Magical Memoir Moments
A New Earth and the Quest for the Essential Self
Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose was a runaway bestseller earlier this year, due in large part to the enthusiastic embrace Oprah Winfrey gave it on her show and in the ten-week internet classes she conducted with Tolle beginning in March, 2008. The book sold 3.5 million copies in the first…
The Spiral Staircase: Spiritual Memoir the Second and Third Time Around
Karen Armstrong’s life story illustrates the hero’s journey described in my previous post. Her memoir’s title follows the traditional pattern of separation and hints at the initiation and return that happens within the pages of the book: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Armstong builds her book on the scaffolding provided by T….
Blogging and the Memoir Community Online
By Shirley H. Showalter There are more than 150,000,000 bloggers. I joined the enormous online ocean less than six months ago, and I learn a new swim stroke every day. Authors are beginning to find this site, and I am beginning to locate memoir authors, teachers, and speakers. I thought I would point out three…
Memoir, Formula, and the Hero's Journey
I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, which comes into my inbox first thing every morning. I enjoy starting the day with a poem and some interesting facts about writers and writing. The October 12 entry introduced me to Lester Dent, a writer I had never heard of before. Here’s the text that caught…
Contests and Memoir
I have always enjoyed biography, autobiography, and the personal essay, but my study of memoir as a subject is only two years old. It started when I saw a 2007 literary contest announcement in the local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette. The three categories were poetry, short story and memoir. That choice was easy, since my…
Max DePree, Leader, Mentor, Memoirist
A few weeks ago, my husband Stuart and I traveled to the “west coast” of Michigan, first to Saugatuck, where we had a lovely visit on a rainy day to the Wickwood Inn, and then to Holland, where Stuart explored the downtown and I visited Max DePree, the man who has been my mentor for…
Living the Questions
“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” –Rainer Maria Rilke I am trying to go deeper with my understanding of this famous quote, which I loved from the time I first read it in Letters to a Young Poet. Like most mothers,…
Creating a Space: Preparing for a Writer's Workshop, Part Two
Wallace Stegner once said that you can’t teach writing but you can awaken it. That’s what I hope for in the class I will teach next Monday. We begin with creating space and thinking about the environment, both of the physical space and the social, emotional, and spiritual safety within that place. To teach is…