Episode 069 - Writing Memoir with Beth Kephart
March 9, 2021
Beth Kephart talks about WRITING MEMOIR, including various motivations for embarking on a memoir, and which might be considered unproductive or unhealthy (for example, for revenge). She discusses how writers can approach topics or episodes that involve actual people, both from a writing perspective and in terms of preparing those people for the experience of reading about themselves. And she talks about the market for memoir, and her experience across the full spectrum of publishing options—from the most well-established traditional houses to her own imprint.
Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2013 Master Writing Teacher for National YoungArts, is a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, has delivered keynote addresses on the art of teaching, has led teach-the-teacher sessions, and has taught writers of all ages in a variety of settings. She has published two books on the teaching of memoir—HANDLING THE TRUTH and TELL THE TRUTH. MAKE IT MATTER.—and writes a monthly educational newsletter, Juncture Notes.
"When you really get into what memoir is, can be, should be it has to do with whether an absolute fidelity to the truth carries the story you have in your heart as cleanly and as effectively as it might." —Beth Kephart
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today my guest is Beth Kephart. Hey, Beth, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Beth: I'm good and nice to see you on this snowy day.
[00:00:08] Matty: Yes. It's nice that we still have the technology to do this. We'll hope it lasts for the whole time. So just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:17] Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2013 Master Writing Teacher for National YoungArts, is a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, has delivered keynote addresses on the art of teaching, has led teach the teacher sessions, and has taught writers of all ages in a variety of settings. She has published two books on the teaching of memoir: HANDLING THE TRUTH and TELL THE TRUTH. MAKE IT MATTER. And she writes a monthly educational newsletter, JUNCTURE NOTES.
[00:00:44] And so we're going to be talking today about writing memoir, appropriately enough. And Beth, I wanted to start out asking you what drew you to memoir writing, both as a genre for yourself and as a topic of study?
[00:00:57] Beth: Well, the first memoir I ever saw was in a Princeton bookstore and it was written by Natalie Kusz. It was called ROAD SONG. I had never actually seen the word before. I'd gone to Penn and I had studied the history and sociology of science there. And I had written poems since I was about nine years old, but I wondered, what is this book?
[00:01:16] And it is, continues to be, and I'm still writing about it, one of the books that taught me the most about what memoir could be. It can be something beautiful. It often is not. There have been periods when the media have torn it down. And so I began to study the form, began to publish essays. Began to publish my own memoirs. Published five memoirs and then published the memoir of the Schuylkill River called FLOW: THE LIKE AND TIMES OF PHILADELPHIA'S SCHUYLKILL RIVER.
[00:01:45] I then began to think about all that I didn't know when I had been writing my memoirs myself. And so for many years, I wrote for young adults, I wrote middle grade. I wrote for the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. And I continue to amass a very large memoir library. I was asked to teach at Penn. I began to develop ideas about what it really means to teach memoir. I think it is, as I said, a beautiful form, a misunderstood form, a dangerous form. And it is so plastic that it engages me to this day.
[00:02:19] Matty: So let's start out talking a little more specifically about what memoir is and isn't. How is it different from an autobiography?
[00:02:28] Beth: Yeah. I thought to answer that question I would pull from what is now a very beat up version of HANDLING THE TRUTH. I'm looking at it, thinking of all the times I've opened these pages. And I have something here that I think is important and it will answer your question in a couple of different ways. So what I'm going to tell you is what memoir is not.
[00:02:49] And it is not autobiography and it is not a number of other things. So it is not a chronological, thematically tone-deaf recitation of everything remembered. That is autobiography. Often we see politicians or celebrities writing, you know, here's the beginning of my life. Here's everything I did it. They try to be inclusive. And they become, or can become, dull. That is not to say that every politician or celebrity who writes memoir writes badly. Mary-Louise Parker, an actress, is an extraordinary memoirist. And of course we've got Barack and Michelle and others. So I am not in any way suggesting that just because you're a politician or a celebrity, you're writing poorly.
[00:03:28] Memoir is also not a typeset version of a diary, unfiltered and unshaped. It is not exhibitionism for exhibitionism's sake. It is not an accusation or retaliation or your day in court. It is not a lecture or a lesson or a stew of information facts. It's not self-administered therapy. It's not an exercise in self-glorification. And it's not a trumped up, fantastical idea of what a life might have been. We've seen many false memoirs, which is part of the problem with the genre. ...
[00:00:06] Beth: I'm good and nice to see you on this snowy day.
[00:00:08] Matty: Yes. It's nice that we still have the technology to do this. We'll hope it lasts for the whole time. So just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you ...
[00:00:17] Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2013 Master Writing Teacher for National YoungArts, is a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, has delivered keynote addresses on the art of teaching, has led teach the teacher sessions, and has taught writers of all ages in a variety of settings. She has published two books on the teaching of memoir: HANDLING THE TRUTH and TELL THE TRUTH. MAKE IT MATTER. And she writes a monthly educational newsletter, JUNCTURE NOTES.
[00:00:44] And so we're going to be talking today about writing memoir, appropriately enough. And Beth, I wanted to start out asking you what drew you to memoir writing, both as a genre for yourself and as a topic of study?
[00:00:57] Beth: Well, the first memoir I ever saw was in a Princeton bookstore and it was written by Natalie Kusz. It was called ROAD SONG. I had never actually seen the word before. I'd gone to Penn and I had studied the history and sociology of science there. And I had written poems since I was about nine years old, but I wondered, what is this book?
[00:01:16] And it is, continues to be, and I'm still writing about it, one of the books that taught me the most about what memoir could be. It can be something beautiful. It often is not. There have been periods when the media have torn it down. And so I began to study the form, began to publish essays. Began to publish my own memoirs. Published five memoirs and then published the memoir of the Schuylkill River called FLOW: THE LIKE AND TIMES OF PHILADELPHIA'S SCHUYLKILL RIVER.
[00:01:45] I then began to think about all that I didn't know when I had been writing my memoirs myself. And so for many years, I wrote for young adults, I wrote middle grade. I wrote for the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. And I continue to amass a very large memoir library. I was asked to teach at Penn. I began to develop ideas about what it really means to teach memoir. I think it is, as I said, a beautiful form, a misunderstood form, a dangerous form. And it is so plastic that it engages me to this day.
[00:02:19] Matty: So let's start out talking a little more specifically about what memoir is and isn't. How is it different from an autobiography?
[00:02:28] Beth: Yeah. I thought to answer that question I would pull from what is now a very beat up version of HANDLING THE TRUTH. I'm looking at it, thinking of all the times I've opened these pages. And I have something here that I think is important and it will answer your question in a couple of different ways. So what I'm going to tell you is what memoir is not.
