My Beacon Hill Seminar

In October and November 2015, I will be teaching an adult education course titled “Memoirs: Reading Others, Writing Yours.” The two-hour class will be offered once a week, on Mondays, 1–3 p.m., October 19–November 30, in the King’s Chapel Parish House at 64 Beacon Street in Boston.

As they say, space is limited!

My course is presented by Beacon Hill Seminars, a longstanding membership organization of people with “a vigorous interest in continuing their intellectual growth.” There are twenty courses in the fall catalog.

I was invited to teach as the founder of Memoirs Unlimited and presumably as someone who knows about working with mature adults on crafting narratives of their lives. Other courses cover the sciences, art history, music, literature, and philosophy.

My approach is my own, dreamed up out of whole cloth.

Each week students will read a short excerpt from a published memoir, and I will read and quote from others in class.

The first hour of each session will be devoted to discussing what we’ve read together. In the second hour and at home, students will be encouraged to write and share short pieces of their own lives, as little as a paragraph, as long as a few pages.

We will divide the course—and our lives—into three stages, which I refer to as the Gift, the Call, and the Return. Each of us is a creature given a certain inheritance of family, environment, and education. At some point, we each receive a call or calls—to love, to war, to vocation. Later in life, we begin to consider our return, perhaps in several senses: return on investment, return (giving back) to society, return to our family history or native land, return to the earth, perhaps to the Creator.

Obviously, no one is likely to write an entire memoir in seven weeks. But I hope to encourage those who have thought of doing so, giving them approaches and disciplines for completing the project.

The books selected for reading and excerpting are of my own choosing, and so they represent my own interests to a large degree. They are memoirs that have moved me.

The catalog listing for my course includes six books. Others I am considering include Bob Smith’s wonderful account of finding his vocation as Hamlet’s Dresser; and Helen Macdonald’s 2015 award-winner H is for Hawk, about training a goshawk as a way of recovering from her father’s death.

Students will also read what I consider a near-perfect memoir, complete unto itself, by Norman Maclean, author of A River Run’s Through It. His short story “Retrievers: Good and Bad,” manages to sing an entire family in fewer than ten pages.

In my experience with more than fifty individuals during thirty years, family is the beating heart of most memoirs.