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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.

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

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—or as you sat in the morning sipping your coffee but also because she told them to others in your presence. Often, details are added in this retelling or an emphasis changes for the benefit of the new auditor—and unexpectedly you understand a new angle to the story.

Martha wrote a number of her stories—always in segments. She intended to write a memoir but her life was cut short by breast cancer before she could realize this goal.

Wanting to finish her memoir, I inserted her compositions, chronologically one after the other, into a manuscript and soon realized that there were explanatory details missing—details that I knew not only to be true but necessary to create a memoir. Soon enough, I found myself contributing her words that lived within me into the narrative. These words soon added up not only to details but to whole stories I recalled. Soon, more of the stories originated with me than from her composition.

Can you tell where one author lets off and the other begins?

—

My entrance into this world could have been better executed.

I came weeks premature—weighing in at 4 lbs., 9 oz.—on May 30, 1952, at 12:07 AM. Instead of being cradled in my mother’s arms, nursing, sleeping in her warmth, as all baby mammals instinctively do, I spent my first nine days in an incubator. I must have been under harsh lights and I must have longed for my mother to touch me, to take me in her arms and to rock me—“hush little baby don’t you cry”—when I whimpered.

I must have wondered what this world I had come into could possibly promise me if this was how I was being welcomed.

With two children waiting for her, Emily had turned 9 in April and John Mark would turn 5 in July—my mother went home some time in those nine days without me. With my own children, I often felt emotional and psychic links to them. They were in the next room perhaps, and I could feel them sleeping. Did my mother feel that link to the baby girl she had left behind at Worcester General Hospital? I wonder because my mother was not an intuitive person. People say women are intuitive, but my mother was not. Her “take” on things was often premised by what she believed others wanted her “take” to be. That is, my mother was insecure and what others thought and felt were somehow more important to her than how she herself thought or felt. She was not a vain or ambitious person so this concern was not predicated on her sustaining an image. It was rather a need to be approved of as if her identity could not be secure without others approving of it. And so, who she was seemed to shift.

I was born in Worcester only because my family had only recently moved there. We had no relatives or friends waiting for us. What we had was a church—the Hadwen Park Congregational Church had called my father to be their pastor. We had been in the parsonage which was adjacent to the church only a short time when my mother went into labor prematurely. I was not supposed to be born until late June or early July.

My father was the first in his family to go to college and he had financed his education entirely on his own—having worked for five years after high school first in a rug mill and later in a shoe store to save the money to go to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Bates College had been founded as a Baptist school and was known in the 1930s for producing ministers, school teachers, and social workers. Once at Bates, he had worked at a job or two to finance his education, and because of the demands on his time that part time jobs required, he had had to commit five years to completing his course load.

He and my mother had met at Bates in Greek class in the first weeks of their first year. My mother was also the first in her family to go to college, and after her graduation with a BA in 1940, she had worked in Lewiston, Maine, as a social worker until my father graduated in 1941. He had then gone on to the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and it was decided that my mother would live with her parents in Portsmouth, NH. It waschurch_round-2 at the end of his first year, on June 1, 1942, that he and my mother married at the Middle Street Baptist Church on Haymarket Square in Portsmouth.

My mother would have wanted to be a minister, and in later years, often preached and conducted services. My father had at least one female seminary classmate (I knew her in later years) so there was some modeling available for my mother to pursue her dream. However, the wife of the Reverend Curtis at the Middle Street Baptist Church inculcated in my mother that being a minister’s wife was a higher goal for a woman than being a minister herself. True to her nature, my mother complied to Mrs. Curtis’s ambition for her.

In 1952, the year I was born, my father had been in the ministry seven years. I believe he really enjoyed his calling. As did teaching and social work for other working-class young people, the ministry provided my father an access to a professional life.

index~~element65After having served small, basically working class churches in Norway and Millinocket, Maine, coming to the Hadwen Park Congregational Church, must have seemed a step up—a promotion of sorts. The congregation would have been more mixed socially and educationally than that of his previous churches.

In this seemingly placid world, not everything was well.

(to be continued)

Yesterday would have been my mother’s 94th birthday. The following post was published on Matilda Butler’s fine blog.

My mother died on May 5, 2015.

—

Let me celebrate my mother’s life by writing about her memoir We Were Not Spoiled.

