Magical Memoir Moments

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…

Read More...

Is Memoir Becoming Mandatory for Politics?

Candidates rise or fall depending upon how voters feel about the stories they tell and the stories others tell about them.  That’s why in recent years political conventions often feature films with the candidate as the hero, and hastily-written biographies usually crop up on Amazon and in the bookstores.  John Kerry was savaged by a…

Read More...

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…

Read More...

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…

Read More...

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,…

Read More...

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…

Read More...

A Workshop on Reflective Writing

Next Monday I will conduct the first of a series of four 1.5-hour-long workshops at the Fetzer Institute, the organization for which I work.  Our founder, John E. Fetzer, believed that we need to be the work in order to do the work.  He was a visionary leader who intuited the needs of the future…

Read More...

Six-Word Memoir Google Video

Since my previous post about six-word memoirs elicited some response, here is a great video with examples at the beginning and a speech from Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, who tell the story of how Smith Magazine created this special form.

Read More...

Barack Obama at Google

Read More...

Elizabeth Gilbert

Today was Blogging-in-WordPress Lesson #2 with my son Anthony.  I wanted to know how to embed a video, so he showed me how.  Yippee!  Here is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.

Read More...