Memoirous

A new week. A new day. But somehow I am having a hard time shrugging off last week and the election. I am trying to move forward. Winter is coming. When I was younger this might have been the time of year when each week brought something wonderful. Starting with my sister’s birthday in October, followed by Halloween, then my birthday, it was one party after another. Festivities leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas took over school. I was in choir so we rehearsed for a Christmas program. Industrial arts/home ec was given over to a great selection of craft-making options. My brothers and sisters and I always made some top-notch presents that when we were clearing out Mom and Dad’s last home, an assisted living place we were still unearthing these prizes. That’s tells you either how much they loved junk or how much they loved us. A bit of both. Now—after the passing of my parents, and some of my friends and peers, I’m feeling a bit melancholy about the holidays. Not exactly

Writing is a journey. Every time we sit down to begin a piece or write the first chapter or the first line we are venturing into uncharted territory. We never know how it is going to turn out. Oh, we have a certain idea, like most pioneers or explorers. But, these journeys can take detours; we have to react to circumstances and often go with our gut. 365 Affirmations forthe Writer is about listening to those who have gone before us and letting them guide us with their insight, their own trials. They know the terrain, how harsh it can be; they know where we can find water, shade, and rest along the way. By reading what others have said, we can survey the path before us, count the cost, and plunge ahead. My motivation for compiling 365 Affirmationsfor the Write r is to offer light along the way. From day to day, week to week, we are getting further inside our writing, further down the path. The book is 365 days of inspiration—quotes from writers and writing prompts. He

Another Brooklyn , Jacqueline Woods A couple of weeks ago I went to hear Jacqueline Woods read from Brown Girl Dreaming and Another Brooklyn at Women & ChildrenFirst Bookstore . What a refreshing evening—saw some old friends from AROHO. Brown Girl Dreaming is straight up memoir. It won National Book Award for Young People's Literature in non-fiction. Another Brooklyn is another story. A lot of good fiction reads like autobiography. And, certainly, there is little division between the two. Our lives inform our stories, and visa versa. Yet, any reader of Brown Girl Dreaming will see resounding strains in Another Brooklyn . Certainly Woodson’s love for her adopted hometown. Also something else—nostalgia. Many of us look back with different glasses on our past, but in NYC and Brooklyn the neighborhoods are dramatically changing. Readers of this blog will know from my posts that I’m no fan of gentrification. Yet there is no stopping these population shifts.

Today's Hot Flash is lifted entirely from Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir, my eBook available EVERYWHERE. Oder it today .* —Dialogue One of the first things one wouldn’t see in an autobiography or at least very little of is dialogue. It is not possible to reconstruct dialogue according to memory—unless one used a secret camera or spy-recording device. As the author of your memoir feel free to include dialogue. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes would only be half as interesting without the use of written dialogue. Frank McCourt was the consummate Irish storyteller. I can easily imagine him telling some of the same stories from Angela’s Ashes down at the pub (or pubs, he had a few favorites). EXERCISE: Devise a flash told completely in dialogue, this can either be straight memoir, fictional, or a combination thereof. If it helps, write the flash as a small scene. Feel free to include plot twists and surprise endings. If stuck here is a prompt: A couple fighting in a car.

I just wanted to say thanks to all my readers for making this blog a roaring success. Not sure what sparked a movement—but Memoirous gets about 20,000 hits a month! I want to say thank you and encourage all my readers to BUY my books. If just one in 100 of you buy a book (or books), then I will . . . I was never good at math, but I like the sound of 1 in 100! Christmas giving is around the corner, PLUS after the commotion of the holidays, you’ll need to get yourself back into gear and refocused on your writing. Freeze Frame, available as an eBook for 2.99 . 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. 365 Affirmations for the Writer, is an eBook for 3.99. Writing is a journey. Every time we sit down to begin a piece or write the first chapter or the first l