[00:02:49] And it is not autobiography and it is not a number of other things. So it is not a chronological, thematically tone-deaf recitation of everything remembered. That is autobiography. Often we see politicians or celebrities writing, you know, here's the beginning of my life. Here's everything I did it. They try to be inclusive. And they become, or can become, dull. That is not to say that every politician or celebrity who writes memoir writes badly. Mary-Louise Parker, an actress, is an extraordinary memoirist. And of course we've got Barack and Michelle and others. So I am not in any way suggesting that just because you're a politician or a celebrity, you're writing poorly.
[00:03:28] Memoir is also not a typeset version of a diary, unfiltered and unshaped. It is not exhibitionism for exhibitionism's sake. It is not an accusation or retaliation or your day in court. It is not a lecture or a lesson or a stew of information facts. It's not self-administered therapy. It's not an exercise in self-glorification. And it's not a trumped up, fantastical idea of what a life might have been. We've seen many false memoirs, which is part of the problem with the genre. ...
click here to read more
[00:04:01] Matty: I thought it was interesting that you had talked about your book about the Schuylkill and in preparation for this interview, I looked up "Beth Kephart books by genre." And I don't think anywhere on here is memoir listed. We have fiction. You have an listing under bildungsroman. Biography. Reference work. Young adult fiction. Alternate history. Children's nonfiction literature. Travel literature. Fable. Adventure fiction. Suspense. Autobiography. Children's literature. Didactic fiction. Thesis. And self-help book.
[00:04:34] Where did you find that? I just Googled Beth Kephart books by genre, and it was that sort of Google generated entry at the top. I thought it was interesting because--
[00:04:46] Beth: Google. What does Google know?
[00:04:48] Matty: Exactly. Well, it's pulling together what it thinks. And I thought it was interesting that there's not a line between memoir and these other things. Elements of both can be included.
[00:04:58] Beth: That's so interesting, Matty. The truth is that many of my novels have been autobiographical, especially the first one, UNDERCOVER. The truth is that I'm always inside every book that I write, that in writing the Schuylkill River's memoir, I was also writing what it was to be a woman caught in perpetual middle-age. So it is the Schuylkill's memoir, but it's also very much my voice, my thoughts about that, hidden in, embedded in the Schuylkill story.
[00:05:26] But I am known primarily, when I'm introduced at things, et cetera, I am known, even though I have far more books of fiction, as a memoirist and as a teacher of memoir. And of course, as you know, this book is WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF, it's coming out on March 2nd. It is a memoir in essays, which is slightly different from memoir, we can talk about how. But it's not just an interrogation of myself as a wife, as a daughter, and then as who I am when I'm not being either of those things. It is also a look at how memoir gets made and how we put our life onto the page. So it is also in its own way a teaching book about memoir. It is probably the most profound work I've done on memoir.
[00:06:08] I've done other books and lots and lots of essays on memoir. In fact, JUNCTURE, which you mentioned, is the workshop program that I founded with my husband five years or so ago. We've taught in person. We've now, of course, for now moved on to Zoom. And for that, I developed 11 brand new one hour lectures on ideas that I have never explored. Each of those presentations took three or four weeks of rereading 30 or so books for each one.
[00:06:37] And I developed all these new ideas about memoir, which are now going to go into another book that my husband and I will publish at the end of August, which is a really deep look at craft. Which is only to say I write memoir, I write about memoir, and I always will have more to say about it.
[00:06:54] Matty: If we step back and think about the people who are listening to this, and maybe they're thinking I want to write a memoir, or I want to write something. Maybe it's a memoir.
[00:07:04] If you think back to those very, very early stages of just thinking about it, what do you think are the driving reasons that you hear people decide that they want to undertake a memoir, and which of those are healthier or less healthy? Like you had mentioned the whole revenge motivation, not a good motivation. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:07:24] Beth: Yeah. When people announce that they want to write a memoir without having done sort of a deep dive into what memoir is, the reasons tend to be, not always, I don't want to generalize completely, but the reasons tend to be, man, I have a story that is like nobody else's. Nobody could tell my story. My story is so interesting. I'm so interesting. Or I am so mad at someone and it is my turn to speak. I never got to tell my side of the story. And those are the kinds of two initial provocations. Either I'm so interesting and I want to tell other people my story, or I'm so mad.
[00:07:58] And yet when you really get into what memoir is, can be, should be it has to do with whether an absolute fidelity to the truth carries the story you have in your heart as cleanly and as effectively as it might. And then you have plenty of options. You can write poetry that is memoir infused. You can write auto fiction, which is very autobiographical, like William Maxwell's SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW. You have a lot of options. And I think a lot of people think memoir's the easiest, because I don't have to do any research because I live that life. And in fact, memoir is the hardest.
[00:08:32] Matty: Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is I am not a memoir reader. And I think I must've had a bad experience early on of one that fell into one of those don'ts that you had mentioned earlier. And that the experience was like striking up a conversation with someone at a cocktail party, and then they just want to talk about themselves for the whole time.
[00:08:51] Absolutely. Talk about how people can avoid, if they say no, memoir's what I want to do, how can they avoid that, it's at the cocktail party, and I just wanted to talk about myself approach.
[00:09:03] Beth: We have to, as you said, read a lot of memoir before you take the endeavor, because once you start really reading it, you will recognize the glories and the dangers of the form. And you'll be able to say, I want to go there, or I don't.
[00:09:17] We should really start with this. You should, as a writer, put what feels urgent onto the page. Don't judge it. Don't label it. Don't say this is memoir, I'm writing memoir, and boom. Just start writing. You may find like Francisco Goldman, when he wrote SAY HER NAME, which is a highly autobiographical account of his wife's death on a Mexican beach by drowning, you may say I'm writing memoir. This is truth. And then he ran into, but there are these things that I need to fudge, these things I need to shape. I'm going to therefore take myself out of the box of memoir and say it's a novel. We all know that it's really closely aligned with what actually happened, but I'm giving myself the freedom to not have to be precise.
[00:10:02] And so I think it's important to not box yourself in with a label right away. I have written, as you've said, all these different forms, I've published a lot of short stories for adults. I haven't written a play, but I have a written and published poetry. So I think that each impulse and instinct necessarily takes its own form and it is wrong to pre-label.
[00:10:22] And then once you're into it, and if you're sure that you're writing memoir, it's always for me the ability to ask the larger questions about life, to connect your story to the reader.
