Writing Life Blog
Writing Love
Love is arguably the emotion that matters most. We are born loving, reaching out blindly for our mother’s love, and continuing to search for love our whole lives, bending toward its warmth like a flower swiveling its face towards the sun. Love is universal, but the...
Edith Wharton and the Landscape of Childhood
Lately I have been reading Edith Wharton’s memoir, A Backward Glance, and I am most struck by the early chapters when she describes her childhood. The young Edith was a dreamy, sensitive child who loved nothing so much as rambles in the countryside, and who was...
The Importance of Finding a Positive Writing Circle
For the most part, we writers are a solitary, introverted bunch. But much as we may enjoy our own company and the quiet musings of our imaginations, we also need to come out of our corners and play with others. Enter writing classes, circles, retreats and other...
Pictures of Childhood
In my elemental system of memoir, January is an Earth month, and Earth represents the childhood ground of our being. So here it is, January, and I’m thinking about my childhood. Over the holidays, my mom pulled out an oversize Brooks Brothers suit box brimming with...
Three New Year’s Resolutions for Memoirists
Every New Year is another opportunity for setting goals and resolutions for the year to come. Here are three resolutions that will be useful for anyone working on a memoir—or thinking about starting a memoir project. Be bold. In your first draft, have the...
Playing with time: the work of the memoirist
Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, always gets me thinking about the fleeting passage of time. It’s a cliché to say that life is short, but once you get to middle age, that’s indeed how it feels.
One of the gifts of writing memoir is that you get to play games with time. In lived experience, a day can seem short or long, but it’s always the same number of minutes and hours ticking away. Not so in narrative.
As Virginia Woolf showed us so beautifully with her novel Mrs. Dalloway, which takes place over the course of a single day, when we set out to tell a story, we can do all kinds of tricks with time. A crucial hour can be slowed down and looked at from multiple viewpoints, all its facets separated out and narrated with full complexity, including the flashbacks of memory that give our minute-by-minute lives temporal depth and breadth.
This Solstice season, capture those “tender bits of eternity”
As the days grow shorter and darker on our way to the Winter Solstice, I always find myself in a more introspective mood. I want to shut out the blare of the headlines, turn down the next holiday party invitation, and just make myself cozy at home, lighting candles...
No one is an island: writing memoir on the boundaries of self, others and world
When you set out to write a memoir, it’s natural to assume that the focus is going to be on you. Yes, it’s your story, but no one is an island; it would be a pretty dull account if you tried to simply talk about yourself without including your constant interactions...
Writing Memoir in our #MeToo Moment
As a memoirist, I’ve had to think long and hard about some of the #MeToo issues that are now buzzing around the public sphere. When you write memoir, you generally don’t get too far before you run up against thorny questions of how much to reveal about your past,...
Changing the World, One Story at a Time
I recently joined my oldest friend, Audrey Kalman, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California to lead a writing workshop called “Birthing Your Truest Stories.” The theme seemed right to us because it integrates Audrey’s work as a birth doula and writer with my work...
It’s an Emoticon World—But Not for Writers
We all do it these days: slap on a smiley face or a frowny face or a thumbs-up to stand in for a more complex expression of our feelings. The Tweeter-in-Chief uses just one word—SAD--to represent a whole political diatribe. His other favorite one-worder: FAKE. We...
WRITING LIFE: Pay Attention to your Dreams
There are all these romantic myths about great artists painting or writing frenziedly in the middle of the night, but the truth is that dreams hold the key to our most creative energy, and the only way to tap that creative elixir is to sleep. In our goal-oriented,...
Writing Life: Four Secrets of Productive Writers
Last weekend I led a writing workshop way up high on the summit of Mount Greylock, the highest mountain in Massachusetts at just under 4,000 feet. Thirteen women made the trek up the winding narrow road to the broad windy peak, with its rustic wood and stone Lodge and...
Writing Life
In writing life we seek, as Shakespeare put it, “to hold a mirror up to nature”—to call into words the intangible aura of significance that, whether we realize it or not, illuminates every moment of our lives. It’s a calling that offers deep, sustaining nourishment for the journey of life.