Fear–everyone experiences an uncomfortable tension, a flutter in the stomach, when they think about writing about their lives and revealing themselves. But most of us come to the page with a need–to explore our lives and memories. To understand something. To muse and wonder about life, relationships. What are the stories that haunt you? What do you need to say…
What are the stories that call out to you? Moments that shaped you into who you are now? What voices tell you to write them, and what forces stop you? What I learned in wrestling with my inner critic is that writing will cure it.
When the invitation to join our Enid High School 55th graduating class reunion arrived, at first I tossed it aside. Enid, Oklahoma is a long way from California. It takes a whole day to get there by two planes and a car. Would I really connect with “kids” I knew back in the fifties after all these years? Then,…
This is the first chapter of my memoir Don’t Call Me Mother–A Daughter’s Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness. This story begins to explore a three generational pattern of mothers leaving daughters–and what necessarily comes in the wake of such troubles. The beginning paragraphs are from a dream I kept having about my mother and me after she died. The train…
I just returned from “home,” Enid, Oklahoma, where I read my memoirs and attended my high school reunion–more to come on that. All over town, I encountered places of memory so profound I felt I was surfing layers of time. This photo is of a small lake bordering what was Phillips University back in the 50s, tucked away in silence…
Yes, I say mothers, plural because my mother’s mother raised me after I was six, and I saw my mother once a year as I grew up. In my first memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother, my mother, grandmother, and all the other adults who shaped my life were viewed through the eyes of a child who grows up to adulthood…
I was one of those children who found refuge in books—burrowing down in bed at night, the golden light of a flashlight creating an illuminated cave as the light played across the pages. Great stacks of books were piled on my night table, and I made my way quickly through them. Books were a refuge, they were my friends, and…
Today as I got up and remembered that it’s International Women’s Day, I thought about the history of the women in my family–my great-grandmother Blanche who gifted me with her stories from the 19th century, and the idea that hard work is a valued part of life; my grandmother, Gram, who raised me, who started off as Lulu, a farm…
In the last post, we examined the inner critic—how it can sow seeds of doubt about the validity of your story, and how we can worry about how the family will react, claiming that their own version of the past is the only “true” one. My advice was to accept that you are not alone! That all writers have doubts…
When you begin to write a memoir, you soon discover several layers to the process: there’s the emotional angst most people feel about writing about themselves, the worry about exposing yourself and your family to public scrutiny when the book is published. And there are questions about the craft of writing a story. After all, your story is so much…