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 people I have found and give my readers a chance to go to their sites if you have not already done so.

Jerry Waxler commented on my post about the memoir Left to Tell a month ago.  He introduced me to the memoir community online.  Here’s his blog.  I have not had enough time to explore this community fully, but I will make incursions into it, and I am grateful to know that there are organizations like the National Association of Memoir Writers.  Jerry has an amazing set of essays about memoir, an e-book, and a blog roll with many memoir sites posted on it.  He’s an aggregator as well as a blogger.  Thanks, Jerry!

The first memoir author to come to this site is DeWitt Henry, author of the memoir Safe Suicide.  I was so happy to have his interest that I immediately bought a copy of his book, which you can do also just by clicking on the bookcover.  Isn’t that cool?

I not only am giving him this plug before ever reading his book, but I plan to review it after it arrives from Amazon.  Only the first author to contact me gets this kind of call out, and who knows whether I will like the book.  But I am grateful to DeWitt for illustrating one of the possibilities for this blog–contact with authors.  He also pointed me to a literary journal, Ploughshares, published by Emerson College, where he teaches in the MFA program.  Dewitt did not comment on a particular post but found my bio and commented.  Fun surprise!

Another discovery I made in the last week is Lisa Dale Norton, a blogger with The Huffington Post, one of my favorite sources for political news.  I signed up to be one of Lisa’s fans because her posts align perfectly with the “memoir in the news” category I began a few weeks ago when the role of narrative in the presidential campaigns seemed to strike me, and apparently many others, as really significant.  Lisa has published a recent book about memoir.  I hope to get to that book some day, too.

One of the luxuries of beginning this blogging journey is that I have a small enough community to introduce folks to each other.  This post is like a cocktail party–without those funny paper umbrellas to stick in the drinks!