THE PURPOSE OF the U.S. Memorial Day holiday is to remember the men and women who have died while serving in the military — to honor those who gave their lives in order to preserve freedom and democracy and protect the world from tyranny. Today, in addition to honoring our […]
I RECENTLY RE-WATCHED Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s 2010 TED talk on “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory,” which is about the difference between what he calls the “experiencing self” (that part of us that experiences life moment by moment) and the “memory self” (that part of us that remembers our […]
A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they’ve disclosed their soft underbellies. — Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir WHEN YOU READ A MEMOIR, what about that author’s story evokes emotion in you? What makes the […]
AS I APPROACH THE AGE of retirement, I have begun to worry about the health of my memory. (My mother died from Alzheimer’s, and the specter of that soul-sucking disease continues to haunt me.) If newspaper, magazine, and blog articles about the aging of baby boomers are to be believed, I […]
ONE OF THE CHALLENGES of writing memoir is pulling partial memories into full and clear focus, and remembering the concrete details surrounding those memories. You might want to write about your first day of school, the first time you met your stepmother, or your relationship with your father. But when you […]
In Memories to Memoirs, Part 6, I wrote about the importance and impact of fresh metaphor to the life of our stories. Not only does metaphor engage the imagination of our readers, it is key to our own writing voice. Because metaphor is the frame through which we understand concepts, it reveals […]
This is the third in a series on moving from memories to memoirs. Click here to read Memories to Memoirs, Part 1 and Memories to Memoirs, Part 2. In part two, we used map drawing to trigger memories about place and time in our lives. In this article I present another technique to release sensory […]