My mother has found its audience

Between 2009 and 2013, I interviewed my mother for her memoir for which I was to serve as ghostwriter. I have written about the process elsewhere, so here I would like to talk about how the writing of this book was an integrating experience for me.

To read more, click here.

lucille 1945

A mini-course on bringing discipline to your memoir writing

A big part of success is showing up and doing the work. The same is true in writing a memoir. To succeed you have to do some writing; you have to demonstrate some discipline in your memoir writing, some nose to the grindstone.

Now the writing process is not straightforward or linear and there are many unexpected twists and turns to the process. In fact, in the link below to blog posts on discipline in writing, you will even find a post of taking time out—which doesn’t seem very much like discipline. Anyway…

Click on the link below to an archive page to access your veritable mini-course on bringing discipline to your memoir writing.

to access the archival page on discipline…

Following the recent posting of part one of  What You Can Do Before You Send a Manuscript to An Editor, I am reprinting a post that contains more useful information on how you can edit your own work before sending it to a professional editor. Self-editing can focus your narrative and save on editing fees.

I hope you find it useful and will leave your own suggestions in the comments section.

to read more…

Why would I go away to a writer’s retreat to write when I can write at home, at my very own desk, with my cat and my favorite coffee mug?

1. To be free of distractions

A. I won’t be tempted to put up a load of laundry

B. Are we out of milk?

C. Yes, I am happy with my (long distance service, cable service, internet service, utilities supplier), click.

D. No, I am not available to (feed your cat, take your dog for a walk, pick up your dry cleaning). I AM WRITING!

2. To focus completely on your writing and its emotional and technical demands

Whether it’s a combination of instruction and time to write, or just a few days of solitude to think about your writing project, a writer’s retreat allows you to have one focus: writing.

Before I published anything, my first feelings of being a writer came from attending writer’s retreats, workshops and conferences.

If you choose a retreat with instructors you admire as writers, you will learn techniques to hone your craft. A writing retreat offers a significant opportunity to master technical issues of writing: besides grammar and sentence composition, there are elements such as point of view, character development, etc. You will leave more sure of your “tools.”

3. To be stimulated by change

A change of scenery has advantages, too, for expanding your perspective and deepening our insights. Often, what we need is the opportunity to let an idea or feeling mature. Maturing one new idea, method, or viewpoint can be worth the trip.

4. To work in a community of writers

How others deal with the issues facing memoir writers can be helpful to you as a writer?

At one point or another, all writers of memoir come upon similar issues that they need to grapple with. Some of those issues may be:

  • What will my family will think?
  • How do I structure my memoir?
  • Where do I begin?
  • What time period of my life should I focus on?
  • What about a theme?

There is nothing like the inspiration of a supportive writing community. Discussing your theme with thoughtful and engaged writers can help clarify your approach or help you develop it further. Experimenting with styles and writing scenes in a workshop situation where feedback is easily available can open your eyes to the strengths and weaknesses in your writing.

No one can tell you how to write your memoir or novel, but people who have done it successfully can point the way to finding your own path. They can show you techniques for narrowing your focus, ideas for structuring your story and tools to find your theme. Just one new perspective can send a writer on the way to unraveling the story s/he was meant to tell.

5. To develop friendships with writers that go beyond the workshop

Says Kaylie Jones, author of the acclaimed memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (Harper Collins, 2009), “Life-long friends are made at weekend retreats. The experience of sharing your passion for the written word, along with the beginnings of this long and arduous journey of self-exploration, are what make such retreats so special in forming friendships.”

Who should think about going to a writing retreat?

Writers at all stages of their writing life and in their projects can benefit from attending a retreat. Even in the beginning, when you may just be considering whether to devote the time needed to write your memoir, it can help to have guidance through the process.

Going to a writing retreat, of course, may not address all of your questions or needs, but finding out how other writers have successfully dealt with various issues, through example and discussion, can be invaluable. It can mean the difference between continuing on your memoir journey, or being stopped by a common stumbling block.

On this blog, I have frequently offered excerpts of my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. It has  been such a satisfaction for me to have written her story and to have been able to hand her a copy. One day, after I had presented her with the hard copy of We Were Not Spoiled, she said to me as she held the book, “You spoil me!”

