Where I Lived and What I Lived For: The Art of Transformation of One’s Life
A Memoir-Writing Workshop with Dr. Barbara Mossberg
The world depends upon your story — your writing it and our reading it. Writing about your life creates it, your best life, your truest life, and saves it, and those lives reading it who recognize in what you express about your life as our own, in a way it can be understood, forgiven, and cherished. In this two-day writer’s workshop, we will comprise a real-world Concord community, supporting and encouraging each other’s voices.
We will use Zoom technology as a miraculous aid, with WhiteBoard and breakout rooms, and the Record feature which will allow writers to keep a visual and audio record of our work, and enable you to reproduce your own sharings across media.
Saturday, September 17 & Sunday, September 18
1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
On Zoom. Links sent after registration.
Learning with Dr. Barbara Mossberg is an awakening of heart and mind. She is an alchemist whose intellect, wit, and passion for language and life, combined with skillful teaching methods, kindle flames of inspiration in all who have the honor of knowing her. — Pat Andres, Evergreen, C
Barbara’s joyful exuberance for living as well as her thought provoking guidance, wisdom, inspiration, and expanded thinking, are truly a gift. I am honored and grateful the winds of destiny brought Barbara into my life! — Deborah Tramitz
After fifty years of journaling for my eyes only, I approached a workshop on writing a memoir with trepidation. Dr. Mossberg has encouraged me and a truly inspired and inspiring group of fellow storytellers to listen, look, experience, and share. As a result, at 74 years of age, I am learning to see in new ways. What a privilege! — Stephen E Follansbee
The world depends upon your story — your writing it and our reading it. Writing about your life creates it, your best life, your truest life, and saves it, and those lives reading it who recognize in what you express about your life as our own, in a way it can be understood, forgiven, and cherished. In this two-day writer’s workshop, we will comprise a real-world Concord community, supporting and encouraging each other’s voices. We have a mentor in Thoreau, whose intimate daily writing changed the world, in civil and human rights, war and peace, and environmental conscience. Thoreau didn’t just document his life — he created it, by writing, and so will we, discovering our truest selves, best selves. In experiments and discovery through his lens living purposefully to honor life, prompts are designed to invite, inquire, and invoke your own “Walden.”
Exercising our imaginations in journaling, we will see our larger community of Thoreau and his mentors, including Homer and Emerson, and peers (Whitman, John Muir, Emily Dickinson), and contemporary forms of memoir, from Scott Sanders’ integration of nature and autobiography to Radiotopia’s “Everything Is Alive,” the MOTH stand-up storytelling platform, fictional memoir (Amy Hempel), poetic memoir (Mary Oliver, James Wright, Adam Mansbach, Sandra Gilbert), and multimedia (music, social media, visual and plastic art, installation): good company! You will develop your own memoir Table of Contents for writing that enacts living deliberately.
We will use Zoom technology as a miraculous aid, with WhiteBoard and breakout rooms, and the Record feature which will allow writers to keep a visual and audio record of our work, and enable you to reproduce your own sharings across media.
Dr. Barbara Mossberg is a prizewinning teacher and memoirist on the page and stage and in the air, with recent books (Here for the Present, A Grammar of Happiness in the Present Imperfect, Live from the Poet’s Perch, and Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror Is Not You, and other hopeful news postings), in poetry, essays, one-woman plays, and radio and podcast programs. Actor, playwright, dramaturg, literary scholar, diplomat, and California laureate/city poet in residence, Barbara is Professor of Practice, Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.
She has taught creative writing and literature at public, private, large, small, traditional and innovative colleges and universities, including Indiana University, Union Institute and University, Mt. Vernon College (Distinguished Institute Scholar), Pacifica Graduate Institute (Engaged Humanities Faculty), and the University of Helsinki, where she twice was Senior Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer and Bicentennial Chair of American Studies. She has held administrative and leadership positions at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and National University, and both teaching and leadership positions at California State University – Monterey Bay, as founding dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Director of the Integrated Studies Special Major, at Goddard College, as President and Professor from 1997-2001, and where she was awarded the title President Emerita in 2001, and at the University of Oregon, where as tenured professor in the English Department she co-founded and co-directed the American Studies program, as well as served as acting dean of the graduate school and director of the graduate Individualized Studies: Interdisciplinary Program.
Mossberg has also held distinguished national and federal appointments, including representing the University of Oregon and United States as U.S. Scholar in Residence to the U.S. Department of State (American Studies Specialist), Senior Fellow to the American Council on Education, and Poet Laureate for the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching. Mossberg is known as a dedicated mentor for writers from school-age through 101, and studies creativity in aging.