Beth Kephart
Memoir as Fiction. Fiction as Memoir: Traversing Genres
June 20, 2025
11 AM PDT | 12 PM MDT | 1 PM CDT | 2 PM EDT

In 2005, following the publication of five memoirs, Beth Kephart wrote an intimate, first-person accounting of a river caught in perpetual middle age, a river in search of memory, absolution, and love. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River was memoir as fiction and fiction as memoir—a book that had no convenient genre home.

In the years since, Kephart has published memoir, memoirs in essays, and a collection of essays; middle grade and young adult novels; picture book biographies and a corporate fable; and many books on memoir craft. But the immersive experience of writing a book rooted in memory and extended by imagination has remained a seduction, and when a letter arrived, two decades late, containing insights into a long-gone and much-loved grandmother’s life, Kephart slipped back inside that genre-transcending world. Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story carries Kephart’s grandmother across time, from her final days in 1969 Philadelphia to 1918 Philadelphia, a pivotal year of war, race riots, a pandemic, factory work, and yarn. The present day asserts itself as well, as Kephart openly reflects on the very making of the book—the days spent remembering, imagining, and dreaming.

How do we write the true stories that we cannot finally know? How do we assert the authority of truth into imagined realms? How do we navigate multiple points of view while still in pursuit of a seamless story? How do we merge remembering with the imagination? How might visual arts impact the approach to the page? These are the questions Kephart faced while writing her new book, the questions she will pursue with Linda Joy Myers.

Participants will benefit from:

• reflections on point of view—the use of perspective and tense to harmonize memory and imagination
• reflections on writing history in ways that feel contemporary and urgent
• reflections on publishing books that don’t fit neatly into categories
• reflections on personal truth as the place where stories begin

Bio
National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some forty books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher of memoir, a widely published essayist, and a paper artist. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts grant, a Leeway Foundation grant, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and others. She pairs her art and writing on her Substack, The Hush and the Howl, where she explores the nature of the writing and lived life, craft concerns, and singular moments in time.

https://thehushandthehowl.substack.com/
bethkephartbooks.com
junctureworkshops.com
bind-arts.com 

Upcoming Teaching
Join Beth for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.

Join Beth for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.