To Teach to Write. To Write to Teach.

Nest. Flight. Sky.

“Nest. Flight. Sky.,” Beth Kephart, Monotype

I never knew, at first, what I was doing.

I was writing in a vacuum, writing beneath no banner, uneducated in all things literary, carrying a History and Sociology of Science degree forward, and a file’s worth of half-good poems. When the important things happened to me I wrote them down—as poems, as scraps, as essays. And because I feel according to the rhythms that I hear, I wrote them again and then again until they had the sound, in my ear, of a song.

I learned that memoir was a possibility by buying, as early readers of this Substack know, a true-life story (Road Song) by Natalie Kusz. I learned what it meant to freeze truth on a page by sending 1,000 words about a lost pearl necklace to a journal called Iowa Woman and by being rejected twice before acceptance. I heard about the author’s life when I met my first published author—the novelist Fae Myenne-Ng—at a bookstore when I was in my early thirties.

An author’s life.

But it took publishing five memoirs and a memoir of a river before I could fully articulate what memoir is. It took reading hundreds of other true stories, critiquing those stories, sharing those stories, and reading the truths of third graders and 80 year olds, high-school seniors and empty nesters before I would say yes to teaching memoir at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.

I hadn’t been in full possession of a memoir theory until then.

I didn’t have the memoir vocabulary.

I couldn’t have told you what I’d gotten right or gotten wrong in the memoirs I had written. I had to know more than I did.

It took a long time to learn my memoir lessons.

A few years into teaching at Penn—a few years into exercises and ideas, readings and reversions, suggestions and demands—I could see, as I had never seen before, all that memoir had to be and all that was incumbent upon memoirists. Sure, obviously, memoirists couldn’t make things up whole cloth (use italics when you can’t remember the spoken words; use quotation marks when you do), memoirists couldn’t be boring, memoirists couldn’t be stage-hogging narcissists, memoirists couldn’t be many things. But also: memoirists required actual wisdom, they required the intrigue of themes, they wouldn’t ultimately succeed in the absence of generosity, they had to avoid the cruel temptations of simple autobiography.

It had taken years, but I had come to know these things—to teach them, to define them. I came to write of them, on a fairly regular basis, in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. I began to travel, to lecture, to suggest, until finally it became time again for me—after years spent writing fiction—to write a memoir. A new memoir. A now memoir. A frame within which to put all that I finally knew about the form. Stop talking about it and write it, I told myself, and so I retreated … on behalf of

a mere 7,500 words.

Nest. Flight. Sky.: on love and loss one wing at a time is the story of losing my mother following her crushing, unstoppable illnesses, a story I wrote and published years ago. It’s about the last words my mother could say to me and the last words I could hear. It’s about how my mother’s presence lingered in the form of foxes and breezes and songs. But, even though Nest. is a very miniature memoir, it also had to turn around a universal question. In this case: How do we find grace in the face of loss?

Every memoir, to be a memoir, must take the reader on a journey across a question raised and fiercely pursued.

Every memoir, to be a memoir, must take the memoirist on that journey, too.

Which is to say that when I began writing this short book called Nest, all those years ago, I did not know the answer to the question that haunted me. I did not know who I had been in the face of grief. I did not know what scaffolding I had turned to, clung to, survived through in the days following my mother’s death. I didn’t know until I began to write what had been real and good and true, what had hurt and why it hurt, what I had misunderstood.

I learned, in the process of writing Nest., how fundamental, how soul saving, birds had become to me. I learned, in the process of writing, about the gifts I’d asked for and received. And I learned, too, because I stopped to learn, because I did the research, about those other women who, over the years, have relied on feathers , wings, and nests to survive earthbound loss.

Every memoir, to be a memoir, must be bigger than the memoirist.

Every memoir, to be a memoir, must investigate the broader world.

Nest. is a short book, a mini memoir. But in its announcement of themes, in the framing of its question, in the pursuit of its wisdoms, in its unfolding of other stories within my own personal story, it became a container of sorts for my ideas about both the form and my life. Nest. became, and it now is, a quiet keeper of the lessons I have learned.