Magical Memoir Moments
The Remembering Self v. The Experiencing Self–A Crucial Distinction for the Memoir Writer?
The video below of a TED talk given by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman is a must-watch for all memoir writers. In this talk Kahneman, psychologist and inventor of the field of behavioral economics, describes how hard it is to study happiness. A moment in time lasts about three seconds. The average person has over 600…
Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: A Year-of-Memorizing Memoir
Meet Joshua Foer, a 28-year-old whose first book, Moonwalking with Einstein, reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s books–quirky, researched subjects with personal and other anecdotes sprinkled generously through out. Moonwalking actually fits another memoir subcategory: the year-of-memoir. In these memoirs the author sets aside a year to do something and then details the results. Examples abound–The…
The Cycle of Life: All Shall Be Well
Some pictures are worth a million words. Introducing our first grandchild–Owen William Showalter. Born March 31, 2011, at 11:15. As he was being born, my dear Aunt Lois was dying. I’m feeling the full impact of the life cycle today. Owen William, your memoir has begun. I hope to help you remember your early days…
The Magic 100 Number–Could You Memorize 100 Poems?
100 seems to be a magic number for lots of educational enterprises. We on this blog are collecting lists of good memoirs, are trying to read and review 100 memoirs, and are learning about the genre through reading, writing and online conversation. Rosanne Cash had a list of 100 songs from her father Johnny as…
Voice and Place: A Resonant Connection
These mountains in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia are teaching me about voice. The picture on the left represents a small slice of the panoramic view we first saw from the window of our new house when we were seeking a place to call home. The mountains and farmland called us and we came. Just…
Connecting Voice to Touch: What I Learned About Writing from Max DePree
“Find your own voice,” say the writing experts. Easy to say. Hard to do. In another post on voice, I described how helpful it was for me to try to visualize my voice as a farm. Today I am pondering the role of another of the senses–touch. How does one sense inform, enlarge, or restrict,…
Finding Voice: Part One
Once, when I was a young professor asked to speak in the Goshen College Afternoon Sabbatical lecture series, I was helped by an unexpected source–my five-year-old son Anthony. We had just returned from nine months in Haiti, where our family had led two groups of college students in a wonderful deep learning experience–an international service-learning…
A Great Memory Generator: More Touchstones for Baby Boomers
Today on Facebook, my friend Linda posted this video of games and activities recollected from growing up in the 1950’s and ’60’s. I recommend you take a trip down memory lane, and you will almost certainly come back with some interesting memories. Or, if you are a young person, you might want to watch just…
The Night the Battery Died
“Where are those Showalters?” God must have asked. “They’ve had such smooth sailing lately, let’s shake things up for them.” After a whole week of sunshine and sightseeing in Los Cabos, the Baja, Mexico, and four long flights without any delays, we were ready for the last leg of our journey home—a car ride…
Selling Serenity: More Dancing with Change
I promised my Facebook friends that I would tell the story of how we sold our Kalamazoo, MI, house (named Serenity) after the closing last Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011. So why not share the saga with the readers of 100Memoirs.com also? The buying and selling of real estate in the current market is not for the…