Tag Archives: memoir

Falling in Love All Over Again

Posted on by

A couple of Thursday Writers* ago, my co-facilitator, Steve Montgomery gave us writers this prompt: “We fell in love again.” It’s taken from a poem by Ted Kooser, the first US Poet Laureate.

The idea of Thursday Writers is to write to the prompt, writing practice style—that is, go where the prompt takes you, write for a given amount of time (in this case, thirteen minutes) and when time’s up, read your writing aloud if you want to; no critique is given.

This is what I wrote from the prompt (some light editing for grammar, punctuation, etc):

Continue reading →

From Memory to Memoir

Posted on by

How Memory Becomes Fiction

In the twenty-five-plus years since the journey that took me around the world and about which I am now writing a memoir, I have taken shards of memory of that time and transplanted them into countless stories and poems. Bits and pieces of memories have found their way into notebooks and writing practice sessions too numerous to count. Bones of memory have had added onto them what didn’t happen but might have. Characters who were never part of the actual journey appear as if they were part of the scene.

Continue reading →

Yes, I’m revising my memoir. Again.

Posted on by

Not long ago, after months of what it must feel like to push a river upstream, I determined (with the generous comments from members of my writing group), that the structure I had been writing to wasn’t working for the story I wanted to tell. Square peg/round hole and all that.

So I chucked what might have been the first third of my book to start over, writing to a new structure which seems to fit the story better. At least so far. Just a month or so into the revision, it feels better. More flow-y, to continue the river metaphor.

Continue reading →