Memoirous

Waves: A Confluence of Women's Voices If you’re a woman writer or artist, you’re invited to submit. There are no restrictions as to subject matter and form (other than the necessary word/line limits). We are open to all kinds of work. Along with your creative work in any genre, including artwork, we welcome additional submissions from women who attended the 2015 Retreat Waves Discussion Series, and we’d like to suggest that anyone who has applied for the Gift of Freedom consider submitting some portion of her application. Submit thoughtfully, and check our website for more inspiration as the wave grows. We are hoping for a mix of established and new voices for this anthology, featuring Maxine Hong Kingston. Hear more about Diane Gilliam's vision as editor here . You may submit unpublished or previously published work. If you are submitting we would be glad for you to invite women writ...

Summer of 2011 I received a grant from the Illinois Arts council to attend a writer’s conference called A Room of Her Own ( AROHO ) at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. It was a very, very encouraging time. The group of women I met with in the afternoons gave me the confidence to go bold. The group was led by Mary Johnson author of An Unquenchable Thirst now out in paperback. Also in the group was Renny Golden whose latest poetry collection Blood Desert won the WILLA Literary Award by Women Writing the West. One afternoon I sat in on a breakout session led by Kate Gale of Red Hen Press where she extolled us to go bold. What do you really want? It’s not that no one has ever asked me that—just not lately. One of the things I wrote down as a goal was : Win a prize. So far in 2013 I’ve had 4 pieces accepted and been paid for 2 of them. In addition I’ve been shortlisted at The Red Line . Next month at OCWW I am schedule to teach a course on The Art of Writing Small (flas...

I few days ago (dear readers! you may recall) I blogged about my Law of What Needs to Happen First. It was sequential theory with a bit of the spiritual thrown in.  And, even still, it is hard to reconcile that sometimes a bad thing needs to happen before something good can take its place. This law perhaps cannot be applied to everything. Because, indeed, VERY BAD things happen to children. See Murders Up in Chicago 60% You can also read/hear/absorb through the airwaves the Jerry Sandusky story. Even if you wanted to avoid this one, it's been impossible. And every time the radio/TV/newspapers/Facebook reported on it, I felt sick to my stomach, and angry. But today I received confirmation that even out of this VERY SORRY EPISODE can come the next right thing. A wonderful woman I met last summer at a writer's conference A Room of Her Own, Dora McQuaid, a poet and activist who worked at Penn State as a voice against violence to women has been chosen (her image) to REPLACE ...

At AROHO Marilyn Robinson spoke about this. Of course I’m aware of today’s paranoia over borders, terrorists that have turned many people inside out to the point of demonizing the “other”, this was just the first time I’d seen it used as a verb, as in “othering” others. Basically the other is someone other than you. I know pretty broad. Yet it is only in the broadest language that one can describe something as all-encompassing as the universe outside of our self. Some people have attempted to mitigate this generalization by saying something like this: I’m not racist, I’m just not comfortable with a black president or what’s wrong with profiling—we need better border security. Well this is all fine except it is “othering”. A great example of this is in a book I referenced earlier this month: Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Years , where Wendy and her beau traveled to downstate Illinois to attend a weekend festival revolving around farm skills ie putting up tomatoes, canning peaches, making...

The inner city mission where I live and work is situated not too far from Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play. Maybe it was a friend of a friend or through the city or food depository, but our organization is one of a few invited to come about thirty minutes after the game to pick up unsold stadium hotdogs. So after every home game Chris and Stewart go in an old van to drive the one and half miles to Wrigley to load in a box (or two depending on the weather) of assorted grill items ie either a hot dog, hamburger, brat, or Italian sausage. The whole neighborhood gets a piece of this action. It’s a neighborhood comprised of homeless shelters, half-way houses, people pushing grocery carts down the alleys, and old Hungarian-looking women feeding pigeons next to signs saying Don’t Feed the Pigeons! Trash and bread and bagel debris swirl at corner curbs and once in a while a drunk sleeps one off on a bus bench. But about forty-five minutes even before a game is over, people start streaming...

Today I'd like to do a couple of quick reviews of three memoirs. I'm not a REAL critic, but am always on the look-out for memoir material I can share with the classes and workshops I lead. The first book I have already used at the homeless shelter where I facilitate a creative writing program. The book is I REMEMBER by Joe Brainard . The concept is so simple, you're surprised more people haven't done it. The book first came out in 1970, fell out of print and is now back. It is 170 pages comprised of remembrances that begin I remember. For example I remember Payday candy bars and eating the nuts off first. I remember drawing pictures in church on pledge envelopes and programs . I remember rainy days through picture windows. I remember Peter Pan collars. I remember autumn. Many of the remembrances are banal, quotidian, of no significance--except that they are his. We often think, What do I have in common with others? Also many of us as artists also grew up feeling lik...

File this under the corruption of memory. Memoir. The whole time I was at AROHO I was trying to remember when I had visited my sister who worked at Ghost Ranch on college staff sometime in the early 1980s. I narrowed my memory down to Christmas. I know that much because we snowshoed back into Box Canyon and on Christmas Eve I hopped into the back of a pickup truck for a ride to Christ in the Desert ( http://www.christdesert.org/ ). I seem to remember the chapel being lit only by candles. After the service there was a reception where we ate homemade bread made by the brothers—and rang in Christmas Day as it was well after midnight when we left the monastery. I had those memories, but had lost track of others. I also held onto a singular memory of being introduced to a nice young man newly married and his wife. My sister said he was going to be a turkey farmer. Later after returning home she wrote me to say that the young man had been killed, from a fall, during a hike on a mesa at G...