Interview with Dana Tramba / Making Peace With The Pieces of My Life
Denis Ledoux: Can you tell our readers what your book, Making Peace with the Pieces of My Life, is about and why you were compelled to write your book? What was driving you to spend the time, energy, and money to get this book out into the world? Dana: I wanted to reach the divorced […]
You Don’t Have to Rush To Complete a Memoir
Writers will sometimes tell me that they are blocked and can’t seem to get back into writing. I have a surprising answer for them: don’t write just now to complete a memoir. It’s ok to be stalled for a while.
Let me give you a little scene in which I came to the viability of this conclusion.
One summer when I was serious about gardening, I went away on a late June trip. It was a fun vacation with my family, but the trip fell at a time when the garden seriously needed daily weeding, hoeing, and watering. As you can imagine, when I returned home, I found my garden overrun with weeds. The vegetables that I had so carefully planted were just about choked out, so I was, to say the least, challenged seeing the overgrown mess of weeds.
Rather than tackle the job immediately, however, which would certainly have been reasonable, I made a counter-intuitive decision: I spent time across several days just sitting on the edge of the garden, envisioning how I wanted the various parts to look once my work of cleaning up was done, imagining the lovely vegetables I would have.
Action will come.
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Writing a First Memoir Draft Was Daunting
At age 54, I wrote the first 56,500 words of my first memoir draft of my book, Showbiz Survival Memoir.
It was cathartic writing a first memoir draft and getting it out of me. Honestly, it was a bit grueling though, — emotionally and even physically — to relive some of the most painful times in my life. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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The Photos You Don’t Have / How to Journal Without The Photos
Notice Gaps In Your Collection of Photos?
As you organize your photos for your albums, you notice gaps in what you photographed–in other words, the photos you don’t have. You remember events that you didn’t even photograph at all– perhaps you weren’t there or perhaps you were too busy to take photos.
You can ask around to find if anyone took photos you might have copies of. And what if no one has photos to record a time or a person in your life that you simply must memorialize? What to do? [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]