My Name is Lucy Barton , Elizabeth Strout My Name is Lucy Barton was something I picked on a whim off the library shelf. I have not read her other works, namely Olive Kitteridge , which won the Pulitzer prize. The story is set up almost as vignettes that bounce back and forth between the past, the “present”, and then the “present” turns into past reflection. It is a book about memories—and possibly mistakes. I say possibly as I don’t want to rob it of broader themes. A daughter, bedridden in a hospital with an unknown ailment, becomes the basis for her mother’s unexpected arrival. And, for 5 days the mother sits vigil and the two begin to revisit the past. A complicated one, but nothing out of the ordinary. There is no GREAT revelation; this is no The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls). We have here in a fairly slim volume, the story of a family making ends meet in rural Illinois. We also have the story of the families around this family, the surrounding community. It is a b

I wish I did not have to come into work every day and write another post about DT. At a certain point I want to go back to YouTube and babies belly laughing and cats playing pianos. Really . I do not want to start my week talking about politics. If only it were politics. So let me begin by saying I went to a concert over the weekend at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I almost wrote Old School. Well, it is. Today’s folk music seems to draw inspiration from the 60s, and their audience. The singer between songs spoke in a sing-songy voice that reminded me of Garrison Keillor aka Prairie Home Companion . The atmosphere was peace, love, and No More Nukes. Sort of a throw-back. I felt right at home. You see since this election there have been few safe places. Not social media, not the news, not my extended family. Thankfully, I live in a place where I get a lot of support. Don’t get me wrong—I could unfriend a lot of people and write my family off, but I sincerely like th

I used to wonder: What is fascism? I realize most eight-year-olds don’t spend their time puzzling over such matters, but I was not your typical kid. I used to save news clippings of super serious events in a Girl Scout Handbook. A baby repeatedly bitten by rats, a slew of kids mowed down by a drunk driver, Beth Ann Mott—a girl who was snatched and later her body recovered. I wasn’t obsessed, yet I dwelled with these things, like how I reread The Diary of Ann Frank , always pausing near the end to contemplate: In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I think there was a bit of the time traveler in me, the history detective. If only we could go back in time and “fix” things or jump over a particularly devastating moment. Change the trajectory, the course of human events. Rewind that moment in the opening intro to Wide World of Sports where the skier flies out of control, crashing—send them back to the slopes, in pursuit of victory. I just

Not sure what happened last week, but I was not able to post on Friday/Hot Flash. (We all know what happened last week.) Leonard Cohen died. Outside of Bob Dylan I cannot name another more prolific songwriter/poet. He was someone who embodied my mantra of Write Right Now. I don’t think he ever passed up an opportunity to chronicle a moment, experience, a relationship, turn it into words, something to be sung. Cohen’s writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, was “like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.” A perfect description of what it’s like to write for any writer. I wished I’d had this quote when working on 365 Affirmations for the Writer      There’s also no denying the inspiration for these lines: from Ceremony,

I know, I know, we are nearly sick to death of this subject—a campaign that went on way too long with a world-altering aftermath. I’ll leave all the discussions to Facebook.   I’m here to blog the virtues of SAME-DAY VOTER REGISTRATION. Chicago/Illinois is definitely left-leaning—meaning we do not try to shorten early voting or restrict access, making people jump through hoops in order to vote. We do not require ID—if you are in the poll books. Some say this is fraud, but as someone who has been an election judge since 2000, I can only say: for some people the act of voting is hard enough. For example EVERYONE knew it was election day—and if you didn’t know then you probably didn’t care in the first place. For the love of God get to your polling place on time! We had a gentleman show up at ten after 7 expecting to vote. No. Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 7 pm.  Same-day voter registration is not a ploy by Democrats, it is not handing the election over to fraud, or a

Frances Willard—how did I not know about you?! During last months Open House Chicago I visited the Frances Willard house in Evanston. A little cottage with gingerbread trim. Fairly humble—even though I suspected it was 2 houses, next to each other, retrofitted to be one slightly bigger residence. Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women’s suffragist. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Thus we have Frances to thank for the right to vote. The tour guide talked about matching the wallpaper and carpeting to look authentically Victorian. I had about 10 places I wanted to hit in Evanston and was only half through that list, so I began to glide into and out of rooms on the first floor (second floor was not on the tour). In a dining room/study I saw pictures of 1886 Frances astride a bike with her billowing skirts. What! you say! A progressive