[00:10:32] There are two problems that memoirist have that are the most profound and the most ubiquitous. The one is form and structure. You know, is this chronological? Is this a collage, is this a lyric braid? Are there time gaps? Is there a lot of research? And the other is the failure, the easy failure, of not connecting yourself to the reader, asking is this of interest to them? Is there anything in this for them beyond gossip, beyond kind of feeling like I'm listening to somebody else have a conversation and they don't know I'm here. So those are the two big problems. There are many others, but those are the two most ubiquitous ones.
[00:11:15] Matty: You had mentioned before that one of the maybe not so good drivers of writing a memoir is, I had such a fascinating story and everybody should hear it. And I think that the corollary might be, I don't have anything interesting to say. Why should I bother writing this kind of thing down? Is that a danger as well? And if it is, how can people get past that?
[00:11:33] Beth: I think the biggest danger's having that thought and then allowing yourself to believe it. I am not an interesting person. I did not climb Mount Everest or spend a couple of weeks on Mars. You know, I haven't done these things. But I have felt the freedom to explore memoir in what will be seven books or so of it. And because I've been really interested in the big, big universal questions that tie us. One of my memoirs, INTO THE TANGLE OF FRIENDSHIP, was about how do the people we invite into our lives shape who we become.
[00:12:06] A third memoir was about my marriage to my Salvadoran husband, and it was how well do we ever really know the people we love as the kind of central spine of it. And these are questions that would be of interest to others, and not just to me. You don't have to be extraordinary in your resume to write memoir.
[00:12:25] In fact, some of my students at Penn, I just had this question. Someone asked, I'm really happy. I love my family and love my sister. I love my home. Do I belong in this class? She didn't put it that way, do I belong, but will I have anything to say?
[00:12:40] And so many of my students at Penn have in the past entered the class thinking, I've got to summon up the most tragic thing that happened to me, because then I'm writing memoir. And that's not necessarily the case. In fact, some of the best memoirs are just funny. And really, there's no problem with being a funny and generous memoirist.
[00:13:02] Matty: What would be an example of one of those memoirs that's relying not on a tragic event and what makes it effective?
[00:13:09] Beth: Oh, gosh, I'd have to go look at all of my books. I think there are so many although this sounds tragic, Elizabeth Tova Bailey's THE SOUND OF A WILD SNAIL EATING. She does get very sick. The author, in the first few pages, she's struck down by a virus. She then has to spend a lot of time alone in a room. There is a small tragedy there, but that's like this much of the book, it's like the first three pages, because then what happens over the course of the rest of the book is, she hangs out with a snail and she's watching it and they seem to have this relationship.
[00:13:43] And even though she's in bed and a lot of the research books are really heavy, she's reading about the snail and her life becomes filtered through this relationship with the snail, the past and the present. And it's not like on every page there's a plot point and a bit of suspense or something tragic or bloody happening. It's Bailey and a snail. And it's beautiful.
[00:14:06] Matty: Do you know how that book was published?
[00:14:09] Beth: To great acclaim, a bestseller. I don't know the behind-the-scenes story of how she got her agent, but a very established press and won a lot of awards and she's famous for that book.
[00:14:20] Beth: Let me go back to your question, an example of a book, WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF is an example of a book where nothing tragic happens, but a lot of deep thinking is done. I'm thinking about what it is to be, you know, I'm an artist, my husband's an artist, to try to build something out of our age of meaning, to try to understand what makes love enduring, to get over things that aren't maybe working.
[00:14:45] And then the DAUGHTER is, my mother's passed away. And then my father, I spent a lot of time with him in all those years, and then packing his house, moving him three times, being there when he was very sick. And when he was having hospital induced psychoses and all kinds of things and yet still loving this person. And then SELF is an exploration of what it is to feel like you're an apostrophe versus your own thing. a husband's wife, a father's daughter, or yourself. Tragedy? No. Some inciting event that had to be written about? No. But a really deep plunge into what it is to be navigating love and loss and uncertainty? Yes.
[00:15:27] Matty: How do you navigate the decision when you're taking off all your self filters, you have a story you want to write, let's say about a relationship with your father. You get it down on paper. It's you decided something you want to share out with the world. And if the story, if your own story comes to a happy ending, then the justification for wanting to get that out into the world could be other people who are facing this might read this and then benefit from it. If the outcome is not happy, how do you weigh perhaps putting someone who's in a bad situation with their parent in a worst situation when they read about your experience in your memoir, and then bring it, take away a sense of hopelessness rather than a sense of hopefulness?
[00:16:11] Beth: Because it's never about the outcome. It is about the thought process that accompanies the day-by-day decisions that get made. And if there's wisdom, even in difficult circumstances, that wisdom transferred to a reader is a kind of hope. We might not get the final chapter we want to write, but as my friend Ruda, who I quote in this book, my father did pass away in August, she has elderly parents, and she would always say, finish well, finish well. And even though it could be hard. Even though there was sadness and confusion and anger sometimes, there was the sense of trying to finish well, of showing up, even when you may not be told that you're wanted. And I think the thought process is what matters, not how my dad finally did.
[00:17:06] Matty: If you're writing about other people, how do you weigh fictionalizing, not fictionalizing, naming names, and avoiding the revenge motivation?
[00:17:17] Beth: Yeah. First of all, I am aligned with Sally Tisdale and her essay VIOLATION. Do not make anything up. Do not merge characters. Do not fictionalize. If you want to go to auto fiction, you have that choice. There are books that infuriate me because of the opening, you're thinking this is really great, and you go back to the beginning, it's like all the characters have been changed. They've been disguised. There've been so well disguised, they won't recognize themselves. And then you start reading and it's very explicit dialogue. And she was wearing a yellow scarf and her jewelry ... You're like, well, why do those details matter if you've just told me they're made up? So I am not a proponent of that.
[00:17:55] I also believe that if you're searching for wisdom and not for retribution, you cannot control how people will feel about the books that you've written. People have been upset that they weren't in the books because, I was trying to protect them and, Oh I didn't get to be in your book. But I want to read something to you from WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF towards the end of the daughter section, because your question, I do tell people who are in the book, my books, that they are there before it's published.
[00:18:21] And this is a scene where I'm actually telling my father that this book is happening. And before this, I had found letters from my mother written to me very long ago, that had changed my understanding of what our relationship had been or could have been.
I began to tell my father of some letters I had found, some words my mother had written to me in my twenty-second year. I'd never read the letters when they first arrived for I'd been harboring deep hurt. I hadn't read them when I found them again a few years ago, during those months of cleaning out the family home. I'd only read them recently. And what I'd found in them was love. Love I'd wasted years not trusting. Love that might've made me a purer version of myself, a more capacious, less guarded, less leaning-toward-intense self.
"That's good," my father said after I stopped speaking.
[00:19:11] And then I go down.
