Memoirous

Because of a lack of foresight, or maybe an error in judgment, my husband and I ended up carrying our daughter’s trunk, sewing machine suitcase, and autoharp, the last of her possessions, objects of endearment, from south Brooklyn to the tip of Manhattan on Memorial Day   weekend changing trains numerous times. And because the trunk was heavy, full of her stuff, and because it had no handles, I wrapped it with clothesline cord, one of us on each end, going in and out of trains, up and down stairs, pausing to rest and then continue on. We waited on platforms and pushed onto packed trains, bumping and bonking, and excusing and pardoning, and begging for some kind of logical end to what could only be described as illogical. The schizophrenics stopped to consider us, interrupting their own internal conversations. Manhattanites dressed to the nines, going out on the town, pondered the tableaux before them: a middle-aged Dust-Bowl-looking couple, weary and worn out, sitt...

I am in the latest issue of this : It was a story that took a while and a boatload (pun intended) of rejections. All I needed, I guess, was a Stoneboat to carry me thru. EXIT 24: The story of two elderly women who decide on a day of shopping--and then things go terribly wrong. If they’d only known what lay ahead, they would have turned around and gone back home Scroll down to order the issue . You'll be glad you did. Also here through Amazon .

CONGRATULATIONS!

People have been writing to me/commenting on the cover of my new book. With all modesty I say, I know! Here are the people I use, and have in fact done ALL my (e-book) covers. Nine3Nine Creative They can do anything--really. T-shirts, signs, websites, covers, logos, illustrations. And did I mention they're FAST? Yeah. I e-mailed my idea/concept and within an hour had the above. For Beyond Paradise I'd had the photo taken when the book was first published with Morrow back in 2000 but the editor decided to go with their own in-house. Thus, ten years later I e-mailed the jpeg to Nine3Nine and, again, within an hour the boys mailed me back. This was soooo easy. Full-disclosure: I now write web content for Nine3Nine. Through the back and forth on covers they now contact me if they need someone to run down content, etc or at least help them with mock up text. There you go. Relationship building. so for all my friends and clients that I'm helping edit their memoir ma...

Many of us are looking to write memories—either in the form of literary memoir or simply to record family history. This how-to book looks at memoir in small, bite-size pieces, helping the writer to isolate or freeze-frame a moment and then distill it onto paper. Flash is generally anywhere between 1,500 words to as few as 66 (I've seen 6-word memoirs!). Since I began exploring the genre I've had over 30 flashes published. Lately I've also been teaching Flash Memoir. so this how-to book is a summation of my process, the approach I take to flush out a flash. Even if you are only interested in flash, or only in memoir, or only in fiction--I believe there is something in this small book that you can take away. Order  Freeze Frame: How To Write Flash Memoir TODAY! If everyone who visits my blog downloads a copy I will become a millionaire and I promise to flash about it.

How many moments are everlasting? When even a second is measured in past tense, as soon as it has happened it is gone. The only thing that lasts is eternity and . . . photographs. That moment captured in forever carpe diem. Perhaps this is why I’ve always been spellbound by old snapshots. Look, I don’t know how many times I’ve said, look at that cat. It looks so alive. Why cats? Maybe because sometimes when lazying about they often look dead. I used to visit a Miss Puls in a nursing home down the street where I grew up in Centerville, Ohio. In an act of altruism, I began, all on my own, to walk up the hill to Bethany Lutheran and visit residents the staff indicated had very few visitors. So I’d stop by and say hi to Miss Puls. And it was always the same. I’d ask if I could look at her photo album. She had so many OLD pics from when she was a girl growing up in Dayton, to young adulthood. She never married and became a secretary and worked in an office. She...

I have a flash memoir in Wordland : What They Saw in the Night Sky. My piece is called The Night of the Comet. JUST CLICK ON Contents . Check it out! Also NEXT WEEK I am going to launch at Amazon an E-book called Please be sure to come back next week. I'm also available for panels and to teach seminars--just sayin'

Have I mentioned no rain. We slept that night in a pollen-soaked campground, yellow dust coating the picnic tables, the ground, us in the morning. We ate, packed up, and unknown number 3: Sickness. A slight case of diarrhea of which I am prone when drinking all different kinds of water, a lingering symptom of another ride taken when just 16 through a bog area, where the trip guide said the water was safe to drink. I believe I picked something up that day that has resided in my intestines ever since. Don’t talk me out of this idea. I fall quickly in and out of tummy trouble, and this trip will be part of a very long list. But we ride on. On what turns out to be a perfect day, weather-wise. We ride into Tupelo to get a Starbucks coffee and more supplies at a Wal-mart. We continue riding, feeling as one should when the sun comes out: glorious, as if anything is possible. We only have 73 miles planned. But after 20 I am again, suffering. Sunburned, dehydrat...

When we awoke, to the sound of rain and gray skies that obliterated the landscape we knew: Riding this a.m. would be a mistake. We ate our oatmeal, drank a flask of hot tea, played cards, and commented on how much better the sky looked in comparison to 5 minutes ago. By 11 a.m. we thought at least we’d try, try to get 5 miles down the road, or 10, or so. We finished the day doing 69 miles after all. Oh—but up! Up! Up! Then, down, down, down. There is a sound of wet tires on a wet road A sizzle, wind filling the ears, and heart pounding wondering, would wet brakes grip? Always the unknowns. Would cars behind us slow down, see us at all? We had on blinkers, flapping ponchos, bright colors. The only moving specks on an otherwise Black and shining tarmac. Then the sun popped out and we were near a town, indicated on the map, so We stopped and my riding partner met a man with a pickup who carried an air compressor Who filled her tires to top PSI and I boug...

sunken trace, the original trail April is the cruelest of months It also brings showers—this much I know In a list of unknowns, we didn’t know anything Only anticipations and broad guesses We were riding our bikes from Nashville to Jackson, MS on the Natchez Trace A National Park parkway, a place for cars and bikes with minimal traffic (again, an unknown) How long had I been planning this trip—the thought came a few years ago and every Spring I thought about it until—I booked tickets on Megabus and the train, for there and back So this we know—we will bus to Nashville and a week later train home from Jackson, http://www.natcheztracetravel.com/natchez-trace-parkway-maps.html   Now the list of unknowns    . . . We arrived in Nashville about 8:30 a.m. after a cramped night-bus and re-assembled our bikes in a parking lot. One unknown known. We did it! While the sun shone, then after taking beginning photos the clouds rolled in. Another unknown:...