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People are driven to express themselves. Each of us has a story and an urge to tell it. In my estimation no other medium is as effective in revealing the self as the irreplaceable memoir.

Below are thoughts of various media for self-expression.

Flash Memoir

In a world of texting and Twitter, the urge to self-express is constricted but still vibrant. A new ‘literary genre’ called Flash Memoir has emerged: storytelling within the confines of six words. (It’s close relative is  Flash Fiction!) The most famous of these Flash Writings is “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Attributed to Mr. Earnest Hemingway, it is purported to be a ‘novel’ produced to win a $10 bet. For writers less gifted than Mr. Hemingway, the best I can say about Flash Memoir is that it is brief. Most examples compel me to edit for wordiness.

Poignant as Hemingway’s terse ‘novel’ may be, too much is left unsaid. If one calls six words a ‘novel’, then arguably, the name on a headstone followed by the birth and death dates is a ‘memoir’. But that hyphen separating those dates doesn’t measure up.

Speed and brevity are not always an advance.

Letters

One long step backwards in our march to progress is the loss of writing personal letters. When did you last get a letter? I know people who have never, ever gotten a letter.

Consider what that loss means. My mother recently sent me a packet of letters written decades ago by her mother. Gramma wrote Mom weekly and frequently more often. It was a conversation.

What a revelation. Each letter revealed Gramma’s personality and style. Her distinct voice and gentle wit brought innocuous events to life in a few lines. Descriptions of others were warm, revealing and conversational. Her hand writing was beautiful. They don’t teach cursive in schools anymore.

Historians always mined old letters for hints about the lives of writers beyond the names and dates. What can historians do in the future? Will anyone eagerly pour over millions of emails or ‘tweets’ to find that telling phrase? Better get started.

Of course, paper records are ephemeral too. I recently assisted in researching a man’s life. Born in Eastern Europe, he immigrated to the United States before WWI. He became a master carpenter working on the assembly lines in Detroit. However, two world wars and the communist regime destroyed the church in which this man’s birth records were kept. Statements he made about his past were contradictory.

He spelled his name so idiosyncratically that no record of him, nor anyone with that surname could be found. Alternate name spellings discovered far from his stated home town made a sure connection impossible. His origins and ancestry remain obscure. No letter or irreplaceable memoir exists with which to piece together a biography for his family. Was he was trying to obscure his past?

Family Trees

Another problem is posed by family trees which contain the barest sketches about possibly hundreds of ancestors over centuries. Names and dates may be associated with piracy, ministry, royalty, wars and migrations. But family trees share much with ‘flash fiction’ in that a very few words say but little. Without an irreplaceable memoir the names are familiar but remain bloodless.

Irreplaceable Memoir

The full-length memoir stands alone as an in depth, first-hand account, told as remembered but filtered through experience of life. Letters are invaluable but lack the cohesiveness of the memoir. Written in the heat of the moment, letters lack the long view a memoir offers.

Nothing matches the depth, breadth, and the context of the memoir. It can take interesting detours when desired but always has that unity of an individual’s life providing perspective.

Everyone has a story. Anyone can write a memoir. Often, the personal account of someone on history’s edge offers perspective that a major player cannot provide. A fresh, sustained point of view is simply unavailable by other means. A personal account can reveal emotions that inform the reader of far more than a ‘just the facts’ approach could convey.

A well written memoir of a multi-faceted life is a joy to read. Those who lack writing skills but still wish to tell their story may employ a ghostwriter.

Technology can be used to good effect here. Recorded interviews ensure the accuracy of the telling while preserving the flow of the narrative in the individual style of the story teller. The memoirist needs only to tell their story, in their words, as they remember it, and leave the paper work to the ‘ghost’.

Life in a parsonage for my family was a 1950’s middle-class existence. It is what I believe my father was striving for when he worked those years in Enfield, CT, after high school and before Bates College, those years at Bates working at the telephone switchboard at Central Maine General Hospital, serving as kitchen and dining room help at President Clifton Daggett Gray’s house in exchange for board and a room on the third floor.

