I’m so pleased to be able to “meet” Dinty Moore and Robin Hemley this Friday Oct. 21 at the National Association of Memoir Writers Telesummit, –the two guests that are the subject of this post– and really happy that I get to hang out with 7 great guests starting at 10 AM PDT, 1 PM EDT.

I eagerly follow Dinty’s online magazine Brevity, where thought provoking articles and interviews make me work harder at my writing and teaching!

His book Crafting The Personal Essay is on my table along with his memoir Between Panic and Desire. I notice that last week Writer’s Digest featured an article from the book How to Bring Your Voice to life in Personal Essays. In the article he quotes another one of my favorite authors who speaks about truth and voice in Creative Nonfiction and Memoir, Sue William Silverman. You must read her book Fearless Confessions! Sue is one of our favorite speakers here at NAMW,and I carry her book around with me torn pieces of paper sticking out all over the place where my favorite passages lurk–topics like truth, confession in memoir, the right to write, and the importance of claiming our voice in confessional writing.

In the article he mentions the work of Robin Hemley, who ALSO will be speaking with us this Friday! Robin likes to hang out on the edges between fact and “truth,” memoir and fiction, and may take us into the territory of genre bending. Tune in to find out.

His memoir Nola, by the way, has me staying up late at night to read it, blown away by the story. Nola is his sister who committed suicide, and the book is compiled from clips from her diaries, his mother’s diary and memories, his own memories of the family and Nola when he was young, and reflections about life through the eyes of a young boy as well as the grown man writing the story. It’s a true tour de force that asks tough questions about truth, memory, and how we know what we know — or how we believe that we know it.

We have many more guests to talk about, which will come in new blog posts this week. Hope to see you at the conference!

Linda Joy