memoir
November 17, 2009
- In 1966, when I was ten years old, my dad heard the voice of God commanding him to give up his career in business and become a Christian writer. As a result, he packed up our family and we took off to travel the world so he could gain inspiration for his books. We had many adventures, such as escaping out of Egypt right before the 6 Day War, smuggling Bibles into communist countries, and ...
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November 17, 2009
- This is a great article from the Wall Street Journal called “Story Time: The Heck with looking foward. There’s value in looking back.” It is about the wisdom of telling stories from the past to younger family members as “a deft way to transmit lessons about life while strengthening generational bonds.” It also includes this provocative quote from Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust ...
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November 13, 2009
- The Day I Sold My Memoir My memoir was sold on Valentines Day when I was at the Associated Writing Program in Chicago. I was relishing some time away from the computer, enjoying the windy city--jazz on the street corners, the spectacular art museum, ice sculptures of Ghandi and a couple dancing--My agent had tried to sell my book to a number of big houses. No one had wanted it, and I was ...
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November 13, 2009
- Twenty years ago the Romanians overthrew their corrupt communist government. Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down, uniting two long-divided worlds. And twenty years ago, students of Mills College revolted against the decision to admit men. I graduated from Mills in 1988, and like the other alumnae (yes, that’s the correct Latin ending for a plural female noun), I wanted to support ...
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November 12, 2009
- I wrote today's Twitter (1/2 pt. = commits to journey. Things seem to get a bit better. They're about to get way worse = Crisis 3/4 pt.) based on something I heard Andre Agassi say in an interview about his memoir. I missed the part about why he despises tennis from the start but at around the Middle of his journey to wholeness, he quits drugs and alcohol and commits to tennis for the very first ...
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November 12, 2009
- Silence A no-frills religion, Quakerism. But if you like formality, as my father did, you can transform a moment of silence into something elaborate.My new husband and I were seated at my parents' carefully set dining room table, east and west, with my parents at north and south. A portrait of my great-great grandfather as a girlish little boy, with ringlets, overlooked the room. The gleaming ...
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November 9, 2009
- It's Day #9 of the Write Nonfiction in November challenge! We've covered a lot of ground already, and I thought we'd take a break from the business side of nonfiction writing to talk a bit about actual writing—memoir writing to be exact.Memoir writing represents an area of nonfiction writing I know much less about, so I've asked my friend and Linda Joy Myers, president and founder of the ...
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November 3, 2009
- I met Brenda Miller at the Get Lit! festival this past April, almost two years after I first read her wonderful essay “Blessing of the Animals” in The Sun. I was reminded of the exquisite beauty of her writing when I heard her read and promptly devoured her new book (titled after that essay) as well as her first collection, Season of the Body. Brenda’s essays have been described as ...
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November 2, 2009
- I lost my father on a Sunday in the sixties when I was ten and he was fifty-four. He didn’t die. Despite a lifetime of non-filtered Camels and a high fat diet he was remarkably healthy physically. No, I lost him to a paranoid hate that I cannot decades later understand nor condone. The black and white RCA console television was crackling in a corner of the slightly ...
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November 1, 2009
- The recent societal bent towards navel-gazing has apparently reached its zenith with "Eat Pray Love," Elizabeth Gilbert's pseudo-memoir of self-discovery and seeking enlightenment. Or perhaps it was a shallow grope for the best-seller lists and Oprah's couch. Either way, it worked; her book has been on the best-seller lists for over two years now. But reading about this book ...
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