Teaching—Examples of Lisa’s teaching

 Writing memoir is hard work. You spend hours gazing into your past, mining memories for emotions and details, and coming to insights that

You haven’t heard from me in awhile. I’ve been in hibernation. Ever have one of those periods? I’ve been finishing a book and–let’s face it–grieving the loss of my mother and my dad, too, who died a few years earlier. I’ve been trying to figure…

You love them. You hate them . . .   You yearn to record their greatness. You seethe to burn them good. The heady month of hearts and flowers seems a fine time to consider what all this emotion can do to the success of…

It’s winter in Santa Fe now, and the colors are chalk brown and muted green huddled amidst the white of mounded snow. In my fireplace I burn Pinion pine, and it makes this northern New Mexico town smell like a perfumed temple on winter days.…

Here’s the thing: the writing pours out of me in this old pirate ship of a cabin. I am pushing the arc of the narrative closer and closer to being a complete book manuscript. I never could have forseen this story. It has given itself…

I’m finally settling in to my Santa Fe life, and loving it. As I unpack boxes each day I think about the manuscript I am working on and it mixes in with the manuscripts I read and edit for my clients—wonderful, brave stories of people…

What a heady week it was. My class on Memoir Writing at Yale was so big it overflowed the assigned room and we had to move across the street to an auditorium: Sudler Auditorium in Harkness Hall which is very near Sterling Memorial Library, the…

“Shimmering Images” is a guide on how to write your memoir. Here are 50 things to know about memoir and the book. Memoir is storytelling. Storytelling is art. Memoir is art. There’s a reason memoirs by newsmakers and celebrities top bestseller lists and capture the…

Later this month I’ll be on the faculty of the International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG) 34th annual summer conference beginning June 24 on the campus of Yale University: http://www.iwwg.org. The Guild’s goal is, “personal and professional empowerment of women through writing,” and it draws women…

Here’s my summer writing desk at the cabin in the Sandhills. I’ve had time to turn back to my new book. You know what that’s like—life often gets in the way. I’m writing about love and inheritance and playing with modular and linear structures in…