Your Incredible Life: Exploring The Role Poetry Can Play In Developing And Contributing To Your Memoir
with Mary Mackey, New York Times Best Selling Author
Date: Friday August 13, 2010
Time: 11 AM PDT |12 PM MDT | 1 PM CDT |2 PM EDT
Cost: FREE FOR NAMW MEMBERS (NAMW Members, the Call-In Details are posted below. Please be sure to login to see the details).
[private_NAMW]Teleseminar Dial-in Telephone Number: (760) 569-0100
Teleseminar Telephone Conference Code: 193761#[/private_NAMW]
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In this teleseminar, Mary will talk about the role poetry can play in developing and contributing to memoir. Some of her talking points will include how to use poetry to find your personal voice, choose your narrative style, set the emotional tone of your memoir, summon up the past, and make your prose come alive.
Topics that will be discussed include:
- How writing poetry can help you write your memoir, even if you have never written poetry before.
- What is so liberating about writing poetry?
- How poetry helps recover forgotten parts of the past.
- Personal voice and how writing poetry helps us find it.
- The four most important techniques for making writing come alive
- Poets who write poems based on memoir
About Mary: Mary Mackey received her B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. One of the founders of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at California State, University, Sacramento, she has taught memoir writing for many years on both the graduate and undergraduate level.
Related to Mark Twain through her father’s family, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica in her early twenties. For a number of years, she has been traveling to Brazil and incorporating her experiences into her fiction and poetry. In 2005 she took a boat up the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, travelling over two thousand miles through flooded jungle. In June 2009, she made another trip to one of the headwaters of the Amazon on the Rio Tocantins
Mackey is the author of five collections of poetry including Breaking The Fever (Marsh Hawk Press), and twelve novels including The Widow’s War which recently appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list. Mackey’s works, which have also made the New York Times bestseller list, have been translated into eleven languages, and sold over a million and a half copies. At present she lives with her husband in northern California. To learn more about her and sample her writing, you are invited to visit her website: www.marymackey.com
Mary, thanks for boosting me out of my summer writing doldrums with a fantastic teleseminar! The mere anticipation of a discussion in praise of poetry apparently inspired my muse to begin a poem early this a.m., while swimming laps in a fog-shrouded Berkeley pool.
Linda, when is your Fall memoir class scheduled? I’ll be away the last two weeks of September but definitely want to participate.
Regards, Paula Wagner
Dear Paula,
Thanks for writing. Thanks for your support and feedback regarding Mary’s Teleseminar. To answer your question about Linda Joy’s Fall Memoir Writing Workshops, you can see all the details including the dates by clicking on this link.
Kind regards,
Staci
Each month a new treasure. The NAMW teleseminars stimulate and inform. Thank you, Linda Joy, for finding Mary Mackey. She’s a gifted teacher. She packed in examples from her own poetry and novels to illustrate metaphor, sense details, how fragments can turn into a story, and how her consciousness about the environment and life itself speak, autobiographically, in her writing.
I want to move immediately to Sacramento to take your class! I want to go to Lynchberg, Virginia to see the graves from the Civil War as you saw them and as I would see them. I want to read Marcel Proust again with a cup of tea and a cookie. I want to know more details of your “fragment files” and how you organize your work.
After the teleseminar, friend Marta and I got together for our version of cookies and tea. “Every experience is not lost, but we’ve lost our way to it.” and Mary’s creative suggestions for “harvesting old things” kept us talking all the way to Barnes & Noble where Marta bought the last copy of Mary Mackey’s Widow’s War!
If someone is wondering whether joining NAMW is worth the price, my advice is sign up, and start by listening to Mary’s practical and inspiring audio version. Sincerely, Linda Lacey Missouri