Even when it was well once more and able to return to the wild, the pheasant would come back again and again to see the friend who d saved his life. For 20 years, he has been teaching people how to write their memoirs, wringing out priceless stories from ordinary lives. He is a gentle teacher, wry and whimsical, sharing anecdotes from his own life to help his students view theirs more clearly. They're awfully vulnerable, and by writing and sharing themselves, they take some risks. Although he taught younger students at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point for several years, Kempthorne admits that working with elderly people is good for him.
Old people are so irreverent.
I guess 'insouciant' is a good word to describe them. They're not going to worry any more about what the neighbors think. Kempthorne's work with elderly writers became front-page news last spring, when Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux sold her memoirs for more than a million dollars. Guided by her teacher, at age 80 she began writing down those safely innocent tales everyone might expect from a white-haired Midwestern grandmother. But soon she was spilling out darker stories of abuse and misery at the hands of an alcoholic husband.