Magical Memoir Moments
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…
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…
Discovering Shelfari
My son Anthony keeps showing me wonderful places to go online, especially places that help me learn more about social media and might brighten the face of this blog. The latest is Shelfari, a place to rate books, talk about books, and meet new book lovers. I have started a group there called–you guessed it–100…
Scott Russell Sanders and Spiritual Memoir
The September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle carries an interview with Scott Russell Sanders by Tom Montgomery Fate which excited me because it asks one of my own questions: is it possible to tell an artful story out of an ordinary life? Scott Russell Sanders is one of the few who do this difficult task…
Meditation and Memoir
My daughter Kate and I had a wonderful conversation on Monday about the difference between fantasies, feelings, and actions. I resolved to get back into the practice of meditation as a result of that conversation. I am fortunate to work in a place that provides opportunity for meditation at work, so I have begun using…
Stanley Fish On Three Popular Narratives and Their Limits
Stanley Fish in yesterday’s New York Times writes about a recent essay by Charles Van Doren in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker. If you saw Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford, you know that Charles Van Doren disgraced himself, his family, and perhaps even academic life, by participating in a rigged quiz…
Doris Lessing
I just finished reading a New York Times review of Doris Lessing’s new novel/memoir (strange combo). The review focused on the author’s struggle for emotional control of memory. Lessing apparently hated her mother and saw both parents as tragic figures. In this book she tries, without total success, apparently, to understand and forgive both parents….