Excavating Memory : Archaeology and Home

by Elizabeth Mosier

"The strings of a violin have to be held in place on both ends, and the two poles of Elizabeth Mosier's book are memory (as archaeology) and forgetting (in the very moving passages about the author's mother and her descent into the blankness of Alzheimer's). The music of this book is very fine indeed, and its passion is for the preservation of objects, moments, persons, and places that Elizabeth Mosier has loved. In its clear-sighted lyric eloquence, this book is unforgettable."—Charles Baxter

Kindle Edition

Published April 7, 2020

About the author

Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier logged 1,000 volunteer hours processing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Laboratory to write Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home (New Rivers Press, 2019). A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays and appears widely in journals and newspapers including Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poets and Writers. She writes the “Intersections” column for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.