My mother passed on May 5, 2015, of congestive heart failure. She had said she was not afraid of dying, but she didn’t want to die alone. She did not die alone. Her six kids were with her along with four other members of the family. It was a quiet passing; she slipped away, her breath less and less strong until there was no more breath. It was 9:57 PM.

Below, I am reprinting the eulogy I composed and read at her funeral Mass. (There were also three other eulogies—we were not going to let her go without being sure everyone knew what a terrific woman had just left us.)

At the end of this post, I have a gift for you in memory of my mother.

—

My mother Lucille lived a long life. She was born in 1921 towards the beginning of the 20th century and she died almost a century later.

During her 93—almost 94—years, much changed. There is the obvious: she was born when radio was still in its infancy, the telephone was expensive and cumbersome to use. Automobiles were clunky.

Television was introduced and perfected. Computers came into use. Following the computer came all the rest that she never used.

These technological changes are obvious but at some level they were not the biggest changes that occurred in her lifetime. The big changes had to do with how people lived their lives with one another, how they related to one another.

In her adolescence, like all the young people she knew, she worked—mostly in retailing—and turned her paychecks over to her parents. My mother kept a little The Memoir Networksomething every week as an allowance. If she required more, she would have to go to her mother and ask for more money to cover her need. This was money that she had earned but she did not question it was her obligation to turn her paycheck over to her parents.

In her lifetime, she saw the affluence of the general population rise. She saw the end of the Lewiston [Maine] mill economy that had dominated her younger life. She saw how people—her children and nephews and nieces—were accessing a higher level of education than she had ever thought accessible to them. She saw changes happen that she could not have imagined when she was young.

Of course, all of these changes, and many more, occurred over a long period of time and, like the lobster dropped into cold water, she experienced the changes gradually, adapting—or not adapting as the case may be—to the demands of each step.

My mother was a stoic. “You do what you have to do!” That seemed to be her motto. My mother was not a person given to introspection, to reflection. Instead, she adapted pragmatically to demands of the present.

As a wartime bride, she saw her husband leave for duty in the Pacific. She had her first child when he was thousands of miles away—all the while living with her in-laws. It was Albert Lucille wedding on stepsnot until Bill was six months old that she would be able to be a family with her son and husband—and even then they would continue to live with her Ledoux in-laws. Living with parents was an accepted way in the 1940s for young couples to start out. The concept of “privacy” did not seem to have much currency.

In the years that followed came five other children and a variety of homes and work. There was the variety store next to her in-laws. There was work in the textile mills until, not feeling well one day, she came home unexpectedly and found my brother and myself locked out of the house and discovered Claire still in her crib with dirty diapers. She had also found a very surprised babysitter and her boyfriend hanging out in the living room. When my mother could not find another babysitter, she followed what was her deepest commitment and that was to quit work and stay home with her children.

In the 50s, there was the poultry farm in Lisbon Falls. Early one morning in 1954, all of their poultry was shipped out for slaughter and processing. Unfortunately, it was the same morning President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack. The markets crashed. The price of meat dropped dramatically in those few hours after the chickens had been slaughtered. The meat needed to be “moved on” to distributors at a reduced price. What a difference a day sooner—or a day later—would have made in my mother’s life! It was a very bitter time for my young mother. She went to bed that night knowing she and my father were deeply in debt.

Then one day a letter came with the actual sales figures—the “damage” as we say today. lucille 1945She cried bitterly that day as she read the statement. Claire, too young to be in school, was with our mother when the mail came in and she kept asking, “What’s the matter, mama?” as she tried to console our mother who was so uncharacteristically out of control.

Many years later, when I was an adult, she showed me the letter that Uncle Lucien who was a priest and the educated one in our family had written to her at the urging, I believe, of our grandmother Ledoux who lived upstairs.

In the letter, Uncle Lucien reminded her that, in addition to the money that she and our father had lost, she could lose her children to the depression she was slipping into.

In showing me that letter, my mother said, “I knew I had to leave that behind me. I had to focus on what was really important.” But it took many years before the financial consequences of Eisenhower’s heart attack came to an end in her life.

My mother responded to every stage of her life with a pragmatic approach. When she became a widow at 59, she reinvented her life—and it was a good life she created for herself. There were her many friends—in the widows and widowers group, in the Daughters of Isabella—there were her Lucille days when she would indulge in whatever fancied her, there was renovating her home to better suit herself as a single woman.

