We continue our study of micro-memoir for the next six weeks beginning on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.

This time, we’ll examine Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly. It’s a delightful book filled with a wealth of examples written in a variety of structures.

Fennelly’s book was the first long-form micro-memoir I ever read, and I was fascinated by the stories she included and how she wrote them. I think we can learn a lot more about writing micro-memoir from Fennelly’s work.

Heating & Cooling is different from Jennifer Lang’s Places We Left Behind in that it is not one story sustained throughout the book. It is filled with glimpses into Fennelly’s life from many different angles.

We’ll spend six weeks studying Heating & Cooling, and I’ll give you questions to stimulate discussion in our book study sessions. Each week, we’ll read about eighteen pages. Here is the revised reading schedule for this book.

Beth Ann Fennelly is an incredibly talented and versatile writer with many more credits to her name than I can list here, including multiple books of poetry, nonfiction, and a novel.

Fennelly and her husband, Tom Franklin, who is an accomplished novelist. He and Fennelly co-wrote a novel called The Tilted World about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

If you’d like to know about the author, Heating & Cooling, and her writing, here are some resources to check out:

Here’s “Beth Ann Fennelly: On Heating, Cooling, and Safety Scissors,” an interview with the author published in the Brevity blog.

In this episode of Conversations on Mississippi Public Media, Marshall Ramsey interviews Fennelly, who was then poet laureate of Mississippi, about Heating & Cooling and her creative process.

Another interesting bit is hearing Fennelly read her poem, “The Kudzu Chronicles.”

Beth Ann Fennelly’s website  has a number of other videos on her multimedia page.

Fennelly also has a free newsletter called BethAnnigan, which she describes as “writerly shenanigans, musings, and tips” that you can subscribe to if you’d like. It might be worth a look.

I look forward to studying Heating & Cooling with you these next six weeks.