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(trying for monthly) ever since except for the period 2000 to 2005, when publication was suspended. The mission of the newsletter/magazine has always been and remains to help people write their personal and family histories. Charley Kempthorne has been writing since he was 11, when he purchased a typewriter with his share of the money he’d earned from the sale of the family’s small wheat crop. He painted the keys with luminous paint so that he could write after lights out. (It didn’t work.) He wrote all through high school and the Navy. He edited a newsletter for his ship and even wrote a column for a patient newsletter when he was hospitalized in 1962. He has graduate degrees in writing from the University of Kansas and from the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. He began a career as a university professor, but within a few years resigned to write full time and to raise his young family on a farm in the Flint Hills of Kansas. He and his wife supported themselves by starting a painting and papering business. During these years until 1992 most of his writing was done early in the morning in a journal. His journal is now more than seven million words and, printed out, fills a double closet shelf. In 1976, while still working as a painter and farmer, he started the first reminiscence workshop in the nation in his nearby hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. His very first student, the late Jessie Foveaux, sold the memoir she wrote in his class for more than a million dollars. Any Given Day (Warner Books, 1997) details Jessie’s idyllic rural childhood and her later difficult and abusive relationship with her husband whom, after eight children, she finally divorced. In 1991, with his wife, June, Charley edited and published LifeStory Magazine, which ran for 89 issues. It continues now in a newsletter format. In its early days the magazine not only led the movement to write personal histories but defined the way to do it. Syndicated columnist Lucille de View of the Orange County (California) Register called it “the bible of the Memoir Movement.” Charley has taught personal and family history writing through traveling workshops in most states of the USA and even in Canada. |