Magical Memoir Moments
Beautiful Sentences Contest Winners: Toujours Bon Appetit!
The poet Keats, at the age of twenty-four, penned these immortal words, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ I thought of them often as readers and I struggled with how to evaluate the many different kinds of sentences entered into the contest to find…
Iran? Why Iran?
During the last month Iran has consistently shown up on the top of the list of readers of this blog outside the U.S. I am curious about the 13-20 readers who evidently come here regularly. To my knowledge I have no close friends living in Iran. I would love to hear from some readers in…
Beautiful Sentences Contest Entries: Please Vote for Your Favorite One
Well, what fun it has been to see the contest entries emerge in the last week. Eleven readers responded, some with one sentence, and some with several. I had great plans to find a polling widget and install it on this site to make tracking easier, but I think the numbers are small enough that…
Memoir as Potential Social Movement
Last Friday, The Kalamazoo Gazette published an op-ed I wrote. Its conclusion contains the revolutionary idea that if all of us finished the tasks (see below or click link above) we need to accomplish before a “good” death is possible, we would have years to live free of the fear of death and thus could…
Love and Death: Forrest Church's Testimony and a Mini-Memoir
Forrest Church’s voice rings in my head today. I finished his memoir last night, and many of his themes are ones deeply embedded in my own life. His 2008 book, Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, published by Beacon Press, focuses on the two big ideas of the title, especially…
Telling the Truth About One's Life: Memoir Controversies
What would a memoir blog be without a category for memoir controversy? Can you trust the label of memoir when it appears on a book? Today’s writers, editors, and their lawyer’s are continuing to ask Pontius Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Most readers, myself included, expect that the basic facts reported in memoir correlate to…
The Middle Place and How to Sleep Alone in a Twin-Sized Bed: Humor and Pathos Together
Remember when I met the woman from Wells Fargo bank on a plane going from Minneapolis to San Francisco? Remember that she told me about Kelly Corrigan and a must-read memoir called The Middle Place? Well, I finally read the book. I have to agree with my seatmate– Kelly Corrigan can write and she knows…
The One-Hundredth Name for God: A Foreword to A Hundred Camels
Now that Dr. Gerald L. Miller’s memoir, A Hundred Camels: A Mission Doctor’s Sojourn & Murder Trial in Somalia, has been published, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, I will share with you the foreword I contributed to the book which I hope can do double duty as a book review. This book contains…
Beautiful Sentences: A Different Kind of American Idol Contest
About 200 people visit this website each week–not a great crowd, but one that is slowly growing. Each time I log in to the dashboard to begin writing another post, I get another set of statistics that informs me which post is most popular and what search terms people are using that brings my blog…