Magical Memoir Moments

Little Heathens–Perfect Memoir for a New Depression?

“Ralph Waldo Emerson could have learned a thing or two about self reliance from my great-great-grandparents,” asserts Mildred Armstrong Kalish near the beginning of her book Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. I knew I would love this book when I read those lines, and I…

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A New Earth and the Quest for the Essential Self

Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose was a runaway bestseller earlier this year, due in large part to the enthusiastic embrace Oprah Winfrey gave it on her show and in the ten-week internet classes she conducted with Tolle beginning in March, 2008.  The book sold 3.5 million copies in the first…

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An Op Ed–Memoir Style–About Socialism

I was hoping that Newsweek would want to take this article for “My Turn,” but since the election is tomorrow and the time will have passed for the relevance of this essay, I offer it here to you.  What good is a blog if you can’t self-publish? I love when old categories are rearranged as…

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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…

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Memoir, Formula, and the Hero's Journey

I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, which comes into my inbox first thing every morning.  I enjoy starting the day with a poem and some interesting facts about writers and writing. The October 12 entry introduced me to Lester Dent, a writer I had never heard of before.  Here’s the text that caught…

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Contests and Memoir

I have always enjoyed biography, autobiography, and the personal essay, but my study of memoir as a subject is only two years old.  It started when I saw a 2007 literary contest announcement in the local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette.  The three categories were poetry, short story and memoir. That choice was easy, since my…

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Max DePree, Leader, Mentor, Memoirist

A few weeks ago, my husband Stuart and I traveled to the “west coast” of Michigan, first to Saugatuck, where we had a lovely visit on a rainy day to the Wickwood Inn, and then to Holland, where Stuart explored the downtown and I visited Max DePree, the man who has been my mentor for…

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Living the Questions

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”  –Rainer Maria Rilke I am trying to go deeper with my understanding of this famous quote, which I loved from the time I first read it in Letters to a Young Poet.  Like most mothers,…

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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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