part of your history with it. Because in the first room, in the first year, there were only five of them—loose and jangly and mostly ill at ease— and it was a very different room, and in the last room, the best room, your heart was smithereens.
*
Shouldn’t each semester exclaim upon the past, rise up, messianic, anticipating the prefatories, forestalling the swerves, proving the sedimentary of intelligence? Shouldn’t you say that you are leaving because your mascara ran, because your glasses smogged, because you only knew Apple but the room was IBM PC’d, because the mic didn’t work, because sometimes you could not hear them behind their double Covid masks, because sometimes when you turned your back you did not feel their eyes on you, because when you tried to breathe behind your mask, you couldn’t breathe behind your mask, because when their friend died you didn’t know and you didn’t say, dismissed, go freely into your sorrows. Instead, you played a filmic eulogy for a writer they had never read.
*
“I knew long ago that I was looking for something, and I didn’t know what it was.” (Barry Lopez)
*
At the end of those winter days you could not make your way home from the station, you could not walk another mile in your cracked Doc Marten boots, a hole in the toe of your stockings. The ache in the ankle that will always now be broken. Your age. The weight of your coat on your shoulders, the weight of your books in your bag, the weight of your unfulfilled intentions, the tonnage of self-doubt. You called for help and your husband arrived trailing Jeep rust, that Wrangler with the broken zipper plexiglass windows and the pool of floorboard wet where the snow had blown in. You barely opened the door and you barely climbed up to the gray fade of the seat and you barely dropped your bag to the damp floorboard. When you got home, you stumbled up the walk, and through the door, and to the couch, and you were catatonic and your husband, following in your wet footsteps said, Look at yourself, remember this.
*
In the last room, the best room, your heart was wild. You were desperate to repair the weeks that had come before, in the smog and burr of winter, when you could not feel their eyes on your back. To repair the weeks that had not been spent in this room, the very best room, but in that other room, which was long and crushing, chilled and inhospitable, a narrow hallway of a room, a corridor built for passing, aspersions on the room. What is the opposite of echo? There were no echoes in that other room. You god damn needed another room. They gave you another room. Your second chance was your final act of final desperation. Your second chance was when you knew that you would soon be leaving.
*
It couldn’t have mattered that your husband guessed it.
*
What is another word for wild?
*
You said: (a) Contain your passing thoughts. (b) Summon the photograph’s negative. (c) Muscle memory. (d) Sonnet your confusion. (e) Jangle your fragments. (f) Delineate your alternative history. (g) Write haunted.
*
You said, right, okay, Let’s make this easy: Narrative arc. Character arc. Voice. Tone. Mood. Theme. Hierarchies equaling purpose. Writing to as a way of writing of. The origin impulse as persistently urgent, descriptions as inherently complex, paragraphs operating as poems, structures alive with the impulses of the natural world.
*
You said: A work of writing reflects your mind; don’t overthink it. You said: You own the work; the work works for you.
*
A motif might, you said, be birds in flight, in song, in wait. Or the progressive movement of the sun across the room. Or the sound of rain becoming the sound of footsteps becoming the sound of an idea. Or successive bodies of water, or the iterative colors red, or the life of seeds. Or a motif might be the ways in which you repeatedly encounter, and therefore enlarge, the magnitudes of sadness.
*
The way the telling details make the story universal.
*
Pivot is a word you used: “Altered Flowers” is the pivot essay in the Brenda Miller collection. In Who’s Your Daddy, forgiveness is the pivot. Feel your way toward the pivot; the pivot knows that it’s the pivot.
*
Juxtaposition is a word you sliced. If hurt sits beside hope, what sits beyond hope? If a black braid becomes a black bird, what happens on the pages in between them? If white space is the pause, what isn’t pausing, and in what sequence, and what is the consequence of the sequence?
*
This is the consequence of the sequence.
*
They wrote: childhood, yearn, forgiveness, becoming, the cost of pronouns, lipstick, they say|therefore, feet burn, fragments, tripartites of silence, rhyme and no reason, mother of pearls, the relative pleasures of bed, the bruising at the ice rink, the white communion dress, mothers.
They yielded: Poa arctica, a purity of wish, escalations of the self, the who they told her to be. Smuckers Uncrustables. Albania. Grandfathers. The silence in the bottom of a pool. A stray droplet of the sea. Arachnophobia. The Bedouin way. An hour north. A body made of stardust. Whipped meringue. The two-step and the glide of truth, and time to each other, for each other, for you, from winter through spring.
*
You gave them names: The Spectaculars. The Astonishments. The Wows. The Lovely Ladies. You wrote them into your novels, gave them the endings you wanted most for them—the hero’s perch, the brain that will not stroke, the heart big enough for the world as they defined it. You asked them what they’d carry forward, and they said: ideas of community. They said: kinship. They said: opening the inner monologue to art. They said: everyone has their own story.
*
The soul of you was in the throat of you and so you let it be, you shattered.
*
Sometimes you see them now in the world, and they are famous—in the pages of magazines, at the helms of magazines, in the hands of the most important agents, winning prizes. Sometimes they write to you wanting a letter—a point of access to their third degrees or their fourth careers or their next pretty prizes. Sometimes they send you something they have written, or the date when they’ll be traveling, or an invitation to a cafe table in New Orleans, where no teacher comes between you, only the white, warm dust of beignets.
*
As if you had any claim, you claimed them for, you claimed them as. They were yours. possessives.
*
Lesson failure: There is still time to pivot. The arrow can yet bend, the hour. Return. Return. Write another syllabus. Invite another guest. Give another A. No one is judging you, no one is pressing you, no one is hovering beyond you, okay, sure, there are plenty of want-to teachers hovering beyond you, wanting your spot in the Ivy League, wanting their place on this campus, which is yours in many ways—your father’s alma mater, your alma mater, your teaching post for more than fifteen years now, your identity—say it—your possession, and yet you choose to leave, you say I can’t, your pivot is the heel of your own cracked boot.
*
You don’t know how you will feel until you have the time to feel. You must leave to find the time to feel, and then you’ll be doing all the feeling, and what if, then, in the molasses mess of your feeling, you will know that the leaving was wrong, that you were not ready, that having time to feel is the condition of remorse, that all you ever really wanted was the time to feel, but not the remorse?
*
What if, in losing teaching, you lose your Book of Commonplace—the new of the students, the fester in their stories, how their stories became your stories?
*
How could you? Walk away? In the prime of your—the prime of your what? You couldn’t name the what. That was the problem.
*
You’ll never name the students you now will never have.
*
It started, and then it could be stopped.
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Recent books include Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. Learn more at bethkephartbooks.com, junctureworkshops.com, and etsy.com/shop/BINDbyBIND.
5 October 2023
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