"Dad I've written of those letters that I found. I've written of me and us, of now and then, of broken things and fixed ones. I've written a book, or I'm writing a book, and I met someone, Dad, who might want to buy it."
The river flowed on, knocking itself against its banks.
"That's good," my father said. "That's good. A book like that could be important."
[00:19:33] So he knew that I was struggling in the pages with my mother and my memory of my mother. He knew that ultimately I learned things about love by making that struggle. He knew he was in the book. And my son is here and a page in some pages. I read all of that to him before it was published. My husband of course is the first whole section. And he recognizes that. First of all, everybody who's read the book is totally in love with my husband. Well, everybody who meets my husband is totally in love with him. And then now they're really, really, really in love with my husband.
[00:20:06] And that is not because I paint the portrait of a perfect marriage. Far from it. They just love him. In fact, the other day, a magazine editor wrote to me and, he's been married for 30 years to his wife and he said, I'm reading WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF, and can I just tell you, I'm in love with your husband, you know?
[00:20:23] And so it's not because I'm making it romantic or sentimental or easy or wow, I have a perfect marriage. It's just that I'm being real.
[00:20:34] Matty: Have you ever had people that you don't know come to you to want to talk about the topic of your memoir. And I'm thinking this is sort of similar to a conversation I had in a recent episode with Emma Rose, who writes young adult fiction, and she writes about suicide. And so we were talking about what happens if she's at a reader event or she hears from somebody on social media or via email or something like that, and they say something that concerns her, you know, I've read your book about teenage suicide and then something about the communication is concerning. Do you ever have those kinds of communications with people who have read your memoirs?
[00:21:10] Beth: Well, I mean, I've published what will be 36 books, and some are these really intensely ... I just got a copy yesterday of my Henriette Wyeth picture book, which is gorgeous illustrated by Amy June Bates, so the conversations that I've had over time have been widely varied. I would say most people know me as a teacher. And so 90% of what people ask me is how can I get published? Can you connect me to someone? So that's the primary conversation that comes up. In terms of one of my books, I referenced it, UNDERCOVER.I got a letter from a girl who was in the back of a theater contemplating suicide, and someone had left a copy of UNDERCOVER there. And she wrote to me to say that she had started reading it and she was so interested to find out what would happen, that she just sat and read the whole thing, and by the time she was done, her impulse had left her.
[00:22:09] So there are stories that come to me, never that have been that I feel like I need to throw myself in front of someone so they don't do something. Mostly it's, I want to write a memoir because my story is so interesting or I want to exact revenge. And those are the two things that concern me because I know that exacting revenge is not ultimately a happy, happy thing for anybody.
[00:22:37] And because I know how very hard the memoir journey will be -- there will be many drafts, many disappointments, much not knowing -- and so it is going to be important that they're willing to take that journey over a long period of time and endure it. So I always worry for them. It's not going to be easy. Are you okay with that, you know?
[00:22:59] Matty: If someone comes to you and has some other sentence, then I want to write a memoir because my story is so interesting and they've inserted a different word than story and a different word than interesting. Is there a phrase there that you hear and you say, Oh yeah, memoir is for you?
[00:23:11] Beth: I want to write a memoir because I love the form, and I've been thinking about how complicated truth is and I want to figure out what it is, and so I want to write a memoir that helps me do that, for me and for others. I'm like, okay, there.
[00:23:29] Matty: That does sound like a healthier starting point. You had mentioned earlier, memoir in essays as being something a little bit different than you wanted to talk about that?
[00:23:37] Beth: Well, a memoir, a traditional memoir, is continuous. That doesn't mean it's chronological, but there's a continuous narrative thread. In memoir in essays, there aren't a lot of them, but I have a sort of studied those there are, and this one is very different. It's my own version. But in a memoir in essays, there are small pieces and large pieces that are choreographed, so that there's a sort of a rise and a fall. You see something on page 10 and it is hearkened back to on page 50. But when you see it on 50, it's changed a little because the understanding of the life has changed. And there are these, you can think of them as sine curves that overlap and intersect. And I very much think of it as choreographed work.
[00:24:24] I'm going to put a small piece here. I'm going to echo it here. It's going to feel different. In between this big thing's going to happen. That big thing is going to become this small, remembered sentence over here. And it's this whole mapping, which for me mirrors life itself, because we never have one truth and we're never definitive in our conclusion making. So that's why I'm interested in it.
[00:24:47] Matty: If someone has written their memoir and they now have what they consider to be a very clean draft, what do you recommend in terms of finding an editor for work like that?
[00:24:57] Beth: When you say editor, do you mean at a publishing house or as an editor, like someone who's intermediary.
[00:25:05] Matty: If somebody's goal is to traditionally publish, would you recommend that they engage an editor themselves before they start sending it out?
[00:25:11] Beth: I think there are workshop environments, of course I run them at Juncture, but there are people that my dear friend, Kate Moses, who has like a yearlong program where people are writing over time, she's providing input. It's each class of five or six, they get to know each other over a whole year. Catapult, through writers like Megan Stielstra, do the same thing where you can take this journey and you can get this feedback.
[00:25:37] And I think that's a wise thing to do if you can afford it, if you have the time, because you send your book out. If you get an agent, it's the same thing. To get an agent, you're rejected, you're not going to get another shot, usually. Sometimes you do with that agent. So you really want to make sure you have the best product possible because if you send a book to 20 editors and they all say no, and they tell you no for a specific reason, you can't normally, unless they invite you to, go back to those 20. So you've lost that opportunity.
[00:26:08] Matty: I took a query seminar with Alan Orloff at a conference several years ago and his recommendation, which I thought was a good one, is have your your A, B, and C list, editors or agents or publishing houses, whatever approach you're taking, and then when you first start sending it out, send it to one from A, one from B, and one from C, because you don't want to send it to all your A people and, exactly what you're saying, you've made some error and now you've blown out all your A list.
[00:26:34] Beth: And I've learned that lesson the hard way. My degree is in history of science from Penn, as I said. I am an absolute autodidact. I went with my family as a family vacation to Spoleto, Italy, and met Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons and spent a week with them. That was the first time I'd ever been in communication or in community with writers and then a year later, Jayne Anne Phillips and William Gass in Prague, and then after that, Jayne Anne asked me to be there at Bread Loaf with her. So those are my three, three weeks in my whole life of having outside instruction, anybody workshopping my work. I myself haven't had the benefit. I've had some friends along the way who have read a chapter or two, I'm trying to think if the full memoir. Really, I send my work in small pieces out to literary magazines and I get a sense for whether an essay is really working by the response from editors there.
[00:27:32] Matty: So would this be an essay that's an excerpt of a larger book-length memoir?
