Memoirous

Just when I thought I had nothing new to write about this happens Needless to say, things have been chaotic. Emergency surgery. My father suffers a fall Christmas Eve. This is the season for expecting the unexpected. In the next few days we will bring in 2011--what will the new year bring for you? I'm looking forward to  this . My VERY FIRST artist residency. I'm particularly looking forward to the twice daily dip in the local hot springs which is part of the residency package. To offset the travel expenses and other misc I'm applying to  this . I was awarded monies in 2007 for professional development and hope to receive some this coming year. So I encourage you dear readers to start getting your applications in for conferences (see my Highlights Foundation post from earlier), grants, and residencies. It is much better to hope and feel rejected than to never risk at all. I might not be posting much this next week as I take time off to visit my parents and assess ...

Is it a coincidence that twice in one week I've been involved in conversations where people said they were so happy with the commercialization of Christmas? Some context here is necessary. Early in the week a woman addressed a meeting I was at. She and her husband and kids had spent the past three Christmases in Costa Rica. I swooned. Outside it was snowing and the temps hadn't risen above 17 degrees for . . . awhile. Anyway she shared that she had begun to miss the commercialization of Christmas. We all laughed. No really, she said. There just wasn't enough "stuff" there to remind her of the season or of home. Then just the other night my friend's son was home from high school abroad. In Norway he said they are more laid back about Christmas. He scanned the room we were in with the lights, the lit candles, the TREE. He said already there are more decorations in this room then you'd find in a whole house in Norway. The tree for instance might have one stra...

My library queue finally shook loose the three books I've most wanted to read--and I managed to read all three of them in two weeks. WHAT AN INTENSE READING TIME: Room by Emma Donoghue* ever wonder what Elizabeth Smart felt/thought after being snatched Nothing by Janne Teller* is going to make you think Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi* action-packed and fast paced all three of these books were too great to put down and I highly recommend them

Here is one of my stories published this past summer in Steam Ticket , a print journal out of the University of Wisconsin -La Crosse English department How Poor People Get Money I’ve done many things for money. I rode a bike retrofitted with an ice chest and sold Rocket Popsicles and Drumsticks and other novelty ice creams. I had a paper route where I had to get up at four o’clock in the morning. I did that for a week before I dumped the papers down a sewer. Next, I left leaflets on car windshields. I got in trouble if they blew off, so I pasted them on and that got me fired. Of course, there was also the usual: babysitting, mowing grass, taking out trash, and blackmail. I’ve dogwalked, found lost dogs and gotten a reward, and stolen dogs only to later be rewarded. I’ve sold lemonade from a card table at the end of the driveway. Told jokes for a penny, though to be honest only my mom ever paid. I told her a hundred jokes and earned a dollar—that was before the cancer. After a ...

Whenever anything happens in our family, usually something of the bad sort, we try to lighten the moment by saying: well, at least we’re making memories. Like the camping trip when the rain NEVER stopped. We huddled inside the tent door flap for a break in the weather. Well at least we’re making memories. We run out of gas and have to flag down a ride to the gas station. You get the picture. “Making memories” is the redeemable part we can take away from a catastrophe or a bad situation. Of course when my husband and I argue we don’t later have a laugh and say afterward, well at least we were making memories, because there are some things too horrible to ever come out right. But this past weekend falls into the category of “making memories.” We’ll forever remember this as the Christmas that Mike got his gallbladder out. Totally unexpected—which I guess is a good definition for emergency surgery. We had a good evening welcoming our daughter home from college. Ate some takeout and ...

10 Ways To Give Yourself A Procrastination Inoculation Karen Leland, author of the new book, Time Management In an Instant . via:http://zenhabits.net You know what you need to do. You know why you need to do it. You even know what steps you must take to get it done. But there’s one small problem: you can’t seem to get moving. It’s a common problem. Maybe it’s chronic procrastination or maybe you’re just so overwhelmed that you feel paralyzed. Either way, the task you must complete is just sitting there, gathering metaphorical (or perhaps literal) dust, and growing more ominous by the day. A recently study by Dr. Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary concluded that procrastination is on the rise. According to Steel’s research, in 1978 about 15 percent of the population were considered moderate procrastinators. Today that number is up to 60 percent, a four-fold increase. While procrastination is to some degree a natural phenomenon and can’t be completely era...

as someone who has just start blogging    here is a GREAT article on promoting your books through blogging   also the Chicago Artist Resouce is a great . . .ahem . . . resource. Bookmark it for future visits.

