Writing With Joyce Maynard. Sheltering at Home Week 45
It was Joyce Maynard.
It was the memoirist and novelist Joyce Maynard who led the on-line writing intensive I wrote about yesterday — while keeping mum the whole time as to the identity of the Famous Author who led the class.
As I explained in yesterday’s post, I logged on to Zoom last Friday, Saturday and Sunday and listened hard as Joyce put her decades of writing and teaching experience to work on behalf of nine writers, including me.
Joyce is the author of eighteen books, including the novels Labor Day and To Die For, both of which were made into movies. She’s best known for her memoirs, including At Home in the World, about her affair at a very young age with another famous author, J.D. Salinger. My favorite of her works is The Best of Us, about a late-in-life marriage cut short.
Right now Joyce is working on a book about going back to school at Yale University as an undergraduate — forty-eight years after dropping out when she was just 18.
Go for It
If you’re thinking about taking a writing class with Joyce, I’d say go for it. Normally her classes are in person; she offers them at her gorgeous place on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.
She hesitated at first to offer her classes online during the pandemic, she told us, because she wasn’t sure the video conference format would allow for the very personal, intense experience that characterizes her classes.
But for me, the Zoom format worked beautifully. The participants were fully engaged and brought fascinating stories to the table.
Joyce is a first-rate writing teacher. She puts tremendous energy and heart into showing each student the way to the next step. I’ve taken quite a few writing classes over the years, and Joyce is up there with the best.
More thoughts on writing at “Tulips and Sex — Writing as If Everyone I Know Were Dead.” Also, “Noah Lukeman on the Colon, That Most Majestic of Punctuation Marks.”
