Memoirous

  https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Memoir-Writing-Prompts-Flashing-ebook/dp/B0714K6B41/ a review at Amazon 5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Create Without It! Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2017 While Jane Hertenstein’s book Flash Memoir is ostensibly geared toward writers, this book is a must-have for anyone who is creating art of any kind. Filled with amazing historical factoids (check out Hemingway’s lost valise or Wordsworth’s almost-permanent houseguest, Samuel Coleridge) as well as the writer’s personal examples of following her own advice, the main thrust of the book is to get the reader’s creativity flowing, and boy howdy, the author succeeds at that. Each little chapter or section describes something that can be used as a prompt for creativity, be it old postcards, newspaper headlines, websites filled with breathtaking photos, or basic, evocative stimuli such as certain smells or sudden memories. The author then gives an example of how this prompt can be used, frequent...

Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir, will inspire you and keep you writing. *The link takes you to Amazon, but also available through Apple Baker & Taylor Blio Baker-Taylor Axis360 Barnes & Noble Diesel Flipkart Gardners Extended Retail Gardners Library Inktera (formerly Page Foundry) Kobo Library Direct Odilo OverDrive Oyster Scribd Sony Tolino txtr Yuzu

Flash Memoir: Writing Prompts to get you Flashing available EVERYWHERE.  Oder it today .* *The link takes you to Amazon, but also available through Apple Baker & Taylor Blio Baker-Taylor Axis360 Barnes & Noble Diesel Flipkart Gardners Extended Retail Gardners Library Inktera (formerly Page Foundry) Kobo Library Direct Odilo OverDrive Oyster Scribd Sony Tolino txtr Yuzu

Readers of this blog know that I am addicted to Antiques Roadshow. I watch mostly for the description. Crenulated. Wingback. Bezel. That thing on the top of cabinet clocks. When is an object more than just a thing—when you hear one of the Keno brothers go into detail about it. You come to understand it is the sum of the parts, the work invested, the craftsmanship. One of the appraisers was evaluating a book of police mugshots from Portland, Oregon circa 1900s. The term she used to describe it was vernacular, as in vernacular photos have become very popular. Here’s how Daile Kaplan defined the term: The photography of the everyday, the photography that's a record, that's a document, that has a historic truth. This is also how I might define flash memoir. This is not the letter from Abraham Lincoln or the guy who found the Rembrandt in the trash. This is more like the story behind the toy train. I got it for Christmas one year and it’s been in our family ever ...

This week I’ve been writing about flash, particularly memoir. Saturday, Nov. 14, 1 – 3 pm I will be giving a workshop at Chicago Publisher Resource Center, 858 N. Ashland Avenue, Chicago . Memoir today is being written as fiction and much of fiction is comprised of memoir. Flash is about writing small and using bits of your life story. This workshop will teach you how to take bite-size memories and weave them into narrative. Participants will be given examples of flash, writing prompts, and also a list of places to submit their own flash. When I wrote the above blurb I was thinking primarily of a new book out by Lily Tuck which I haven’t read, but have been intrigued by since I read a review about it in The Washington Post. The Double Life of Liliane is essentially an autobiographical novel. Okay, there’s a muddle. Which is it? Fiction or non-fiction. Life is all about compartmentalizing. Except not everything fits. There are times when fact and fiction are ...

My last post was about a random bag of clothes close to 40 years old. Stuff no one wanted—except when they were returned to the former owner Patti Smith, she burst into tears. At the very thought, the memories the clothes brought back. Consider other infamous lost items. There is a history of art stolen through the ages, later recovered. The current controversy concerns art taken and stored in Nazi warehouses eventually winding its way back to the original owners. Or whoever. Museums are full of objects “taken.” I did some research and came up with stories of lost and found. Peter Frampton had an incident similar to Patti’s while on tour. His plane crashed—and his equipment in the cargo bay, or so he thought.   http://www.npr.org/2012/01/07/144799712/framptons-dream-guitar-recovered-decades-later Another mystery of a missing musical instrument solved: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/07/144799712/framptons-dream-guitar-recovered-decades-later There’s a group tha...

Lost and Found How many of you were captured by these headlines: Woman interruptsconcert to give the singer a bag of her possessions, taken from her tour truckin 1979 That’s right—someone gave Patti Smith her clothes back after 36 years. This blog is about memories. How many memories are stitched into the clothes we wear . . . or used to wear? The dress you wore to your son’s wedding, your favorite sweatshirt that always gets rotated to the front of the drawer, the mini-skirt that got you through your darkest days after the breakup, that sheer blouse that always makes you feel ravishing, that hopelessly out-of-date tie that you somehow cannot bring yourself to forsake. Who is it that said we are the clothes we wear? But, styles change. Yesterday’s punk is today’s conservative. Remember your goth phase when everything you wore was black. I wouldn’t be caught dead in an 80s dress with poof sleeves. The free bins are full of fuchsia jackets with padded shoulders....

Places I still see newspapers: --left on the commuter train --at Starbuck’s --my parent’s house I naturally reach toward them, drawn in by an old friend. Also I am in the current issue of PMS= Poem, Memoir, Story out of the University of Alabama-Birmingham. It is a journal that celebrates and encourages women’s writing. LOVE IT! Kerry Mad­den is an editor there and she has several really great non-fiction books: Up Close: Harper Lee  "I encourage my students to delve into their own lives to mine for material." Sound familiar?  Check out my story entitled Heartbreak Wall