IN ADDITION TO WRITING AND TEACHING about journaling and memoir writing, I enjoy visiting other journaling and memoir writing sites for additional inspiration, new approaches, and different perspectives on writing about and through life. What I have discovered in doing so, is that there are really very few blogs out […]
OCTOBER is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Last October, I wrote about domestic violence and offered some journaling and memoir writing prompts to help confront the subject head on. But I wrote as someone on the outside looking in. Someone looking on with concern and compassion. Someone who had not personally experienced […]
AS ANYONE WHO HAS WRITTEN ABOUT MEMOIR KNOWS, memoirs are much more than memories put to paper. And they are more than journalistically written true stories. Memoirs are comprised of two important elements: scene (narrative) and reflection. Without reflection, you do not have a memoir — you have a vignette or […]
Dialogue does the heavy-lifting work – carrying details, setting the scene and moving the plot forward. ~ J.H. Mae Perhaps more than any other writing device, dialogue brings your readers into the immediacy of scene. It provides a method for showing, not just telling about, a person’s character and personality, as […]
On Thursday, I became a grandmother — again. My daughter’s first child and my sixth grandchild arrived quickly while I, three states away, frantically booked a flight and drove to the airport knowing I would probably not make it in time. I have been present for three of my grandchildren’s […]
This is the second in a series on moving from memories to memoirs. Click here to read Memories to Memoirs, Part 1. One of the great challenges (and satisfactions) of writing memoir is dealing with fragmented memories. We may remember only a snippet of an event; we may be haunted […]
Our greatest desire, greater even than the desire for happiness, Is that our lives mean something. This desire for meaning is the originating impulse of story. ~Daniel Taylor I believe that everyone’s lives, however “ordinary,” are filled with experiences that speak to universal human experience and are therefore interesting to […]
A confused student recently asked me about the difference between legacy writing and memoir. “Aren’t they pretty much the same thing?” she wanted to know. “Aren’t they both just writing about life?” “Well, yes and no,” I said. Not the clearcut answer she probably wanted. Yes, they are both forms […]
Anger is a negative emotion—that’s what we’ve been taught and what our culture believes. But is it true? Is anger “bad”? Years ago, in the midst of divorce, I came to the surprising realization that I had been angry for a very, very long time. Because I had considered anger […]
I sat at my patio table, deep in philosophical conversation with a young man. He was referring to a man we’d seen earlier in the day riding a bicycle on the sidewalk in the wrong direction. The man had long, stringy, graying hair, a scruffy beard, and his clothes were […]
Why do we dream? What are the reasons for all the images and emotions that fill our sleeping—and sometimes waking—minds? The truth is that in spite of years of research and centuries of fascination with our dreams, no one really knows. We know that everyone dreams, and that when we […]
Fairies and fairy dust, elves and goblins, worlds with twelve suns, utopias, timeless oceans, and magic. What do these all have in common? — pictures formed in the mind, imagery, imagination. A place that exists only between your two ears. Have you ever thought about the role imagination plays in […]
