Magical Memoir Moments

The Blessed Ties of Memoir: And A Chance at TWO Book Giveaways

Dairy maids don’t often make it into literature. A.A. Milne placed one in a poem about the King’s breakfast. And Thomas Hardy wrote The Milkmaid about a young woman disappointed in love. My favorite meditation on Vermeer’s The Milkmaid is this one by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s book In Quiet Light. It starts this way: There…

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Seeing with Great Care: Richard Gilbert's Review of Blush

Meet Richard Gilbert, professor, writer, soon-to-be memoir author. Here he is on the “about” page of his blog called Draft No. 4. Richard has become a friend of my life journey by commenting frequently on this blog and by offering tasty memoir morsels on his own blog. He has also been my teacher. His MFA…

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A Fancy Review from a Former Plain Girl: And a Book Giveaway

The heading for Marian Beaman’s blog. She wore a larger covering than I did. Every writer hopes for a finely-tuned reader who will inspire her to place the best words on the page and who will challenge her to keep listening for even fairer music. As we write, we call upon our Muses as the…

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If I Should Die Before I Wake: Why I Wrote A Mennonite Memoir

When I think of dying, I think of Henry David Thoreau who famously said that he went to the woods to avoid dying without living. He had a pessimistic assessment of how many other people managed to avoid that fate: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I’ve known my share of quiet…

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American Culture and Amish Fiction: Why Now and Why So Much? Part One.

When he heard that I finally earned my Ph.D., my grandpa told me those three letters meant “Piled High and Deep.” He didn’t have a lot of respect for speculation and abstraction. My field is an interdisciplinary one, called American Civilization, at the University of Texas at Austin, where I did my doctoral study. A…

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How to Balance Writing with Facebook, Blogging, and Twitter

While I draft memoir chapters about growing up Mennonite, I am also writing to you, the friends of this blog, and to others on my facebook page and twitter feed. Is it worth it to spend my time this way? Sometimes I wonder. A few weeks ago, I was asked by a friend of this…

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City of Tranquil Light: A Fabulous Pre-Publication Book Giveaway

I’m so excited! Today I got three shiny new hard copies of Bo Caldwell’s brand new novel City of Tranquil Light.  Caldwell wrote the bestseller The Distant Land of My Father, her first novel set in WWII Shanghai, in 2001. This excellent new novel (I’ve read it) takes place in the north China plain and…

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