Memoirous

I’ve started to be a little more intentional about booking seminars (I’m open!) and promoting my Substack and books. Sort of. I was asked recently to be on a podcast, Written in the Stars , put out by Lansing Community College. Thanks for reading Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I chatted with John Szilagyi and Robin Moore about books and writing and particularly flash. John asked an interesting question–about what got me into writing. Hmmmmm. It seems I’ve always been doing it. There were no outside motivators, such as an encouraging adult or teacher. If anything, my parents and classroom teacher tried to snuff out the creative spark. I remember my dad coming home from a parent/teacher conference with a sheaf of papers. Random writing from my desk at school. The teacher complained to Dad that I was fooling around when I should have been working/paying attention. Dad handed my writing to me and told me I could write a...

I wrote a few weeks ago about my mother and her soap operas, you know, the daytime dramas that were on from about 1- 3 pm. Scheduled right after she got her morning household chores done and before the kids came home from school. That was life for the middle-aged, middle class housewife. Even the term house wife seems archaic. Anyway, I was reminded of this as I watched my daughter doing her business while walking around wearing headphones. She subscribes to a podcast. You can tell the generational difference: me, a baby boomer, has recently subscribed to Country Living magazine as a way to disengage from the world and all the stressful news. She, a millennial, has decided to pay for exclusive content from the podcast. I asked her what that meant. Of course, she rolled her eyes at me. (Just kidding, but it felt like it.) Behind the paywall (again, these terms!) she is privileged to take part in group chats, given access to YouTube videos to watch interviews that normal listener...

I heard a snippet of a podcast the other day that reminded me of one of the tenets of this blog: to pay attention to small things, write about the mundane, stay present to daily life. Rough Translation is a podcast that explores language and crossover of language. It delves into the social and anthropological surrounding language and how culture and tribalism also impacts words. Yeah, fairly broad. A recent episode “The Cat Must Still Be Fed” is about: a hyperlocal news site in Red Hook, N.Y. posts a job opening. A journalist in Ukraine applies. And what readers think of as "local news" is going to change dramatically. At first the editor thinks its spam, a joke, a bot. Then she contacts the respondent. No, he just likes using the world wide web as a way to escape, to live vicariously—so no, he doesn’t have a background in journalism nor is he especially proficient in English. But, using algorithms and data sourced from the internet he thought he might be able to writ...

The BBC has a prodigious number of podcasts of all kinds available to listen to. https://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts I started with 13 Minutes to the Moon about the ill-fated Apollo 13 launch (the 50 th anniversary) which has been interrupted by another kind of disaster that has the world glued to their radios and TVs, the virus. Presenter, Kevin Fong a medical doctor, has been pulled away to assist the NHS to fight the pandemic. His narration is riveting—even if we already know this story, it is well worth listening to. Also from the BBC is a documentary called Death in Ice Valley https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p060ms2h about the mysterious body of a woman found outside the city of Bergen in Norway in 1970. The podcast has been tremendously popular since it first released in 2018. Ten Episodes. Eerily enough is the sound effect of drumming rain in the background that lends an atmosphere pf noir. Death in Ice Valley has been downloaded or streamed a total of five ...

During Christmas I listened to Dolly Parton's America , a podcast from journalist and podcast celebrity Jad Abumrad, creator of Radiolab and More Perfect. Like all good podcasts there are surprising and insane connections made—where the conversation takes a left turn to something else. I loved the interweaving of themes and threads=all from Dolly Parton. This is America in all its forms. The podcasts begin with Parton in Nashville on the Porter Wagoner Show. She was meant to be the “Dumb Blonde”, second fiddle to the main man, but her ability to carry an audience and build her own fan base was immediately apparent. What Abumrad emphasized is that Dolly’s fans are diverse. She appeals to not only country music fans but to the LGBT crowd. People who vote for Trump, people who would rather die than vote for Trump. In fact, she has more of a following now in her 70s than she did when at age 21 she broke onto the scene on Wagoner’s show. Her songs speak to a whole range of peopl...