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 […]
A Sugary Frosting: A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage How I Survived Being a Preacher’s Kid This memoir reveals an underside of being the 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, a person they may not […]
If you prefer the e-version at $4.99, click here. This book reminds us that clergy families are not exempt from family squabbles and estrangements. They are also subject to a highly modest probability of privacy, as Martha reveals that her parents and the church community seemed to view the parsonage as an “open house.” […]
While I believe my father did well as minister in Hadwin Park, he was by nature a small-town minister. Coming from the working class, he was familiar and comfortable with working men and women. Or, I might say, he was comfortable being the educated man among uneducated people. His talent was working in a small, […]
Isolated memories that seem too ordinary for a memoir can be a challenge to incorporate into a memoir as they usually lack inherent drama. How to place early memories into a narrative so that they give a sense of the foundation of a life without turning the reader off. Let me know in the comments […]
My uncles came into the parsonage, made their announcement of the decision to remove my grandparents which was a fait accompli that they were not willing to discuss, packed my grandparents up and drove away with them. My parents were in shock.
When you are both a story teller and a story keeper, in thirty-one years of co-habiting with someone who is very verbal, you get to learn many of her stories. A number of them you have heard not only because they are told directly to you as you went about your day—perhaps driving into town […]