Bay of Fundy. Photo by Carmen Mikol
JENNIFER BROWDY PhD. UPDATE | Writing to Right the World Interview by Harryet Candee
Hi Jennifer! How are you doing? What’s new in your life since our last talk? Jennifer Browdy: I think each of us has a COVID story we’ll be telling for the rest of our lives—where were you when the COVID lockdowns began? How did you weather that horrendous storm? My story is that I had just come up to Nova Scotia, Canada, where my family has a home, for my March 2020 spring break from the college where I teach, Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington MA. I was planning a getaway of 10 days. It turned into an epic 18-month sojourn, as the college shifted to online teaching and I was able to work remotely, by the sea, in this beautiful place I have come to love so much. For all the turmoil and uncertainty of this COVID time, I am grateful for the door it opened for me to have a kind of solitary retreat, calming myself way down from the frenetic pace I’d been keeping up before. Out of that tranquility came my new book and its companion card deck of images and writing prompts, along with a newfound facility with 40 • OCTOBER 2021 THE ARTFUL MIND
leading online classes and writing workshops, which I find I thoroughly enjoy! Thank you for allowing me to look through your new book, Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, Inspiration for Writers & Seekers. How many books do you have out now? This is the third in my purposeful memoir series, which began with my own memoir, What I Forgot…and Why I Remembered, and my writer’s guide for memoirists, The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir. I have also edited three anthologies of personal narratives by women from Latin America & the Caribbean, Africa, and North America. And then there are all the books I have edited and published for others with my small publishing company, Green Fire Press. Among many things I love about your new book are the photographs. All of them are of nature’s bounty along the coast. Where were you and was your book completed in
this location? This is the first book I’ve done that brings together many different strands of my interests and talents, including photography. I’ve been interested in photography since I was a kid— in fact one of my first jobs was staff photographer of a newspaper. When I began visiting Nova Scotia regularly, in 2006, the beautiful landscapes and seascapes rekindled my interest in photography; all the photos in both my book and the card deck were taken along the South Shore of Nova Scotia, which is where I worked on both projects during the long months of COVID lockdown. The book weaves together my experience as a teacher and scholar of personal narratives, with my own personal history, and my more recent work as a writing coach and workshop leader for memoirists. It’s divided into eight chapters that I frame as Quests for the thriving future we all desire, for ourselves and our communities, including the larger Earth community of which we are all a part. In each Quest chapter, I consider a different quality
