Beth Kephart, the award-winning author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction, has chaired national literature juries; written about memoir and literature for the Chicago Tribune, The Millions, Huffington Post, and Wall Street Journal; and both presented keynotes and participated in panel discussions on behalf of the Moravian Writers’ Conference, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Decatur Book Festival, Bank Street, and the Fox Cities Book Festival, among many others.

As an adjunct teacher of creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Beth is the recipient of the 2015 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring. She was the 2013 Miami YoungArts Master Teacher and the inaugural Readergirlz Author in Residence. She has conducted workshops across the country in a variety of settings ranging from universities and high schools to community centers and literary festivals. She was named one of the 50 writers celebrated in the year-long Philadelphia’s Literary Legacy exhibit at the Philadelphia International Airport. She has been featured on the WHYY TV show Articulate, and her new book, Love: A Philadelphia Affair will be the subject of a six-month display at the Philadelphia International Airport in 2016.

Beth is the author of Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (Avery), winner of the 2013 Books for a Better Life Award (Motivational Category). Her sixth memoir is Nest. Flight. Sky.: On Love and Loss One Wing at a Time. Visit her award-winning blog.

In rural Central Pennsylvania there is a farm where the earth has been worked since the Civil War. Where white kid goats are born to a black-and-white nanny, hay is baled for a herd of cows, peacocks drop their luminescent feathers, vegetables grow in tilled plots, berries ripen in the wild, and the chickens, encouraged, lay their eggs.

It’s a place bordered by thousands of acres of state forests and hilly paths. A place where transported buildings—an old summer kitchen, a former pig sty, a previous wagon shed/corn crib, and a mid-19^th century carriage house—have been converted into homey living quarters.

Not long ago, in single-digit degree weather, Bill and I set off for this farm with the thought that it might be just the perfect place to launch what will become a series of site-enriched memoir workshops. The farther we drove, the more peaceful we became. Beyond us, a wide river flowed and hills rose up. Silos caught the haze of the winter sun. Big birds flew.

There was an occasional diner, an occasional town, a sense of people deeply attuned to nature and the seasons.

When we reached the farm itself, we knew. We spent time in the gracious old farm house where the proprietors live and serve their family-style, farm-grown meals. We asked questions about the profusion of antiques. We met the horse, talked to the cows, photographed a red-headed bird and the white-feathered peacocks. We were accompanied by a pleasant cat. We walked into the mountain hills.

This was it. >>

In September 2016, we’ll be conducting our first five-day memoir workshop right here, on this farm. Participants will learn what memoir genuinely is—and what it is not. They’ll study the words of the greatest memoirs ever written, respond to daily prompts, and work toward a fully developed memoir prologue that summons both the themes and tone of work yet to come. Just after dawn they’ll help (if they wish) to feed the farm animals—before stepping into the family barn for a shared home-style breakfast. In the mornings, they’ll gather for lectures, conversation, prompts, projects. In the afternoons, after a simple lunch, they’ll walk the farm and the hills—and sit at old, rescued tables and write. And in the early evenings they will gather again around the farmhouse table—eating the food that earth has produced, talking more about memoir, and, ultimately, reading aloud to one another.

Throughout it all, Bill, a photographer and book designer, will be recording our days. Ultimately his photographs and the work of the participants will be bound into a special commemorative book. Each participant will receive one copy. Additional copies will be made available for sale.

We think there’s nothing else like this out there. It’s real, it’s authentic. It will, we hope, change the way you think about, and write about, your life.

Please consider joining us. And please continue to watch this page for additional details and for future announcements of additional memoir sites.