Neither my father nor my mother were materialistic people and they did not see their educations, I believe, as passports to more “things.” For them, middle-class life seemed to have been about respectability and standing. While they had met in Greek class, neither of them could be classified as intellectuals. (Years after college, my mother would refer to a child-psychology class for references which seemed sacrosanct to her as if the intervening years had not generated an incredible amount of research findings in behavior and motivation and other areas of psychology. Since she did not read psychology, she was not aware of this.)

Finding their sphere

My parents would have described themselves as doers, and the Hadwen Park Congregational Church as their sphere of doing. They would sometimes speak of a classmate of Daddy’s who had left the active ministry to be a UCC administrator as having somehow chosen the lesser and, even more disparagingly, they spoke of someone who was doing pastoral ministry as having been unable to take on the challenges of working with a congregation.

During those years, my mother, wearing white gloves, went shopping in the large stores downtown. If we were with my father who might have come with us as chauffeur, there would follow lunch or, at least, refreshments in a restaurant. My father loved to eat out, to enjoy the social occasion of being in public. My mother might say as we tagged along, “Isn’t Daddy wonderful.” In my little petticoats and maryjanes, I was sure I had the most wonderful daddy in the world.

A time with more leisure

One day, I helped Daddy clean the birdbath. This seemed like an important project to my young self. As I reflect on this now, my father had much free time in his days—perhaps everyone in the 1950s had more time than we did later. As minister, my father made his own schedule and, except for Sunday services and meetings, had almost complete freedom in how to use his time. Cleaning the bird bath in mid-afternoon when other men—his Yeomans half-brothers—were working in a textile mill or an insurance agency or in a garage was something he could let himself indulge in. No one would question him the use of his time. He was the minister and he could easily—as was true—detail his weekly work to include visiting a church member in the evening or over the weekend or having done some other work of charity on off hours. Perhaps this compensated for his mid-day leisure time.

My mother was also very involved in church activities, and as the saying had it of the minister and his wife, the church got two people for the price of one. She did not chafe at teaching Sunday school or spearheading a number of committees or of hosting church functions at the house. (Was it at one of these functions that I showed off my rosebud petticoat?) During this time and later, she lived Mrs. Curtis’ admonition that, for a woman, being a minister’s wife was a higher calling that being a minister herself. This higher calling had its menial side. Mom’s hands were always ink-stained from running masters of church bulletins through mimeograph machines. I remember this vividly.

Early memories

On a wintry day, I came home from the park where either John Mark or Emily must have taken me to find my mother washing the floor. My mother was as likely to be washing the floor to have it clean in the event a church deacon came in unexpectedly as to have it clean because cleanliness was important to her. What others thought about her and her family was very important to my mother. She was not a social climber or a user of other people. I think she simply derived parts of her identity not from herself but from others. She would decide to do things not for themselves but to assure that others thought well of her husband and of her family.

It was while we were in Worcester that I had chicken pox. During the days that I was laid up, my mother spent hours sitting by my bedside. Sometimes she would sing and other times she might tell me a story. But, what I remember most was waking up and seeing her near me working on something, her attention riveted. Perhaps she was darning a sock or perhaps she working on a religious program, but she was there. I felt secure with her so near to me even if I was sometimes feverish and miserable. I sensed nothing bad could happen if my mother was so close.

My mother also had a manner of making things fun for children. One rainy miserable day when I had wanted to go out for a picnic but could not because of the weather, my mother organized a picnic in my bedroom. It was fun to eat on the floor and break the rules of convention. This appealed to my independence. I was just a little girl and was easily amused by this novelty.

Birthday party before leaving Worcester

My fifth birthday party, not long before we left Worcester, was attended by friends and by my entire kindergarten class. Gordie and the Latolas must have been there. My mother was always good at organizing such activities—I don’t know whether it was that she genuinely enjoyed pulling them off or whether it was because she saw a birthday party as supporting the minister’s standing in the community. She always had a heightened sense of Daddy’s “standing,” and it often shaped her responses. She seemed to believe that the entire world was Congregationalist and everyone was acutely aware of the minister of the Congregational Church. I’m not sure the parents of the Catholic children in my kindergarten class (Worcester had a very large percentage, for instance, of a French-speaking Catholic population) had this sense of reverence for one of the many Anglo Protestant ministers in town.