for most of us fortunate enough to be published it's a sad day when we receive the e-mail/letter informing us that our baby has gone out of print or simply OP. Well my friend Laurel Snyder whom I met at Breadloaf about ten years ago when we were child prodigies has a very GREAT idea to ease the pain of OP. Laurel take it away:

Ukraine to open Chernobyl area to tourists in 2011 (AP)

There are no sadder words than I remember, because it usually means that's in the past, gone. We only can hold it in our minds. It was real, but no longer. And there is no going back. Lately I've been writing Christmas cards to friends and relatives. Mom has been losing her mind, dementia. so in my card to her I say remember this, remember that. I do this hoping to wake her up and bring her back. Remember when you used to put the fudge in the garage to set. Remember the Christmas we all got bikes. Remember the Christmas we only got money because you were too sick to shop. I didn't want to remind Mom of the Christmas she came home from the hospital. Here, she said, I made this for you in occupational therapy. I opened a box. It was a wristband with my name stamped into the leather--except she had spelled it Jayne instead of Jane. That's not how I spell my name, I said. Mom looked confused. I forgot, she muttered. Then she said, It must be the shock treatments. I can...

Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams “I don’t want realism! I want magic! ...I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth”  It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”   Anne Sexton

I feel old. I don't get about half the gifts being advertised on TV this year. Get, like you know, UNDERSTAND. Tom Toms, GPSes, Apps, Epic Mickey, Wii. What does it do? How do these things work? I feel hopelessly behind the times. Technology isn't on my wish list. No Nanos, no can do Kindle, no Leapfrog, Ipad, or Droids. It all sounds like robots to me. And the sad thing is--I'm NOT really all that OLD, but if I feel this way now--how am I going to feel in 20 years?

Czech Christmas cookies called Beehives now this post should arouse some comments!! Let's use this picture as a prompt and write (or post comments) about our favorite holiday cookies (or treats).

Elizabeth Berg is my go to person for fun, lazy afternoon reads. She is good for my soul, like a deep breath. She is candy in a dish. I love her. Afterwards I saw that she acknowledges Pamela Todd, a mutual friend. I have to say it that way so that I can convince myself that Elizabeth and I have something in common. Pam is the author of the award-winning The Blind Faith Hotel. Check it out http://www.pamelatodd.com/

Stumbled acorss an interview with Ben Greenman at Failbetter.com http://www.failbetter.com/37/GreenmanInterview.php Now here's an interesting idea. Greenman creates a mashup between celebrities in the news and Chekhov stories. Sort of like found poetry with the added element of "ripped from the headlines." This would be a fantastic assignment for a comp class. I want a story like this--only instead of the lady with the dog, I need Joan Collins with a muskrat on a leash at the El Paso/Juarez border: now go. Anyway, gotta add this book to my queue at the public library.

No one does it for me quite like Stuart Dybek. Yes, I know he's a Chicagoan and, yes, I read that he teaches at Northwestern, but those things have nothing to do with it. It is how he stirs me up. He hits a memory nerve every time I read one of his short stories. In The Coast of Chicago is the short story "Pet Milk" this one is a gem. "Today I've been drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow." And, yes, dear readers, it was snowing outside my window while I read "Pet Milk". "Pet milk isn't real milk, The color's off, to start with. There's almost something of the past about it, like old ivory." Dybek is very good at invoking the past, and inciting his readers, such as myself, to wax nostalgic. He asks us to remember when we were kids, when grandma gave us kid coffee laced with lots of sugar and milk. His stories remind me of when I came to Chicago in the early 80s, when the curbs were full of litter, when ...

and Old Friend from Far Away I picked this book up from the library and found it to be a good resource for those of us teaching memoir writing (attention Beth Finke http://bethfinke.com/ ). The subtitle is The Practice of Memoir Writing by Natalie Goldberg best known for writing Writing Down the Bones. With this new book about writing she helps us strip away the barriers preventing us from remembering by providing chapters full of prompts--some as simple as Coffee--now GO, write for 10 minutes. For those not familiar with Goldberg she is a Buddhist and many of her prompts come from a Zen-like center. One lesson she provides early on in the book is that sometimes it isn't about remembering but what is it that we are trying to forget . A great concept, and powerful. Fear can be a huge block as well as a motivator. For a writer to harness it can mean lots and lots of material. Then somewhere along the way in this day I stumbled upon the http://www.happiness-project.com/ From Gr...

