Magical Memoir Moments
100Memoirs Celebrates One Year: So Much Change, So Much to Learn!
My first post to this blog took place August 9, 2008. It was a birthday present from my son Anthony, who has his own blog. Since then, there have been 118 other posts and 398 comments. Thank you, dear readers! I especially want to thank several other bloggers, GutsyWriter, Babsland, OKChelsea, for commenting frequently, both…
Why Blog? Seth Godin and Tom Peters Explain the Benefits
Remember how to get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice? Blogging gives those of us who are spending the majority of our time doing something else the chance to write, get feedback, write, get feedback, and get better! But Godin and Peters say it so powerfully in this video link that you will want to…
Tips for Writers from National Association of Memoir Writers
Sharing writing tips is one of the goals of this blog. So today I pass along a few tips from the National Association of Memoir Writers. I recently joined this organization out of interest in finding other memoir writers and locating expertise in the genre. I look forward to exploring the blog, CD’s, teleseminars, newsletters…
The One-Hundredth Name for God: A Foreword to A Hundred Camels
Now that Dr. Gerald L. Miller’s memoir, A Hundred Camels: A Mission Doctor’s Sojourn & Murder Trial in Somalia, has been published, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, I will share with you the foreword I contributed to the book which I hope can do double duty as a book review. This book contains…
Beautiful Sentences: A Different Kind of American Idol Contest
About 200 people visit this website each week–not a great crowd, but one that is slowly growing. Each time I log in to the dashboard to begin writing another post, I get another set of statistics that informs me which post is most popular and what search terms people are using that brings my blog…
Contests, Gilchrist, and a Poem: Mini-Memoir
Without the Kalamazoo Gazette Literary Award Competition of 2007, I would not be writing this blog. Each year the announcement of the award kicks me into gear again, and I review what I have written that might fit. The writing itself happens throughout the year, often in 2-3 day retreats at Gilchrist, the Fetzer Institute…
The Happiness Project Model: Exploring My Goals for Blogging
This blog post will test-drive a new category: writing tips and marketing tips. My goals in setting up this blog were four-fold: 1. To learn more about social media by practicing it. 2. To educate myself about the genre of memoir by reading 100 memoirs and reviewing them for a group of people also interested…
Google Trends and Memoir
Have you ever used Google Trends? You can find the website here. The home page tells you what subjects are “hot” because they have appeared frequently and recently in both blogs and news sources online. Right now, for example “Kemba Walker,” star of the University of Connecticut basketball team, enroute again to the Final Four…
Coming Home to Roost
In a previous post called Blogging and the Memoir Community I promised to review DeWitt Henry’s memoir called Safe Suicide because he was the first published author who found me through this blog. Here goes, DeWitt. Hope you come back to read this little review. Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure…
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…