Magical Memoir Moments
You Can Go Home Again–A Mini-Memoir
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, likes to call itself the Garden Spot of the World. If you travel to Lancaster in the springtime, you understand. The greens penetrate deeper than the human eye can see, and the earth, well, it’s as soft and receptive as any coquette and more fertile than a hutch full of rabbits. I…
Intellectual Awakening–A Mini-Memoir
I was in second grade. The teacher put a word up on the chalk board and asked us to figure out what it was. M-A-N-U-R-E Looking back, one wonders why Mrs. Rothenberger picked that word for a competition to motivate second graders, but at the time all I knew was that we were given a…
Mini-Memoir: What I Learned from Students in Haiti and the Ivory Coast (on SST)
The question comes to me from a blogger in Orange County, CA, who has a following in her own blog from ex-patriots all over the world. What did you learn from your students in Haiti and in the Ivory Coast? First of all, you need to know about the Goshen College Study-Service Term (SST). This…
If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth. . . a Guest Mini-memoir
DK Matai, a blogger and business executive I met in Geneva several years ago, sent out a message to his incredible world-wide network of friends that seemed like a pure gem of experience to me. My father’s favorite saying was, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” DK’s story is a more elegant, eloquent…
What Have You Learned From Your Students?: A Mini-Memoir
If I had to boil down the answer to the question above to one word, what would that word be? Curiosity, honesty, courage, persistence, gratitude, hope, forgiveness, love? And how did I learn it? Was it from the student evaluations which came in a big, heart-thump-inducing envelope with CONFIDENTIAL stamped all over it? Was it…
Mini-Memoir: How Long Have I Been Teaching Memoir?
How long have I been teaching memoir writing? On its face, the answer is, “not very,” but I can also truthfully say “about 40 years.” How can both be true? The recent teaching comes in the form of workshops I have blogged about previously– three sessions at the Fetzer Institute and two about workshops given…
What Are Your Memoir Questions?
One of my blogging friends, Sonia Marsh, (http:gutsywriter.blogspot.com) introduced me to a Mennonite blogger from Paraguay, Betty Wiens (http:bettywiens.com). I am grateful for the connection and recommend both blogs to you, dear reader. Betty Wiens did something on her latest series of posts that I would like to try. She polled her readers: what would…
Does Facebook Cause Vanity? A Memoir Dilemma
One of my Facebook friends, Karin Larson Krisetya, a former Goshen College student now a graduate student and young mother living in Indonesia, recently noted wryly that she had search through 63 photos before finding one good enough for her profile. She wonders if Facebook causes vanity. Here’s her explanation to her friends about trying…
The Frugal Traveler: A Mini-Memoir
The pattern started on our honeymoon, 1969, 40 years ago. Stuart had $600 in his checking account when we got married. I spent all the money I earned that summer– the summer of my 21st birthday, the summer of Woodstock and the moon landing, and the summer of our wedding– on the wedding dress, flowers,…