Magical Memoir Moments
Mark Nepo's Thoughts on Memoir and Voice: Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
Oprah Winfrey has said that Mark Nepo’s writing takes her breath away. His The Book of Awakening has sold steadily since its publication in 2000 and then climbed up the bestseller lists in 2011 after Oprah picked it as one of her “favorite things.” Now Mark is ready to launch a new book called Seven…
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…
Top 100 Memoirs: Which Ones are Essential?
Embarrassing story: When I was a newbie grad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I turned in a review of a book that my professor did not recognize. He asked me why I chose this book to review. I responded, “Because it was on my shelf.” He looked horrified. As Paul Newman might…
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…
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…