Years later, in her late 80s, when it came time to stop driving, she told us that she would make that decision on her own. My siblings and I understood—admittedly with some nervousness—that my mother would not drive beyond her ability to be safe—for herself and for others. One day, she let us know that she would not drive anymore. She asked our brother-in-law John to sell her car. This process was so much Lucille.

When it was time also for her to move out of her apartment, she accepted that as what the present demanded of her. While she was at D’Youville Assisted Living Pavillion, there was no deep struggle or longing for another life in another place.

For my mother’s example of how she grew old, how she accepted the inevitable, we can all be grateful. She has shown us an effective model of how to live our lives.

And now our lives without her have begun. Let these lives be good lives.

As she would say, life is for the living.

—

TheMemoirNetwork.com

The memoir of my mother, Lucille Verreault Ledoux, We Were Not Spoiled is available in the bookstore. I hope you enjoy meeting this dear woman who was my mother.

 

“What do you think of my website?”

It’s one of the questions I hear the most from authors, whether they write memoirs or mysteries.

I wish that my answer each and every time was, “It’s fantastic!”… but it isn’t. And more often than not, the problem is with the site’s blog. Oh, how I wish I had a wand to transfer every writer’s blog into a better author blog.

But let’s pause to distinguish between “blog” and “website,” because many people use them interchangeably.

When I say “blog,” I’m referring to a collection of online articles you add to your site on a regular basis in a section identified as your blog. Your website houses the blog as well as other pages – about, press room, books, contact, and so on. Your website is the home for your blog, and the blog is the tool you use to continually add new content to the site.

With that as the backdrop, here are three easy things you can do to improve the appearance, content, and visibility of your blog so it works hard to get – and keep – visitors to your website.

1. Break up the text with subheads and bullets.

Paragraph after paragraph of nothing but text is deadly for a blog because of the way we read online.

When you think of web writing, think of the “Idiot’s Guide” book series layout, with lots of subheads, call-outs, and boxed text. We need you to help our eyes by “chunking up” the text with subheads and, when appropriate, bullets or numbers.

When offering how-to steps, number them. Look for ways to use bullet points to break up dense text.

2. Always use at least one image in every post.

Quite simply, blog posts with images draw in more readers than blog posts without images. They add visual interest, provide the white space needed to give our eyes a rest, and break up the text. Make sure your images are relevant to the content, though. If there’s no connection, the image just confuses readers.

Popular image options include:

  • Photos
  • Screenshots (these help when you’re providing instructional content; I grab them with the free Jing software from TechSmith)
  • Logos
  • Product images

If your blog post is long and you can’t add visual variety with bullet points, add multiple images to break up the text so it’s less visually daunting. One study recommends one image for every 350 words of text.

Here’s how I did it in a recent epic post, “What should I send to my author e-mail list?”

3. Add social sharing icons visitors can use to share what they like.

Most of my social network updates are links to great content I’ve found on blogs. If it’s easy to share, I’ll share it. If it takes too much work, I won’t.

I recently came across a killer post that I wanted to share with several author groups on LinkedIn. Without essential sharing icons to help me do that quickly and easily, I had to copy the URL, use the LinkedIn search box to find each group one at a time, and paste the URL with related text into a “start a discussion” form in every group.

Oh wait … no I didn’t. I didn’t have time for all that.

Everybody loses out when you don’t make it easy for people to share your blog posts.

My blog uses a floating share bar on the far left. It stays with you as you scroll so that no matter where you are on an article, you can share a link to it with a variety of social networks. It’s generated by a WordPress plug-in called Social Widget, but Digg Digg and AddThis are other options.

A few resources

Here are a few resources that might help you continually improve your blog’s appearance and content. I refer to them often.

  • Problogger: Check out the helpful site content, subscribe to the newsletter, and bookmark the blog. You’ll get great information from a blogging Ninja.
  • Copyblogger: Subscribe to the blog; read up on past articles. While the blog is often about how to write well, there’s lots of information here that can help you improve the reader experience.

You’ve got great material on your blog. Now write a better author blog. Make sure you’re presenting it in a way that invites people to stay, read, and share.

