Events

The best part of publishing a book is the conversation it inspires!

I’ve so enjoyed touring and presenting Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home this spring, at public libraries and private Bryn Mawr Clubs, for audiences including the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Wilmington, DE, and The Quadrangle in Haverford, PA. I’ve spoken on writing through trauma at the 2019 AWP Conference in Portland; taught master classes and breakout sessions on incorporating personal artifacts into the writing process at Creative Nonfiction, the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, and The Chautauqua Writers Festival; and led a narrative medicine workshop for doctors in the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program at Brown University’s Alpert School of Medicine. Along the way, I’ve gathered stories about people’s treasured objects at #excavating memory for an Instagram collection.

I’m taking a break until the fall, to meet other writing deadlines and to travel to Yaddo, where I’ll be in residence from late August through September working on a new book.

Looking ahead, here’s where I’l be in the second half of 2019:

OCTOBER

Wednesday, October 23, 7:00 pm. Bryn Mawr Club of New York event at the home of Jacqueline Silberman ’59. Private event.

Tuesday, October 29, 6:00 pm. Indianapolis Public Library, Riley Room, 40 East Saint Clair Street Indianapolis, IN 46204.

 

 

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I’m teaching a master class in memoir at the 2019 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference!

Read on, or click the link above for more information.

The PWC Board of Directors is happy to announce that renowned novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier will be teaching at the 2019 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. Elizabeth’s class will be called “The Pit and the Page” and will be a master class meant for more advanced memoirists. The two-day course will teach writers how to incorporate materials, especially personal objects, into the writing process in order to gain a new perspective on literary material, and will draw upon Elizabeth’s seven years of experience as a technician at the Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archaeology Laboratory.

Elizabeth logged 1,000 volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home (New Rivers Press, 2019). A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays and appears widely in journals and newspapers including Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has been teaching for over twenty years, in a variety of settings including bookstores, book groups, libraries, and schools including Bryn Mawr College, the University of the Arts Summer Institute, the Bennington College July Program, and the Pennsylvania Young Writers’ Day program. More information about her can be found at http://www.ElizabethMosier.com.

The 2019 Philadelphia Writers’ Conference will be held on June 7 – 9, 2019 at the Wyndham Hotel at 4th and Arch Street in Old City Philadelphia. Registration for the conference will open in early 2019. Watch this space for additional announcements and information on registration, contests, and more!

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I’m teaching a day-long writing workshop at Creative Nonfiction in Pittsburgh on Saturday, November 3, 2018. You can register at this link. Come dig with me!

When writing personal narrative, it can be easy to overlook or discount the most telling details from your life because they are familiar or too commonplace to warrant notice.

But for historical archaeologists, everyday objects are material evidence, full of meaning that helps us realign the deeper truth of experience with the stories we tell about who we are and how we live. Drawing from her seven-year experience as a technician at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archaeology Laboratory, novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier demonstrates how an archaeological approach can bring fresh insight to the writer’s craft.

Please bring a small personal object or heirloom that intrigues you to the workshop.

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From Scratch

I spent Fall, 2016, in Indianapolis, as one of 15 participating artists in the “Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts” program sponsored by Butler University. On Wednesday, February 22, 2017, a public exhibition of our work opens at Christian Theological Seminary.

To present “From Scratch,” my essay about making my father’s favorite rhubarb pie to mourn his death, I’ve created an interpretation of my grandmother’s 1927 Farmer’s Guide Cook Book, in which the original recipe appears. Between the “cookbook’s” blank pages, I’ve inserted (as my grandmother did) personal ephemera from a particular time, place, and relationship. In my version, these clippings, photos, notes, and lists demonstrate the role memory plays in the labor of grief, a circuitous process that resists linear narrative.

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AWP Launch Party!

On April 1, a group of writers I admire (Carla Spataro, Cynthia Reeves, and Alison Hicks) and I launched this anthology published by PS Books at AWP in Los Angeles, reading from our work and sharing our experiences.

As I told the audience, you probably don’t know my name—because I am a professional finalist, warmer of the wait list spot, acting director filling in without coveting the job, mother of grown children, daughter managing my mother’s memory loss and dealing with the sad aftermath of my dad’s and in-laws’ deaths. Like many of you, I’d guess. Though our circumstances are particular, this is what 50-somethings have in common: we’ve arrived at the bottom of what researchers who study life satisfaction describe as a happiness U-curve. Though in our 20s we hoped for a steady rise, many of us have experienced an almost imperceptible fall—from happily hectic to sadly stressed—as career pressures, kids, and crises piled on, progressing along with us to the half-century mark.

