Magical Memoir Moments
You Can Go Home Again–A Mini-Memoir
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, likes to call itself the Garden Spot of the World. If you travel to Lancaster in the springtime, you understand. The greens penetrate deeper than the human eye can see, and the earth, well, it’s as soft and receptive as any coquette and more fertile than a hutch full of rabbits. I…
The Happiness Project Model: Exploring My Goals for Blogging
This blog post will test-drive a new category: writing tips and marketing tips. My goals in setting up this blog were four-fold: 1. To learn more about social media by practicing it. 2. To educate myself about the genre of memoir by reading 100 memoirs and reviewing them for a group of people also interested…
Intellectual Awakening–A Mini-Memoir
I was in second grade. The teacher put a word up on the chalk board and asked us to figure out what it was. M-A-N-U-R-E Looking back, one wonders why Mrs. Rothenberger picked that word for a competition to motivate second graders, but at the time all I knew was that we were given a…
Mini-Memoir: What I Learned from Students in Haiti and the Ivory Coast (on SST)
The question comes to me from a blogger in Orange County, CA, who has a following in her own blog from ex-patriots all over the world. What did you learn from your students in Haiti and in the Ivory Coast? First of all, you need to know about the Goshen College Study-Service Term (SST). This…
Memoir Clusters: A Guest Blog Post
Today’s guest blogger is writer and editor Lanie Tankard who is a long-time friend. My husband Stuart enjoys taking credit for Lanie’s romance and marriage to Jim Tankard, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, because Stuart suggested that Lanie contact Jim about a summer program–back in 1972. This picture of…
If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth. . . a Guest Mini-memoir
DK Matai, a blogger and business executive I met in Geneva several years ago, sent out a message to his incredible world-wide network of friends that seemed like a pure gem of experience to me. My father’s favorite saying was, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” DK’s story is a more elegant, eloquent…
Google Trends and Memoir
Have you ever used Google Trends? You can find the website here. The home page tells you what subjects are “hot” because they have appeared frequently and recently in both blogs and news sources online. Right now, for example “Kemba Walker,” star of the University of Connecticut basketball team, enroute again to the Final Four…
Memoir as a Healing Art
Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story by Linda Joy Myers belongs in your library of books about memoir. Like Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story, Maureen Murdock’s Unreliable Truth: Memory and Memoir, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Patty Miller’s The Memoir Book, all of which have been mentioned or reviewed here, this book…
What Have You Learned From Your Students?: A Mini-Memoir
If I had to boil down the answer to the question above to one word, what would that word be? Curiosity, honesty, courage, persistence, gratitude, hope, forgiveness, love? And how did I learn it? Was it from the student evaluations which came in a big, heart-thump-inducing envelope with CONFIDENTIAL stamped all over it? Was it…