A guest post

Three Stages of Writing a Memoir: Own Your Truth; Find Your Voice; Tell Your Story

In December 2011, I decided to take a trip to my home country, Azerbaijan. I had a property to sell and family to visit there. More importantly, I was on a mission to find my father’s grave. My parents were divorced when I was a mere two-week-old baby. I had never met him. Despite trying to heal this open wound for years, nothing helped. Perhaps finding his grave could bring some closure.

All I knew about my dad’s side of the family was that I had an auntie called Tahira who lived near the city centre of my hometown Ganja. On an impulse, I went knocking at people’s gates. Eventually, I found the right door. I was in for a surprise. Not only did my auntie receive me with open arms, I turned up at her 58th birthday celebration. Her four children, grandchildren, brothers and a legion of other relatives showered me with so much love, I returned to England transformed and healed. For days, I walked in the cloud of memories, and I soon decided I had to write it all up while it was still fresh in my memory. Once I started writing, there was no stopping me.

I’ve recently completed a draft manuscript about my experience of growing up in Azerbaijan. I am currently working on my next book.

For me, there are three distinct stages of writing a memoir, though not linear, stages in writing a memoir.

The Memoir Network

Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG

1. Owning my truth

Owning my truth  has been the most healing stage in writing my memoir. To take full ownership of my life without making excuses for myself or others, or getting defensive, was truly liberating. To accept what had gone on for what it was set me free from carrying the burden of the past. By placing my memories on paper, I was able to view the events of my childhood more objectively and compassionately. It didn’t undo traumatic events, but I could now appreciate the adults’ side of the story too.

2. Finding my voice

It took me a while to learn to distinguish my authentic soul voice from the one which comes from my head or ego. They both sound like me but there is a big difference. My ego voice worries terribly about what readers might think, what details they may like or dislike, how my family may react, etc. My authentic voice could not care less. I know when that voice is in action. It starts in my belly and suddenly the material comes in one big whoosh and all I need to do is to type fast enough to keep up with it. I’ve noticed the difference in the level of engagement of my blog readers with my soul voice. The life stories I share on my blog are timely, relevant, and touch people more deeply.

3. Telling my story

Writing down memories is an important part of a memoir writing process. And there comes a point where crafting them into a story becomes essential. For a while, I struggled with the structure of my memoir, because it oscillated between a collection of short stories and a coherent book. It’s only when I became clear about the theme of my memoir, I was able to shape it into a story.

Writing a memoir has been a most empowering process in my life. The events of my childhood are now three-dimensional. I can empathise with my family members and see them more clearly for who they are. I have been able to access my authentic voice not only in writing, but also in my day-to-day life. Last, but not, least, I have been able to connect with my life purpose, which is to tell my story and hopefully to inspire change and give voice to women who may never be heard otherwise.

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.

Cancer diary entries

Coming Into This World

By on July 23, 2015

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 […]

100-0008_IMG

Bringing Discipline to Your Memoir Writing

By on July 9, 2015

A big part of success is showing up and doing the work. The same is true in writing a memoir. To succeed you have to do some writing; you have to demonstrate some discipline, some nose to the grindstone. Now the writing process is not straightforward or linear and there are many unexpected twists and […]

The Memoir Network

Why Go to a Writer’s Retreat?

By on June 10, 2015

Why would I go away to a writer’s retreat to write when I can write at home, at my very own desk, with my cat and my favorite coffee mug? Writers at all stages of their writing life and in their projects can benefit from attending a retreat. Even in the beginning, when you may […]

My mother's book has found its audience.

My Mother Passes

By on May 28, 2015

On this blog, I have frequently offered excerpts of my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. It has been such a satisfaction for me to have written her story and to have been able to hand her a copy. One day, after I had presented her with the hard copy of We Were Not Spoiled, […]

The Memoir Network

3 Tips for a Better Author Blog

By on April 29, 2015

“What do you think of my website?” It’s one of the questions I hear the most from authors, whether they write memoirs or mysteries. I wish that my answer each and every time was, “It’s fantastic!”… but it isn’t. And more often than not, the problem is with the site’s blog. Oh, how I wish […]

The Memoir Network

3 Stages of Writing a Memoir

By on April 22, 2015

A guest post Three Stages of Writing a Memoir: Own Your Truth; Find Your Voice; Tell Your Story In December 2011, I decided to take a trip to my home country, Azerbaijan. I had a property to sell and family to visit there. More importantly, I was on a mission to find my father’s grave. […]