Magical Memoir Moments

Barack Obama at Google

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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.

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Burn After Reading: Memoirs in the Movies

My husband Stuart and I went to our local theater Friday night and saw the Coen brothers’ latest film, Burn After Reading.    One reviewer called it a smart movie about stupid people.  I would call it not-quite-smart movie but definitely agree about the stupid people part. Only a viewer obsessed with memoir would have thought…

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Left To Tell: Spiritual Memoir

Next Wednesday night the neighborhood book club (described in a previous post) will be discussing Left To Tell:  Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, a dramatic tale of courage, deliverance, and forgiveness from the killing fields of Rwanda in 1994. This book was “written with” Steve Erwin.  By now you know that I am not…

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Thank You, Mary Karr!

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed from Mary Karr about the way opponents of Barack Obama like to diminish him by calling him a memoirist, just as they make fun of his career as a community organizer. Karr, who has written several excellent memoirs herself, including and describes why memoir writing is a good…

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Definitions: Memoir, Memoirs, Autobiography,and More!

Patti Miller’s The Memoir Book is an excellent guide to the genre under discussion in this blog and is also the image I chose to illustrate the 100 Memoir Challenge over at www.Shelfari.com. Using more than 20 years of experience working as a teacher and coach, Patti Miller gives us a condensed version of her…

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On Retreat: A Mini-Memoir

I spent the last five days and four nights on retreat at Gilchist, the Three Rivers, MI, retreat center owned by the Fetzer Institute. I take time away there at least once and sometimes two or three times a year. I love the deep quiet places that surround me as a guest there. I will…

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Book Club Night: 90 Minutes in Heaven

I live in a new neighborhood carved out of the Michigan woods. My husband and I fell in love with the winding road that led through pines into hardwoods, a road that now connects about twenty new houses to the highway. As the first residents of this new community, we had the opportunity to reach…

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A Workshop on Spiritual Autobiography

Tomorrow I will lead a workshop on spiritual autobiography at my church. The time will be limited to four hours, so we won’t be able to do a lot of writing. Here is the plan: 1. Begin with meditation. 2. Using examples from this book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs, we will…

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Dreams from My Father

Today Barack Obama will announce his choice of a running mate for the race to the White House. I did not sign up for his text message. Instead, I am reading one of his memoirs, Dreams from My Father. I can already tell you that the book is beautifully structured and written. Unlike John McCain,…

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