Susan M. Tiberghien

"Memoir, A Window into Your Life" Memoir is not autobiography, but a selected facet of a life. By choosing the focus, you open a window into your life. What window are you opening? What is its frame? What parts will you include, and not include? Working with these questions, with examples of contemporary memoirs and guided exercises, you will move forward o n a memoir already started or you will start a new one.

"Memoir and Metaphor" Metaphor lets us bring our life experiences into clearer focus. In this workshop we will look at how metaphor has been used in literature and in the specific genre of memoir, reading exerpts from contemporary authors, to see how they use metaphor to illuminate their work. There will be guided writing exercises, including a short piece of memoir.

"Seeing Beauty with Words" We will let beauty lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world. In contemplating beauty we are drawn inwards as if in a labyrinth. We will discover stillness and then return to the world around us with words to both celebrate and protect its daily beauty.

"Making Mosaics of Our Lives" We will look for living images in our dreams, memories, surroundings. Then for the patterns linking them together. We will dialogue with the images and shape them into journal entries, essays, stories, or poems, creating mosaics of our lives.

"Writing from Darkness" We will take a few steps along the path of those who have written from darkness, reading exerpts from Hildegard of Bingen, St. John of the Cross, and Ettie Hillesum. Then we will look at how C.G. Jung wrote from darkess in the Red Book. We will see how we can write from our own night.

"Writing the Way Home" will include a brief introduction to Hestia (Vesta), the keeper of the hearth, with reflections on the longing for home in our fragmented world. We will read excerpts from contemporary authors (Orhan Pamuk, Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams), seeing how they find images that lead them homeward. We will look for our own images and write about them, shaping the pieces into mosaic-like memoirs.