Today would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary. They are both gone now—my mother having passed on May 5th of 2015. I included a eulogy in a previous blog post. Theirs was a 1940s Franco-American wedding.

For this post, I am providing you with a link to the blog archives where I

My mother's book has found its audience.

My mother’s book has found its audience.

have posted many excerpted stories from her book We Were Not Spoiled, which I wrote with her and published in November of 2013.

A hard copy of the book is available on Amazon.com

There are many free books, MP3s, and PDFs in our My Memoir Education area for you to enjoy. If you have not been to the downloads section lately, check it out. Here are a couple available to you at no charge.

1. First FreeMemoir Writing 101 : 10 Steps to Crafting a The Memoir NetworkCompelling Memoir

This book’s ten action steps can help you write a memoir or improve the one you are working on. While this is a basic text, we believe it can correct any memoir writing course and get you to a finished product more quickly. Easy but very useful read.

2. The Nice-Nice Club Holds Its Last Meeting

In this short memoir, we read about a family that was held together because someone in the family invested much energy into maintaining the status quo. In The Nice-Nice Club NNCcover300x300Holds Its Last Meeting, a family that had once placed great stock in a façade of loving one another—and it had “worked” for a long time—sees the façade crumble, showing inner workings badly in need of fixing.

If you’ve ever wondered how to handle a family conflict in a memoir, this free book will be your guide to doing so successfully.

Not a member of My Memoir Education?

Become a member today to avail yourself of these free books and of all the free materials available to you. Join today.

Please write an Amazon review.

Both of these free books are on Amazon and Smashwords. I would appreciate it enormously if you left  a short review on either or both books. The review need not be long. Think in terms of comment. You can send the same review to both distributors

Click on the distributor name below the title to be brought to the review page.

Memoir Writing 101 : 10 Steps to Crafting a Compelling Memoir

Smashwords

The Nice-Nice Club Holds Its Last Meeting

Amazon   Smashwords

I am so grateful for your help in spreading the memoir conversation. I look forward to your review as a way of knowing your take on these free books.

DL—This is the fourth excerpt from A Sugary Frosting, the memoir of Martha Blowen, my lifemate and business partner who died in 2008 of metastatic intraductal breast cancer.

The previous posts (first, second, third) 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 and her grandparents’ demanding stay with them and their precipitous departure.

This excerpt presents early memories. 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 below if you think I have succeeded with Martha’s text in placing early memories in a readable context or if this is too ordinary for a memoir.

—

In spite of the scandal of having my uncles whisk my grandparents away, my mother and father established themselves in the Hadwen Park Congregational Church of Worcester, and our family settled into life as the minister’s family. We were necessarily a “perfect” family, straight-jacketed into the role of the model Christian-family. My parents believed the congregation required this, and saw no reason why we children should not want it too. Outside the parsonage, no child was ever to do anything that would embarrass Daddy, compromise his role as minister, or show us as less than a model Christian family. In this, there was no sham. Being a model family was what we were to be, what we were raised to expect of ourselves, what we thought of ourselves as being. Or at least, having to be a model family was how I integrated what I heard into my life, taking it in as I took in my mother’s cooking.

In the next years, John Mark entered grade school in Worcester, and I grew into a toddler. One afternoon—it must have been winter as the sun had set and the room was dark, I woke up after a nap, and John Mark, hearing my cries, came into the bedroom to soothe me. It was suppertime and soon my mother came to lift me out of the crib and bring me into the kitchen. This is my first memory, and it is a pleasant one. My mother was an affectionate woman who loved to touch and be touched. Babies provided her a great source of comfort. When not faced with a social conflict, she had a way of being present that made a child feel special.

Then as I grew up a bit, I began play with Gordie Howe who lived nearby. Perhaps I was going to his house when, being discovered on the sidewalk alone, I was told I couldn’t go up the street by myself. I was a willful child and did not like being told I could not do something—especially when I wanted to do it.

