Magical Memoir Moments

Julia in the park

Playing and Working: Launching a Book while Helping to Launch Children

If what you love to do most is learn, then your work can always be play. And if the book you make is about childhood, what better way to learn and work than to play with children? That’s what Stuart and I have been doing this week. Here are our two teachers and playmates. Meet…

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Doris Kearns Goodwin on Work, Love, Play, and a Bit of Memoir

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin combines her knowledge of American presidents with Eric Erickson’s observation that we need to balance three needs–love, work, and play–in order to be fulfilled people. She describes Lincoln’s love of the theater and storytelling and contrasts his ability to play with Lyndon Johnson’s fixation on work. She herself has mastered the…

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What Does Work Mean to You? Reporting a Facebook Response

Since I quoted from Carl Jung last time, it’s only fair to quote one of Sigmund Freud’s most famous sayings: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” Lately, I’ve been musing about these two subjects of love and work in a series of posts on family, home, and change. You can find them listed…

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What is Your Work: Is It Love Made Visible?

I am a child of the sixties, having graduated from high school in 1966 and college in 1970. Everyone in those days seemed to be reading The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. We read the selection on marriage at a wedding sometime in the early ’70’s: I had not reread The Prophet for years until I…

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Memoir and Love: The Vital Connection

All during the long holiday season/vacation I took this year, I have been mulling over the connection between memoir and love.  Intuition tells me things that I can only later articulate.  This has happened to me all my life. I love the story, whether it be true or apocryphal, that Einstein saw himself riding on…

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