[00:27:35] Beth: Yeah, but like this being a memoir in essays, there are pieces that Catapult had published. Most of the book is new, but there are pieces that along the way had been published and had gotten a good response.
[00:27:47] Like one of them became a Best American Essays Notable. And so you get a sense, okay, that worked because three people wanted it immediately, and that's been my kind of feedback.
[00:27:59] Matty: It does seem like now might be a good time for memoirs because you do have the success of Barack and Michelle Obama's memoirs. Is that paving the way at all for interest in memoir?
[00:28:10] Beth: No. I mean that they're totally in a breed of their own. That's not going to do it. And I don't think there's ever a good or a bad time for memoir. I would say that its harder and harder to publish anything at all. I was at one point talking to an agent who said to me that she was only looking, this was like three or four years ago, only looking for books that had a guarantee sell rate of 500,000 copies.
[00:28:33] No one does that. Yes, Barack and Michelle do that, but if that's the limit that you're putting on submissions, and this was just someone I was talking to, that's really hard. That's really hard. WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF is coming out from Forest Avenue Press, a small indy press. I've been with Simon and Schuster and Harper and Norton and the big presses, but I really like my relationship with Laura at this press. They don't typically publish memoir, by the way. She's really a fiction publisher, so this is a rare thing for her, but we've become very good friends and we're very excited. And when I get to starred Booklist review, she calls me on the phone, and we celebrate together. So I like that. I don't have a need to be with a big house right now.
[00:29:12] Matty: This is also a nice link back to another recent episode, which was with Jason Kasper, who went from being an indy to publishing with Severn River Publishing. And really the whole conversation was about why he had made that change. And it is a nice thing to remember that it's not just indy or traditional, there's a spectrum. It's not an either / or thing. There's a spectrum. And if a big house isn't right for a writer, then there may be other sizes, other focuses, other personal connections that you have that can work, which is why I say that The Indy Author Podcast is for people with an indy mindset, not just an indy publishing business.
[00:29:47] Beth: We've done it all, right? So I've done university press, Temple University did FLOW and LOVE and other things with me. I've done the really big houses. Harper Collins did four of my books, Norton did three, Simon and Schuster two. Those were YA. I've done business with Berrett Koehler. I've done one small YA press for Cloud Hopper, which is a book I love, and my husband illustrated. I've worked on picture books for Random House and Cameron / Abrams and Creative Editions.
[00:30:20] And then Bill and I, my husband and I, have published our own books through Juncture. We have a whole Juncture line. So yes, the workbook we published, we did an essay prize award. We had all these submissions, and we created a book of that. And we've published a journal of his illustrations in life, poems and prompts. We've done STRIKE THE EMPTY, which are thoughts that are taken from Juncture. And we're going to publish this new craft book in August.
[00:30:46] So we control it. He's an artist, we are working on it together and it's part of the Juncture brand. So we've done it in all different ways. And this workbook has sold more copies than some of my very traditionally published books. So it's just, yeah, I do not discriminate.
[00:31:03] Matty: Excellent. Well, this has been so interesting and I appreciate your time so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your books online.
[00:31:12] Beth: First of all, Google Beth Kephart memoir. That's so funny what you found out. I think the easiest thing to do is BethKephartBooks.com and JunctureWorkshops.com. You can get from one to the other. But in Juncture Workshops, there are all these newsletters that are posted, that are free, that provide insights into other's work, some craft exercises. And the Beth Kephart page lists my books and awards and upcoming events.
[00:31:35] And I should say that there are a number of upcoming events for the launch of WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF, including a conversation with the actress Jacinda Barrett on the Free Library stage via Zoom, and something at Brandywine River Museum of Art. And something that might be of interest to some of you. For $1 and the proof of the purchase of this book, I'm doing a free Juncture workshop that they're all illustrated. They're all really in depth. And my editor, Laura Stanfield will be on with me today that day, too. So that's all on my website.
[00:32:06] Matty: Great. Well, that's a great set of resources. Thank you again.
[00:32:10] Beth: You are welcome. Thanks for having me.
[00:04:34] Where did you find that? I just Googled Beth Kephart books by genre, and it was that sort of Google generated entry at the top. I thought it was interesting because--
[00:04:46] Beth: Google. What does Google know?
[00:04:48] Matty: Exactly. Well, it's pulling together what it thinks. And I thought it was interesting that there's not a line between memoir and these other things. Elements of both can be included.
[00:04:58] Beth: That's so interesting, Matty. The truth is that many of my novels have been autobiographical, especially the first one, UNDERCOVER. The truth is that I'm always inside every book that I write, that in writing the Schuylkill River's memoir, I was also writing what it was to be a woman caught in perpetual middle-age. So it is the Schuylkill's memoir, but it's also very much my voice, my thoughts about that, hidden in, embedded in the Schuylkill story.
[00:05:26] But I am known primarily, when I'm introduced at things, et cetera, I am known, even though I have far more books of fiction, as a memoirist and as a teacher of memoir. And of course, as you know, this book is WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF, it's coming out on March 2nd. It is a memoir in essays, which is slightly different from memoir, we can talk about how. But it's not just an interrogation of myself as a wife, as a daughter, and then as who I am when I'm not being either of those things. It is also a look at how memoir gets made and how we put our life onto the page. So it is also in its own way a teaching book about memoir. It is probably the most profound work I've done on memoir.
[00:06:08] I've done other books and lots and lots of essays on memoir. In fact, JUNCTURE, which you mentioned, is the workshop program that I founded with my husband five years or so ago. We've taught in person. We've now, of course, for now moved on to Zoom. And for that, I developed 11 brand new one hour lectures on ideas that I have never explored. Each of those presentations took three or four weeks of rereading 30 or so books for each one.
[00:06:37] And I developed all these new ideas about memoir, which are now going to go into another book that my husband and I will publish at the end of August, which is a really deep look at craft. Which is only to say I write memoir, I write about memoir, and I always will have more to say about it.
[00:06:54] Matty: If we step back and think about the people who are listening to this, and maybe they're thinking I want to write a memoir, or I want to write something. Maybe it's a memoir.
[00:07:04] If you think back to those very, very early stages of just thinking about it, what do you think are the driving reasons that you hear people decide that they want to undertake a memoir, and which of those are healthier or less healthy? Like you had mentioned the whole revenge motivation, not a good motivation. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:07:24] Beth: Yeah. When people announce that they want to write a memoir without having done sort of a deep dive into what memoir is, the reasons tend to be, not always, I don't want to generalize completely, but the reasons tend to be, man, I have a story that is like nobody else's. Nobody could tell my story. My story is so interesting. I'm so interesting. Or I am so mad at someone and it is my turn to speak. I never got to tell my side of the story. And those are the kinds of two initial provocations. Either I'm so interesting and I want to tell other people my story, or I'm so mad.