Perhaps this admonition had some connection with the time I walked to the downtown with John Mark. I have some vague recollection that this was about running away from home. Running away was perhaps something that John Mark had read in a book. I was too young to know that running away would entail not being at home for supper nor having my dollies when it was time to go to bed. John Mark was five years older and that made quite a difference to our ability to evaluate a situation. Perhaps he was simply going for a walk and was weaving a tale about running away—and had every intention of not missing supper. In this process of either running away or taking a walk, we got lost. I don’t remember how we got back, nor how my parents responded. Did a church member see us wondering downtown and bring us back? Worcester was after all a sizeable city, the second largest in Massachusetts after Boston, and two children ought not to be wandering.

Hadwen Park was a community within the city. For most people, it was centered around the park and its shopping district. But for my family, it was all about the church and my father. Gordie’s parents were members of the church, and this reinforced my sense of the world revolving around what was going on in the church. Gordie and I continued to be inseparable friends, and after a while, we made plans to marry when we grew up. One day, not wanting to wait until we grew up, I told Gordie that my father could marry us. Together we went to him. Daddy spoke about the seriousness of marriage and told us he could not marry us. He said that he couldn’t make believe he was marrying us because he was invested with the power to actually marry people.  In spite of how disappointed we were, he would not make believe to marry us. “As if” was all we wanted. (It was the equivalent of the parent giving an explanation of sex when a child asks where she came from only to have the child respond, “Sally comes from Boston. Where do I come from?”) Make believe can be as good as real when you and your fiancé are four.

On another occasion, Gordie and I made believe that the pile of large maple leaves on the slope was money. Often we would swing on a set in the back yard. We also played John and Mary. These were the children characters in a reading series used in the public schools, and no doubt, I had picked the names up from John Mark. And if playing John and Mary passed unnoticed, other pastimes did not. When I played with Billy and Louise Latola who also lived down the street and we had a fine time throwing mud at each other, I was punished. Was it because in those days my mother still had a wringer washer and so the laundry was a lot of work, or was it because of the danger of getting mud in my—and our—eyes, or was it because the minister’s little girl was not supposed to be seen as doing anything naughty. Of course, I was not a naughty child. I was simply a willful one.

I had blond hair and reasonably can presume that I was a “little darling.” One day, when some ladies showed up—I can’t remember if they had come to the parsonage or if they were at a church function but it must have been a Sunday because I was all dressed up—I showed them my rosebud petticoat. I was clearly the center of attraction, and not being given to introversion, I enjoyed being the focus of their admiration. As the youngest in the family, I was made much of and perhaps allowed for Emily and John Mark to escape the attention that would have fallen on them had I not been there to enjoy it.

Action Steps

Here is a mini-course which discusses action and narrative drama and the need to remain within the perceived truth:

1. But Is It a Memoir?

2. Four Tips for Moving Your Plot with Action

3. Do You Need Action in a Memoir?

Two requests

1. What are your early childhood memories? Tell us in the comment section.

2. Let me know in the comments below if you think I have succeeded with Martha’s text in placing early memories in a readable framework.

3. Click on at least one the social-media icons below to share this post with your lists. Help spread the word about memoir writing—we can do it one click at a time.

Some people manage to write a lot of memoir text during the same period of time that others hardly produce anything. Often, those who don’t write but who say they try to write have really valid reasons: company to cook for and entertain, a bad cold, “the kids are in drama workshops and I have to taxi them around,” “the computer wasn’t working all week,” cleaning house, buying a new car, etc.

It comes down to this: they really “tried,” but you know how it is, they didn’t get to write a single word.

Others who are producing memoir text, however, are saying, “I want this memoir finished by [insert a specific date here] and so I got up earlier every day to write while I had company.” Or, “When I drove my son to his practice, I brought my laptop with me and I wrote while he was playing.”

Are you noticing something here? There is a world of difference between “trying to write” and “writing!”

Here’s a story you can probably relate to. Once upon a time at a meeting, a woman was asked if she would bring the refreshments for the next meeting. She answered she was “going to try.”

The group leader said to her, “Phyllis, I didn’t ask you if you would ‘try’ to bring refreshments. I asked you if you would bring them or not.”

She got the point and I suppose you got it, too! Are you a person who is trying to write your memoir or are you a person who is writing it? Your family will likely be left without your memoir if what you do is “try to write a memoir.”

