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Interview with Dana Tramba / Making Peace With The Pieces of My Life

By Denis Ledoux on November 9, 2023

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 […]

Interview with Denis Ledoux French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood

By Denis Ledoux on October 12, 2023

DL: The following interview I conducted with myself is available to anyone wishing to reproduce it in a blog, on a website on in print media. We ask only that you let us know you are using the piece.

Q. Can you tell our readers what French Boy is about and why you were impelled to write your book? What was driving you to spend the time, energy, and money to get this book out into the world?

A. I wrote impelled by a strong desire to record the life of my community—the Francophone Canadian-American community of New England. This is a book about life in Franco-America in the 1950s. It uses my life as an organizing principle. A good memoir is not only about the individual who is its presenting subject but it is about something bigger, about some whole that the memoir subject is part of. I want to celebrate our experience. I do not want the world to forget we were here.

Q. Can you tell us how long it took from the time you conceived the book to the time you had it published? How many years did you spend in active writing? Were there long breaks in between active writing periods? If so, what happened to get you writing again?

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You Need Formal Research

By Denis Ledoux on June 6, 2019

Interviewing family members and friends is clearly a form of research, but interviews alone are usually not enough to give your stories the depth they require. For that, you need formal research.

Best Interview Practices for Writing a Memoir

By Denis Ledoux on May 23, 2019

Can you assume you can depend on your memory when you write your lifestories? The problem with this assumption is that memory isn’t always as reliable as you may want it to be! What are the best interview practices to find out if your memory is spot on?