[00:07:58] And yet when you really get into what memoir is, can be, should be it has to do with whether an absolute fidelity to the truth carries the story you have in your heart as cleanly and as effectively as it might. And then you have plenty of options. You can write poetry that is memoir infused. You can write auto fiction, which is very autobiographical, like William Maxwell's SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW. You have a lot of options. And I think a lot of people think memoir's the easiest, because I don't have to do any research because I live that life. And in fact, memoir is the hardest.
[00:08:32] Matty: Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is I am not a memoir reader. And I think I must've had a bad experience early on of one that fell into one of those don'ts that you had mentioned earlier. And that the experience was like striking up a conversation with someone at a cocktail party, and then they just want to talk about themselves for the whole time.
[00:08:51] Absolutely. Talk about how people can avoid, if they say no, memoir's what I want to do, how can they avoid that, it's at the cocktail party, and I just wanted to talk about myself approach.
[00:09:03] Beth: We have to, as you said, read a lot of memoir before you take the endeavor, because once you start really reading it, you will recognize the glories and the dangers of the form. And you'll be able to say, I want to go there, or I don't.
[00:09:17] We should really start with this. You should, as a writer, put what feels urgent onto the page. Don't judge it. Don't label it. Don't say this is memoir, I'm writing memoir, and boom. Just start writing. You may find like Francisco Goldman, when he wrote SAY HER NAME, which is a highly autobiographical account of his wife's death on a Mexican beach by drowning, you may say I'm writing memoir. This is truth. And then he ran into, but there are these things that I need to fudge, these things I need to shape. I'm going to therefore take myself out of the box of memoir and say it's a novel. We all know that it's really closely aligned with what actually happened, but I'm giving myself the freedom to not have to be precise.
[00:10:02] And so I think it's important to not box yourself in with a label right away. I have written, as you've said, all these different forms, I've published a lot of short stories for adults. I haven't written a play, but I have a written and published poetry. So I think that each impulse and instinct necessarily takes its own form and it is wrong to pre-label.
[00:10:22] And then once you're into it, and if you're sure that you're writing memoir, it's always for me the ability to ask the larger questions about life, to connect your story to the reader.
[00:10:32] There are two problems that memoirist have that are the most profound and the most ubiquitous. The one is form and structure. You know, is this chronological? Is this a collage, is this a lyric braid? Are there time gaps? Is there a lot of research? And the other is the failure, the easy failure, of not connecting yourself to the reader, asking is this of interest to them? Is there anything in this for them beyond gossip, beyond kind of feeling like I'm listening to somebody else have a conversation and they don't know I'm here. So those are the two big problems. There are many others, but those are the two most ubiquitous ones.
[00:11:15] Matty: You had mentioned before that one of the maybe not so good drivers of writing a memoir is, I had such a fascinating story and everybody should hear it. And I think that the corollary might be, I don't have anything interesting to say. Why should I bother writing this kind of thing down? Is that a danger as well? And if it is, how can people get past that?
[00:11:33] Beth: I think the biggest danger's having that thought and then allowing yourself to believe it. I am not an interesting person. I did not climb Mount Everest or spend a couple of weeks on Mars. You know, I haven't done these things. But I have felt the freedom to explore memoir in what will be seven books or so of it. And because I've been really interested in the big, big universal questions that tie us. One of my memoirs, INTO THE TANGLE OF FRIENDSHIP, was about how do the people we invite into our lives shape who we become.
[00:12:06] A third memoir was about my marriage to my Salvadoran husband, and it was how well do we ever really know the people we love as the kind of central spine of it. And these are questions that would be of interest to others, and not just to me. You don't have to be extraordinary in your resume to write memoir.
[00:12:25] In fact, some of my students at Penn, I just had this question. Someone asked, I'm really happy. I love my family and love my sister. I love my home. Do I belong in this class? She didn't put it that way, do I belong, but will I have anything to say?
[00:12:40] And so many of my students at Penn have in the past entered the class thinking, I've got to summon up the most tragic thing that happened to me, because then I'm writing memoir. And that's not necessarily the case. In fact, some of the best memoirs are just funny. And really, there's no problem with being a funny and generous memoirist.
[00:13:02] Matty: What would be an example of one of those memoirs that's relying not on a tragic event and what makes it effective?
[00:13:09] Beth: Oh, gosh, I'd have to go look at all of my books. I think there are so many although this sounds tragic, Elizabeth Tova Bailey's THE SOUND OF A WILD SNAIL EATING. She does get very sick. The author, in the first few pages, she's struck down by a virus. She then has to spend a lot of time alone in a room. There is a small tragedy there, but that's like this much of the book, it's like the first three pages, because then what happens over the course of the rest of the book is, she hangs out with a snail and she's watching it and they seem to have this relationship.
[00:13:43] And even though she's in bed and a lot of the research books are really heavy, she's reading about the snail and her life becomes filtered through this relationship with the snail, the past and the present. And it's not like on every page there's a plot point and a bit of suspense or something tragic or bloody happening. It's Bailey and a snail. And it's beautiful.
[00:14:06] Matty: Do you know how that book was published?
[00:14:09] Beth: To great acclaim, a bestseller. I don't know the behind-the-scenes story of how she got her agent, but a very established press and won a lot of awards and she's famous for that book.
[00:14:20] Beth: Let me go back to your question, an example of a book, WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF is an example of a book where nothing tragic happens, but a lot of deep thinking is done. I'm thinking about what it is to be, you know, I'm an artist, my husband's an artist, to try to build something out of our age of meaning, to try to understand what makes love enduring, to get over things that aren't maybe working.
[00:14:45] And then the DAUGHTER is, my mother's passed away. And then my father, I spent a lot of time with him in all those years, and then packing his house, moving him three times, being there when he was very sick. And when he was having hospital induced psychoses and all kinds of things and yet still loving this person. And then SELF is an exploration of what it is to feel like you're an apostrophe versus your own thing. a husband's wife, a father's daughter, or yourself. Tragedy? No. Some inciting event that had to be written about? No. But a really deep plunge into what it is to be navigating love and loss and uncertainty? Yes.
[00:15:27] Matty: How do you navigate the decision when you're taking off all your self filters, you have a story you want to write, let's say about a relationship with your father. You get it down on paper. It's you decided something you want to share out with the world. And if the story, if your own story comes to a happy ending, then the justification for wanting to get that out into the world could be other people who are facing this might read this and then benefit from it. If the outcome is not happy, how do you weigh perhaps putting someone who's in a bad situation with their parent in a worst situation when they read about your experience in your memoir, and then bring it, take away a sense of hopelessness rather than a sense of hopefulness?