Action Steps

1. Commit yourself today to a writing schedule by selecting times and days when you will write—schedule not for when you will “try to write” but for when you will write.

2. Honor appointments with your writing as you would any other appointment. Do you “try” to keep your appointment with the dentist or do you keep it?

3. Do not allow yourself to slip into “trying”—ever. Notice your hesitation, your reversals. What are they telling you not only about your motivation but perhaps about your subject matter and your readiness to deal with it. Sometimes trying to is a message that we are not yet ready.

4. Being successful at memoir writing is a choice you can make. It is a choice that is made day after day and one which is always subject to atrophy.

 

 

 

DL—This is the third excerpt from A Sugary Frosting, the memoir of Martha Blowen, my lifemate and business partner who died in 2008 of metastatic intraductal breast cancer.

The previous posts (first, second) 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 and her grandparents’ stay.

—

As it turned out, my mother’s choice—albeit unconscious—of my grandparents over me proved to be a wrong one.

By coming to Worcester, my father was closer physically to his half-siblings who, if I remember right, lived in Massachusetts and Connecticut. he was not close to his brothers and his one sister on the Yoemans side. Age and education isolated him emotionally from them. They worked in mills and in the trades, and they must have seen that, as a minister, he landed a job that provided more ease and income. That supposition is perhaps why Enos and Emily, my grandparents, had been handed over to him and my mother.

Sometime during the while after I was brought home, unbeknownst to my parents, my grandfather Blowen had called his Yoemans step-sons (my father was the only mutual child of my grandparents) to complain that Arthur and Ladora were not taking care of their mother, Emily. As a result of this call—or calls, not many weeks after my parents brought me home from Worcester General, two of my half-uncles came unannounced to the parsonage to take my grandmother and grandfather away.

My parents were shocked. It felt like a betrayal on my grandfather’s part, and a betrayal on the part of the Yoemans brothers who had not spoken to my father, their half-brother, about what the situation might possibly really be, presuming the worst to be true. They 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 father and my mother had not yet established themselves in the Hadwen Park Congregational Church, and I can only imagine that they felt it to be a compromise of their position within this untested community to have two brothers “have to” show up to take their parents away. Always aware of the minister’s standing and reputation, Arthur and Ladora must have cringed at the thought of a church member, a stranger really, making a value judgment on the care they had administered to these two old people. I’m sure that my father was kind and thoughtful, and even more so can I state that my mother must have given her in-laws as much of a first-class care as her knowledge and ability would have enabled her to do. My mother, nurturing by nature, was a woman who knew how to serve, and she had a strong sense of how to make an environment comfortable and nurturing for others.

Grandma Blowen died six weeks later. My parents went to the funeral, but it was a frosty occasion. Relations with my grandfather were to remain distant, and I saw him only a handful of times in my life before he died in 1961. I was to grow up hardly knowing my Yeomans relatives.

Since my mother was an only child, we Blowen children were left with a very small family indeed and this contributed to making us into a unit that was turned inward on itself. In the years we lived together, we were somehow unable to discern the example of other families, to learn from them how to be a better family. The opposite was held to be true: it was other families that were supposed to learn from us.

Two Requests

1. Click on at least one the social-media icons below to share this post with your lists. Help spread the word about memoir writing—we can do it one click at a time.

2. I would appreciate your comment on this post. What happened in your life like this “rescuing” Enos and Emily?

DL: On July 7, 2015, the Writers Fun Zone ran an interview with me that I want to be sure you got to read.

—

1. Tell us who you are and how you help writers in 100 words or less.

I help writers to write memoir with more focus, joy and skills. Many writers start their project with enthusiasm and then get bogged down in the problems inherent in any long writing project. They become discouraged. They doubt their ability to proceed and ultimately to finish. They second guess their vision and theme. I see my role as the midwife who helps to get this book baby into the world. I do this through my free and paid membership sites, through coaching, editing, ghostwriting, and book production. And, of course, there are all my memoir-writing books, MP3s, e-courses.