And yet, I’ve made—still make—a living at creative writing, steadily and stealthily writing stories and novels, articles and essays, college viewbooks and book reviews, a few obituaries. A decade of witnessing the death and decline of friends and family has put some things in perspective for me, which I write about in my column for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Magazine, “The U-Curve: Mawrters at Midlife,” and which I’d like to share with you.

Existentially speaking, we’re ALL FINALISTS. So why not stop worrying about what you’ve accomplished and get back to work: rediscover something you love but gave up, revise your idea of what constitutes success, repurpose the talents and skills you’ve worked so long to cultivate, and do something entirely different?

Once upon a time, I started a file—the manila kind that fits in an actual file cabinet fashioned from metal or wood—and labeled its now worn and curled tab, “Inspiration.” Among other cherished documents, the file contains Carolyn Heilbrun’s New York Times essay from 1989, “Women Writers: Coming of Age at 50,” in which she laments that women have lived too much with closure—Jane Austen-style endings we’ve updated to include not only romantic partnership, but the published manuscript and the dream job. “This is the delusion of a passive life,” Heilbrun declared, giving me a head’s up about what, nevertheless, I had to learn the hard way: that literary success often means exchanging one level of rejection, uncertainty and disappointment for another. The only power we have—a power men, for some reason, are less hesitant to claim—is the power to continue. Citing Toni Morrison and May Sarton as examples of women who did their best work in what Heilbrun described as the “last third of life”—a phrase that sent me on a brief detour doing mental math—Heilbrun promised, “When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin.”

In an era before email, this essay was Xeroxed and passed around my office comprised of 20-something feminists when I was in graduate school and working fulltime to pay for it. This was a time when short story collections were earning six-figure advances, when the Big 5 publishers were still the Big 25, holding auctions to bid for writers’ work—but I never expected to write fiction fulltime, thanks to the sane guidance of my advisors at Warren Wilson, who juggled jobs and writing skillfully, reflecting reality and modeling the discipline and sense of humor required to live a writer’s life. And yet, I nurtured my own youthful delusions. I read Heilbrun’s article—Virginia Woolf and the trough of despair: check. Rage against the patriarchy: check—and put it away in a file, certain in the way you can be, when you’re 26, that your life will be exceptional, that you will never actually be 50.

Friends, that day has come.

“The point is not the joys of old age,” Heilbrun said, words I read again this winter when I pulled the creased and yellowed essay from my file. “The point is, probably, death, and the intensity of knowledge it brings.” Though this fact can lead some writers to the trough of despair, Heilbrun insists that this “coming of age portends all the freedoms men have always known and women, never—mostly the freedom from fulfilling the needs of others and from being a female impersonator.” All too often, she says, “Women cling to a life and conditions they have in fact outgrown, instead of launching off into another world.” At 53, I know grief and the rope burns left behind when I’ve tried to hold on to what I’ve lost. But how to let go?

By shifting my focus to what is in my favor, now that I’m older and I’m still here. To (as Heilbrun advises) “make the most of security and seniority, to take risks, be noisy, be courageous, be unpopular.”

By this point in the game, I have amassed a body of work—some of it published—and the work has hurt my body. I have tendonitis in both arms, and after a summer of physical therapy with an athletic trainer who put me on the “thrower’s program” for my competitive sport of typing, I bought a Fit Bit to recalibrate my sense of what makes for a successful day. Trying to better balance mental and physical activity, I’ve become acutely aware that writing prolifically—which I finally have time to do—conflicts directly with living healthfully. And this realization has made me wonder if too much butt-in-chair discipline—and the tyranny of long-held goals I have outgrown—can wear out my mind.

While I strive to take ten thousand steps every day—I know, pathetic—I also seek literary fitness through work that encourages movement—in my thinking and in my subject matter. Instead of seeking answers, I want to be alert to the questions I might pose. For every time I page through my memories to harvest meaning from the past, I want to venture out to gather new material: book a trip, attend a lecture, look at art. For every certainty I defend, I want to converse—in person, on the page—with someone who doesn’t think like me, to freshen and sharpen and open my ideas. In other words, I seek the literary equivalent of balance between puttering around the house and taking a long, meandering walk. I have time for both now. And both ways of working—like both kinds of steps—count, and are necessary to continue to write for the long haul.