[00:16:11] Beth: Because it's never about the outcome. It is about the thought process that accompanies the day-by-day decisions that get made. And if there's wisdom, even in difficult circumstances, that wisdom transferred to a reader is a kind of hope. We might not get the final chapter we want to write, but as my friend Ruda, who I quote in this book, my father did pass away in August, she has elderly parents, and she would always say, finish well, finish well. And even though it could be hard. Even though there was sadness and confusion and anger sometimes, there was the sense of trying to finish well, of showing up, even when you may not be told that you're wanted. And I think the thought process is what matters, not how my dad finally did.
[00:17:06] Matty: If you're writing about other people, how do you weigh fictionalizing, not fictionalizing, naming names, and avoiding the revenge motivation?
[00:17:17] Beth: Yeah. First of all, I am aligned with Sally Tisdale and her essay VIOLATION. Do not make anything up. Do not merge characters. Do not fictionalize. If you want to go to auto fiction, you have that choice. There are books that infuriate me because of the opening, you're thinking this is really great, and you go back to the beginning, it's like all the characters have been changed. They've been disguised. There've been so well disguised, they won't recognize themselves. And then you start reading and it's very explicit dialogue. And she was wearing a yellow scarf and her jewelry ... You're like, well, why do those details matter if you've just told me they're made up? So I am not a proponent of that.
[00:17:55] I also believe that if you're searching for wisdom and not for retribution, you cannot control how people will feel about the books that you've written. People have been upset that they weren't in the books because, I was trying to protect them and, Oh I didn't get to be in your book. But I want to read something to you from WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF towards the end of the daughter section, because your question, I do tell people who are in the book, my books, that they are there before it's published.
[00:18:21] And this is a scene where I'm actually telling my father that this book is happening. And before this, I had found letters from my mother written to me very long ago, that had changed my understanding of what our relationship had been or could have been.
I began to tell my father of some letters I had found, some words my mother had written to me in my twenty-second year. I'd never read the letters when they first arrived for I'd been harboring deep hurt. I hadn't read them when I found them again a few years ago, during those months of cleaning out the family home. I'd only read them recently. And what I'd found in them was love. Love I'd wasted years not trusting. Love that might've made me a purer version of myself, a more capacious, less guarded, less leaning-toward-intense self.
"That's good," my father said after I stopped speaking.
[00:19:11] And then I go down.
"Dad I've written of those letters that I found. I've written of me and us, of now and then, of broken things and fixed ones. I've written a book, or I'm writing a book, and I met someone, Dad, who might want to buy it."
The river flowed on, knocking itself against its banks.
"That's good," my father said. "That's good. A book like that could be important."
[00:19:33] So he knew that I was struggling in the pages with my mother and my memory of my mother. He knew that ultimately I learned things about love by making that struggle. He knew he was in the book. And my son is here and a page in some pages. I read all of that to him before it was published. My husband of course is the first whole section. And he recognizes that. First of all, everybody who's read the book is totally in love with my husband. Well, everybody who meets my husband is totally in love with him. And then now they're really, really, really in love with my husband.
[00:20:06] And that is not because I paint the portrait of a perfect marriage. Far from it. They just love him. In fact, the other day, a magazine editor wrote to me and, he's been married for 30 years to his wife and he said, I'm reading WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF, and can I just tell you, I'm in love with your husband, you know?
[00:20:23] And so it's not because I'm making it romantic or sentimental or easy or wow, I have a perfect marriage. It's just that I'm being real.
[00:20:34] Matty: Have you ever had people that you don't know come to you to want to talk about the topic of your memoir. And I'm thinking this is sort of similar to a conversation I had in a recent episode with Emma Rose, who writes young adult fiction, and she writes about suicide. And so we were talking about what happens if she's at a reader event or she hears from somebody on social media or via email or something like that, and they say something that concerns her, you know, I've read your book about teenage suicide and then something about the communication is concerning. Do you ever have those kinds of communications with people who have read your memoirs?
[00:21:10] Beth: Well, I mean, I've published what will be 36 books, and some are these really intensely ... I just got a copy yesterday of my Henriette Wyeth picture book, which is gorgeous illustrated by Amy June Bates, so the conversations that I've had over time have been widely varied. I would say most people know me as a teacher. And so 90% of what people ask me is how can I get published? Can you connect me to someone? So that's the primary conversation that comes up. In terms of one of my books, I referenced it, UNDERCOVER.I got a letter from a girl who was in the back of a theater contemplating suicide, and someone had left a copy of UNDERCOVER there. And she wrote to me to say that she had started reading it and she was so interested to find out what would happen, that she just sat and read the whole thing, and by the time she was done, her impulse had left her.
[00:22:09] So there are stories that come to me, never that have been that I feel like I need to throw myself in front of someone so they don't do something. Mostly it's, I want to write a memoir because my story is so interesting or I want to exact revenge. And those are the two things that concern me because I know that exacting revenge is not ultimately a happy, happy thing for anybody.
[00:22:37] And because I know how very hard the memoir journey will be -- there will be many drafts, many disappointments, much not knowing -- and so it is going to be important that they're willing to take that journey over a long period of time and endure it. So I always worry for them. It's not going to be easy. Are you okay with that, you know?
[00:22:59] Matty: If someone comes to you and has some other sentence, then I want to write a memoir because my story is so interesting and they've inserted a different word than story and a different word than interesting. Is there a phrase there that you hear and you say, Oh yeah, memoir is for you?
[00:23:11] Beth: I want to write a memoir because I love the form, and I've been thinking about how complicated truth is and I want to figure out what it is, and so I want to write a memoir that helps me do that, for me and for others. I'm like, okay, there.
[00:23:29] Matty: That does sound like a healthier starting point. You had mentioned earlier, memoir in essays as being something a little bit different than you wanted to talk about that?
[00:23:37] Beth: Well, a memoir, a traditional memoir, is continuous. That doesn't mean it's chronological, but there's a continuous narrative thread. In memoir in essays, there aren't a lot of them, but I have a sort of studied those there are, and this one is very different. It's my own version. But in a memoir in essays, there are small pieces and large pieces that are choreographed, so that there's a sort of a rise and a fall. You see something on page 10 and it is hearkened back to on page 50. But when you see it on 50, it's changed a little because the understanding of the life has changed. And there are these, you can think of them as sine curves that overlap and intersect. And I very much think of it as choreographed work.
