Martha Blowen, my partner in life and in work, died on August 18, 2008, from metastasized breast cancer. The following is from collated excerpts of journals we both kept at the time. (Before she passed away, she gave me permission to share her entries.) The memoir is called My Eye Fell Into the Soup, after […]
“Is it possible to support myself in the creative life?” you ask.One day in 1988, I stood in front of a door, on the other side of which was a group of Foster Grandparents. I had in hand a copy of my recent collection of autobiographical short stories What Became of Them and Other Stories […]
If you prefer a hard copy for $17.95, click here. A Sugary Frosting reveals a side of being a Preacher’s Kid, a public role that is rife with challenges of supporting your minister father and your minister’s-wife mother and of becoming yourself. Herein are relationships portrayed honestly and sometimes not flatteringly. A Sugary Frosting, a phrase […]
I am in the very last days of the memoir writing process and polishing A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage, the early lifestory of my deceased spouse, Martha Blowen. It’s a time to make sure I have written what I want to write and to check grammar and […]
The following cancer diary entries are from Martha Blowen and me, while celebrating Thanksgiving with the family after her diagnosis.
Martha’s breast cancer diary was published as My Eye Fell Into the Soup and is a cancer journal/memoir of Martha Blowen’s experience with cancer.
This is an excerpt from the as-yet-unnamed memoir of Martha Blowen, my lifemate and business partner who died in 2008 of metastatic intraductal breast cancer. The previous post covered Martha’s premature birth and her family’s recent move to Worcester, Massachusetts, where her father had taken on to serve as minister of Congregational church there.
Writers can doubt their process. This is understandable as writing a memoir is a long undertaking that can—and usually does—have many discouraging moments.
Shouldn’t writing another person’s memoir be called writing biography rather than writing memoir? You the writer are, after all, not the subject. Doesn’t that make it a biography? But, are there occasions when a biography can justly be called a memoir? In one of my books, A Sugary Frosting / Life in a 1960s Parsonage, […]