Category Archives: General

From Memory to Memoir

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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.

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Notes From My Journal — Day 32

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I have been sitting at my morning table for the entire first cup of coffee, having read the final pages of Long Life, one last, beautiful Mary Oliver essay, “Where I Live,” and two ending poems, and have not written a word here, until this, explaining to myself, not why I have not entered into this morning’s dialogue with the page, but just that I have not.

Out the north-facing window, I gaze into the alley with its fences, the draping brown fronds of the banana tree in the neighbor’s yard, the telephone pole with its nest of black wires I try to block with the spider plant hung in the window. Sometime during my morning reverie I expect to see a squirrel or two along the fence, but not yet on this sunny Thursday that promises another warm day to tempt us outside, donning our masks, keeping our distance.

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It’s Women’s History Month: Make Some.

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March is Women’s History Month and I’m also celebrating the fifth anniversary of the release of my book Wild Women, Wild Voices, Writing from Your Authentic Wildness.

I get all nostalgic when I remember the many groups of wild women who have joined me in meeting rooms and around tables throughout the years to write their stories and give voice to their lives.

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