Sooooooo I’m honestly flattened, knocked for a loop. I want to walk the middle of the road so as not to put off readers or get people twisted up. The Cubs, the White Sox, the Bears, the Packers, North and South, and, dare I say their names, Hillary and Trump. We all knew someone was going to lose and someone was going to win. We just all hoped it would be us, the other guy’s pain, not ours. Last night, this campaign will forever go down in history, in collective memory, as a bad nightmare. I have friends on many sides of the aisle. On Facebook I read posts thanking Jesus to others where the F-word showed up, with a few others. I care about all of you. I care about the future, my daughter, the economy (which just crashed), foreign policy. There is a lot that I wish could change. I wish for a do-over. This morning I was tired. Really really tired. A good friend passed away last evening. He enjoyed walks in the park and last night he walked down to a bench, sat down, an

I know I've posted here many times (click on the label at the bottom to see other posts on POSTCARD FLASH). Anyway here is a place you can submit. Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine needs very short fiction. (225 words or less) Tight prose written in active voice that grips the reader from the opening sentence is certain to catch our attention. For more info visit us here. http://wp.me/P2KTkl-3d Our guidelines to submit are tabbed to the home page. ​ ALSO check out HOOT   http://www.hootreview.com/ HOOT is a monthly literary magazine. On a postcard! We publish current fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and book reviews all at or few than 150 words. Give a hoot and tweet us a submission! ALSO http://postcardshorts.com/ We're looking for original material , about 250 words or so - as much as you could more or less fit on a postcard. Postcard shorts is open to all genres of flash fiction .    

Today’s blog entry was provoked by a strain of threads that I will try to weave together into a coherent post. Part movie review and opinion piece on welcoming the outsider, the other. First did anyone catch the Washington Post article, The White Flight of Derek Black ? Derek Black was the son and heir apparent to a white supremacy movement. He was a junior cadet so to speak and even authored his own column/blog at their Stormfront website which spews hate and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Of course, we have been hearing a lot of this lately. And, in America, free speech is a right. Derek Jr. even helped his father host a radio talk show show and podcast. These guys were committed to their message. So what would make someone so comfortable with their ideology change course, to decide to chuck it and actually become an outcast from his own family? I was surprised to read this in the article: “He joined a new online message group, this one for couch surfers, and he opened up h

I was reminiscing with someone in their thirties, I know, what do they have to reminisce about, but this person hit the nail on the old pumpkin head. How Halloween has grown into a major American holiday. “When I was little it was just one day. Now my kids are sucked into harvest parties and activities for a whole month—not the least a whole weekend of unending trick or treating. Growing up it was monumental to carve a pumpkin. Now suburban moms buy a station wagon full and put them everywhere for decorations. Trick or treating was one night only. And, we didn’t drive around and hand-pick the best neighborhoods. We simply walked up and down the streets. We didn’t spend half a year figuring out a novelty costume. I wore what my siblings had outgrown. Ahh, simplicity. Anyway, my friend took a garbage bags of random costumes to the Syrian refugees she’s been visiting and mentoring. To say the least, the kids were beside themselves with excitement. I can’t imagine fleeing

 I’m writing this a bit bleary eyed this morning. Last night was truly special. And, I’m not even a hard-core fan. But call it a life-changing moment, that second when the world turns, and you feel a shift. That glimpse when suddenly hope swells and you feel like you are standing on the edge of eternity. It only lasts but a flicker and is gone. Except imagine everyone around you is experiencing the same thing—and it continues to roll over you, like a memory, that you are, indeed, a winner, that all your hard work has been recognized and your prayers heard. I know there are people out there trying to stop a pipeline, promises broken to the poor and homeless, and just earlier this week, a young man I watched grow up was killed on his bike out in LA. Yeah, there’s still all that, but now this too. This series (like the election) has showed up the differences in some families. Someone was going to get their heart stomped on. Someone was going to walk away the winner and the