[00:24:24] I'm going to put a small piece here. I'm going to echo it here. It's going to feel different. In between this big thing's going to happen. That big thing is going to become this small, remembered sentence over here. And it's this whole mapping, which for me mirrors life itself, because we never have one truth and we're never definitive in our conclusion making. So that's why I'm interested in it.
[00:24:47] Matty: If someone has written their memoir and they now have what they consider to be a very clean draft, what do you recommend in terms of finding an editor for work like that?
[00:24:57] Beth: When you say editor, do you mean at a publishing house or as an editor, like someone who's intermediary.
[00:25:05] Matty: If somebody's goal is to traditionally publish, would you recommend that they engage an editor themselves before they start sending it out?
[00:25:11] Beth: I think there are workshop environments, of course I run them at Juncture, but there are people that my dear friend, Kate Moses, who has like a yearlong program where people are writing over time, she's providing input. It's each class of five or six, they get to know each other over a whole year. Catapult, through writers like Megan Stielstra, do the same thing where you can take this journey and you can get this feedback.
[00:25:37] And I think that's a wise thing to do if you can afford it, if you have the time, because you send your book out. If you get an agent, it's the same thing. To get an agent, you're rejected, you're not going to get another shot, usually. Sometimes you do with that agent. So you really want to make sure you have the best product possible because if you send a book to 20 editors and they all say no, and they tell you no for a specific reason, you can't normally, unless they invite you to, go back to those 20. So you've lost that opportunity.
[00:26:08] Matty: I took a query seminar with Alan Orloff at a conference several years ago and his recommendation, which I thought was a good one, is have your your A, B, and C list, editors or agents or publishing houses, whatever approach you're taking, and then when you first start sending it out, send it to one from A, one from B, and one from C, because you don't want to send it to all your A people and, exactly what you're saying, you've made some error and now you've blown out all your A list.
[00:26:34] Beth: And I've learned that lesson the hard way. My degree is in history of science from Penn, as I said. I am an absolute autodidact. I went with my family as a family vacation to Spoleto, Italy, and met Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons and spent a week with them. That was the first time I'd ever been in communication or in community with writers and then a year later, Jayne Anne Phillips and William Gass in Prague, and then after that, Jayne Anne asked me to be there at Bread Loaf with her. So those are my three, three weeks in my whole life of having outside instruction, anybody workshopping my work. I myself haven't had the benefit. I've had some friends along the way who have read a chapter or two, I'm trying to think if the full memoir. Really, I send my work in small pieces out to literary magazines and I get a sense for whether an essay is really working by the response from editors there.
[00:27:32] Matty: So would this be an essay that's an excerpt of a larger book-length memoir?
[00:27:35] Beth: Yeah, but like this being a memoir in essays, there are pieces that Catapult had published. Most of the book is new, but there are pieces that along the way had been published and had gotten a good response.
[00:27:47] Like one of them became a Best American Essays Notable. And so you get a sense, okay, that worked because three people wanted it immediately, and that's been my kind of feedback.
[00:27:59] Matty: It does seem like now might be a good time for memoirs because you do have the success of Barack and Michelle Obama's memoirs. Is that paving the way at all for interest in memoir?
[00:28:10] Beth: No. I mean that they're totally in a breed of their own. That's not going to do it. And I don't think there's ever a good or a bad time for memoir. I would say that its harder and harder to publish anything at all. I was at one point talking to an agent who said to me that she was only looking, this was like three or four years ago, only looking for books that had a guarantee sell rate of 500,000 copies.
[00:28:33] No one does that. Yes, Barack and Michelle do that, but if that's the limit that you're putting on submissions, and this was just someone I was talking to, that's really hard. That's really hard. WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF is coming out from Forest Avenue Press, a small indy press. I've been with Simon and Schuster and Harper and Norton and the big presses, but I really like my relationship with Laura at this press. They don't typically publish memoir, by the way. She's really a fiction publisher, so this is a rare thing for her, but we've become very good friends and we're very excited. And when I get to starred Booklist review, she calls me on the phone, and we celebrate together. So I like that. I don't have a need to be with a big house right now.
[00:29:12] Matty: This is also a nice link back to another recent episode, which was with Jason Kasper, who went from being an indy to publishing with Severn River Publishing. And really the whole conversation was about why he had made that change. And it is a nice thing to remember that it's not just indy or traditional, there's a spectrum. It's not an either / or thing. There's a spectrum. And if a big house isn't right for a writer, then there may be other sizes, other focuses, other personal connections that you have that can work, which is why I say that The Indy Author Podcast is for people with an indy mindset, not just an indy publishing business.
[00:29:47] Beth: We've done it all, right? So I've done university press, Temple University did FLOW and LOVE and other things with me. I've done the really big houses. Harper Collins did four of my books, Norton did three, Simon and Schuster two. Those were YA. I've done business with Berrett Koehler. I've done one small YA press for Cloud Hopper, which is a book I love, and my husband illustrated. I've worked on picture books for Random House and Cameron / Abrams and Creative Editions.
[00:30:20] And then Bill and I, my husband and I, have published our own books through Juncture. We have a whole Juncture line. So yes, the workbook we published, we did an essay prize award. We had all these submissions, and we created a book of that. And we've published a journal of his illustrations in life, poems and prompts. We've done STRIKE THE EMPTY, which are thoughts that are taken from Juncture. And we're going to publish this new craft book in August.
[00:30:46] So we control it. He's an artist, we are working on it together and it's part of the Juncture brand. So we've done it in all different ways. And this workbook has sold more copies than some of my very traditionally published books. So it's just, yeah, I do not discriminate.
[00:31:03] Matty: Excellent. Well, this has been so interesting and I appreciate your time so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your books online.
[00:31:12] Beth: First of all, Google Beth Kephart memoir. That's so funny what you found out. I think the easiest thing to do is BethKephartBooks.com and JunctureWorkshops.com. You can get from one to the other. But in Juncture Workshops, there are all these newsletters that are posted, that are free, that provide insights into other's work, some craft exercises. And the Beth Kephart page lists my books and awards and upcoming events.
[00:31:35] And I should say that there are a number of upcoming events for the launch of WIFE | DAUGHTER | SELF, including a conversation with the actress Jacinda Barrett on the Free Library stage via Zoom, and something at Brandywine River Museum of Art. And something that might be of interest to some of you. For $1 and the proof of the purchase of this book, I'm doing a free Juncture workshop that they're all illustrated. They're all really in depth. And my editor, Laura Stanfield will be on with me today that day, too. So that's all on my website.
[00:32:06] Matty: Great. Well, that's a great set of resources. Thank you again.
[00:32:10] Beth: You are welcome. Thanks for having me.
Links
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
