When I ask my Students

“When I ask my students to journal daily, I ask them not to judge and not to filter. Just put it down, I say—whatever you think of, however you want. A week goes by, and I send along a copy of Joan Didion’s short, classic essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” Write three paragraphs about the notebook pages that you have been keeping, I say. What is the value of the notes you have kept? What did they teach you about yourself? How honest are the pages, and what do you expect they will mean to you ten or twenty years from now? What shouts back at you about your voice and the sentences you leave behind?”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“There is the who they thought they were and the who they wrote down, the something lost and the something gained, the discrepancy, now easily measured, between the voice they hear in their heads and the voice they find on their paper. “Our notebooks give us away,” Joan Didion observes. And they do. They also provide, to memoir makers, a shelf and a foundation,”
― Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir

“Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn't save you.”
― Beth Kephart, Going Over

“Nobody knows (for real, for true) how hard someone is trying.”
― Beth Kephart, This Is the Story of You