  Scholarships   27th Annual Writers Workshop at Chautauqua July 16-23, 2011         A Life-Changing Experience In 2005, writer and storyteller Dianne de las Casas lived and worked in New Orleans. Her home and business had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Dianne was trying to get back on her feet and rebuild her career because her bread and butter had been in Louisiana, which suffered tremendously after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In 2007, Dianne was selected to receive a scholarship to attend the Highlights Foundation Writers Workshop at Chautauqua. Here is what Dianne has to say: “My experience at Chautauqua was life-changing. I was able to spend one-on-one time with children’s...

Andre Aciman   Writers on Writing Perhaps this is why all memorists lie: we alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact; we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories—to make sense of our lives We write about our life, not to see it as it was, but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we borrow their gaze and see ourselves through their eyes—not ours. Andre Aciman as well as penning his memoir Out of Egypt has also contributed  to Stories in the Stepmother Tongue about immigrant writers now writing in English.

The past three days the sun has barely appeared. I feel like I live in the far north, like Norway. Sometimes in fact I like to pretend that I live here: Kristiansand Residency – Norway I've walked past the house; it's green with little lace curtains at the window. I fantasize about taking up a residency there for three months, writing through the winter solstice, and teaching memoir writing at the local university. I think on these shortest days of the year when the snow is falling outside that it is okay to let our thoughts take us far away. Where are you being taken to today?

  And now the viral video taking the world by storm. http://www.wellandtribune.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2852421 The Food Court Hallelujah chorus. Can I get a witness? Can something similar to this be done for literature?

I’ve been afraid of jumping into the fray or rather Frey. Mostly because I don’t want to give the bum any more media attention. But then I realized the kind of attention I might afford James Frey would be minimal compared to the hell the NY Times gave him. http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/ Okay we already know he is a liar, but it seems as if the “author” of A Million Little Pieces is now a crook and a liar—and he’s not even a politician (at least not yet). I use the term author loosely. I guess he is an author, he wrote the above mentioned book and now a few others—but it’s how he got published and rose to fame that is the most galling. He lied. First he tried to publish his ms as fiction and when that didn’t work he merely tried to pass it off as memoir. And OMG it worked! He got picked up by Nan Talese who sold him and got big bucks and Oprah and more big bucks and visibility (something by the way that big bucks can’t always get you). I saw people on the train reading hi...

This past weekend I perused and read a couple of memoirs picked up on a whim from the library. One was the third memoir from Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove , and a screenwriter, most recently for Brokeback Mountain for which he won an Oscar. I was impressed with his memoir called Hollywood because one) he came off as a very likeable, balanced kind of guy, whose fame never went to his head. And two) he learned a lot about screenwriting that eventually influenced his novels. The book jacket said he was the author of thirty. He talked about the importance of an establishing shot, a quick pan that gives the reader an idea of location, a hint of the tension or conflict, and at least a cursory outline of the main characters. An establishing shot isn’t about backstory or setting up narrative, rather it is just that ESTABLISHING. For example: The camera starts wide on a school yard, comes in closer so that we can see we’re at the E.L. Stanley High School and then shifts to the ...

Conferences. I’ve been to too many. Here is a small list, in no particular order: Festival of Faith & Writing—Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI Pilcrow Literary Festival, Chicago, Lincoln Park neighborhood Prairie Writers Day, SCBWI-IL regional event Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, where I worked on waitstaff, which turned out to be a very BIG DEAL, Kevin McIlvoy and Ernesto Quiñonez were my workshop facilitators Sewanee Writer’s Conference, where I met Cheri Peters who championed me, I’ve always wished for someone to believe in me, thank you Cheri Green Mountain Writers’ Conference, headed back again to the piney woods of Vermont, and thanks Yvonne Daley to awarding me a scholarship Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, I attended on the Amanda Davis scholarship, Amanda was a truly gifted writer who had just come out with a YA novel and was beginning a book tour when her small plane crashed and she was killed Highlights Foundation Writer’s Conference, at Chautauqua, NY (look it up, it’s...

Congratulations Patti! News of the winners of the National Book Award just came over the wires (a euphemism, since technology today rarely involves wires) and Just Kids , Patti Smith, won for non-fiction. I read Patti’s memoir this summer and was WOW-ed. I guess in her speech or an interview she said that she wrote it for Robert Mapplethorpe one of the first people she met after leaving home (a dreary small town in NJ) and arriving in New York City. They lived together, were lovers, but mostly they were dedicated friends. She promised him before he died that she would write a book about their relationship. Forty years later she writes it and wins the National Book Award. Aren’t you WOW-ed? Oh yeah and art. They were both totally dedicated to art. Patti and Robert were young and trying to figure out if they wanted college or a factory job (was there a difference?) or a third way, making art. Coming as outsiders without experience, connections, or even a university degree (let alone a...