 
Brown Bag BeginningsRobbie ter Kuile, Soleil Lifestory Network Certified Affiliate, Tryon, North CarolinaLike many memoir writers, Robbie ter Kuile started out researching her family's genealogy. She quickly found that the bare facts of when people were born and died didn't satisfy her. She set out to learn how to write memoir and found Soleil through a web search. A former classroom teacher, it was a natural for her to become an Affiliate teacher. After attending the Turning Memories® Workshop and the Business Supports Seminar, she was able to fill her very first class by presenting a brown bag lunch talk at her local library in Tryon, North Carolina. The additional publicity and the excitement she generated by her talk successfully filled her first class. Robbie offers many of her classes through the local community college. This gives her the advantage of being listed in the course catalog. She also makes sure to send out a press release announcing her classes for each registration session. "I love teaching at the community college level and not having to give grades," she says. "One of the best benefits is that it has enabled me to create a community of writers--though I am not writing with this group. I facilitate their writing in a weekly writing group." Robbie has worked out a series of classes that writers must complete before they can join the writing group she mentors. The core of these requirements is the Turning Memories Into Memoirs® workshop, which she augments with a six-hour session on the Photo Scribe® method and a class on memoir writing using love letters. She offered all three this summer. She points to The Letter Box by Mark and Diane Button as an example of a memoir based on old letters. Other memoirs Robbie recommends to her students include A Year by the Sea by Joan Anderson; Clear Springs by Bobbie Ann Mason; and Framing a Life by Geraldine Ferraro. Robbie was part of the Advisory Board for Soleil's new Editor's Manual and has recently taken on her first editing client. She also plans to market herself to other organizations to increase the number of classes she offers. Although teaching memoir isn't her sole source of income, it's a large source of personal and professional satisfaction. Return to www.turningmemories.com/tipsforteachers.html |