2. How did you get to this place in your life? Share your story!

I’ve always been passionate about personal stories. As a child, I was a listener…

To read more…

DL—This is an excerpt from A Sugary Frosting, the 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.

—

Taking her cue from others and their needs, my mother was not a person to take care of herself.

In spite of her pregnancy, she had agreed to have my ailing grandparents, Enos and Emily Simmonds Yeomans Blowen, live in her home. This was not an ideal situation for my mother as my grandmother was senile, bedridden, and incontinent after having had a number of strokes.

Both of my mother’s earlier pregnancies had been difficult. Like me, my sister Emily had been premature while my brother John Mark had been born six weeks late.

In spite of this history, my mother had acquiesced to have Grandpa and Grandma Blowen make the move with her family. They were living in the Worcester house in a second floor room. While my grandfather was still ambulatory and could leave the room, my grandmother was not able to go about on her own. She depended on my mother to bring meals and take care of any personal needs. My grandfather could not do these things for his wife as he was not hearty enough to take charge.

My grandparents were demanding, critical people, and my grandmother was apparently under doctor’s orders to follow a certain diet. My grandfather, as my mother told the story later, didn’t understand the doctor’s care instructions and felt that my parents weren’t feeding Grandma enough nor providing her with adequate care.

To the contrary, my mother who had a compliant nature spent many days while she was carrying me—days when she ought to have been resting and conserving her strength for the baby she was gestating—running up and down stairs to take meals on trays or to lug down soiled bed sheets to be laundered and dried before the next demand for them arose.

It was not my mother’s habit to discuss and negotiate. It would have been so unlike her to call a halt to this overload of work that being geriatric-care provider imposed on her. Instead, she submitted. Another person might have insisted: “I am nurturing a new body and have to take care of myself to assure this baby is getting all s/he needs.” Instead, since she was always willing to meet the needs of others—almost impelled by her nature to subsume her needs to those of others, she presumed that the baby within her would make the same choice. She expected each of her children to sacrifice themselves for others as she did.

In addition to both the move and to the grandparents complaining upstairs, there was what must have been the stress of my father’s new job. It brought with it all the attendant tensions of adjusting to a new work environment with its demands and relationships. My father’s income was what kept the family solvent. In the weeks before my birth, his job entailed meeting new people who considered themselves his bosses and were using this opportunity to shape him into the minister each wanted. In those initial weeks, the sermons he preached would be used to judge him.

It was in this environment of strain and stress that my mother went into labor six weeks early.

adams

The Irreplaceable Memoir

By on September 23, 2015

People are driven to express themselves. Each of us has a story and an urge to tell it. No other style is as effective as the irreplaceable memoir.

truth in memoir

Can Life Get Better in the Parsonage?

By on September 7, 2015

Life in Worcester for my family was a 1950’s middle-class existence. It is what I believe my father was striving for when he worked those years in Enfield, CT, after high school and before Bates, those years at Bates working at the telephone switchboard at Central Maine General Hospital, serving as kitchen and dining room […]

Franco-American wedding

71 years ago today…

By on September 4, 2015

Today would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary. They are both gone now—my mother having passed on May 5th of 2015. I included a eulogy in a previous blog post. Theirs was a 1940s Franco-American wedding. For this post, I am providing you with a link to the blog archives where I have posted many […]

Martha and Gordie, 1956?

Is a Life Ever Too Ordinary for a Memoir?

By on August 22, 2015

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 […]

The Memoir Network

Stop Trying to Write Your Memoir

By on August 17, 2015

Are you a person who is trying to write your memoir or are you a person who is writing it? Your family will likely be left without your memoir if what you do is “try to write a memoir.” This post is full of ideas for going from trying to write to writing.

BlowenswithBaby

My Uncles Rescue My Grandparents

By on August 15, 2015

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.

publish a book

My Interview at Writer Fun Zone

By on August 11, 2015

Tell us who you are and how you help authors. I help writers to write memoir with more focus, joy and skills. Many writers start their project with enthusiasm and then get bogged down in the problems inherent in any long writing project. They become discouraged. They doubt their ability to proceed and ultimately to […]

Cancer diary entries

My Mother Chooses Between Me and My Grandparents

By on August 10, 2015

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.