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Tag Archives | writing with pain

Telling the Children About Cancer

Draining the Cancer from the Pleura

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 […]

Writers Learning About the Memory List at a "Turning Memories Into Memoirs" Workshop

Memoir Trash Talk

Three Ways Memoir Writer’s Use Trash Talk Most of us use a certain amount of trash talk when we think about our memoir writing projects or talk about them. We are very clever about our evasive tactics however and disguise the trash as thoughtfulness. Here are a few examples of trash talk. 1. I need […]

Cancer diary entries

La Ultima Vez—The last time

Besame, besame mucho / Como si fuera esta noche la última vez… Kiss me, kiss me a lot / As if tonight were the last time… Cesaria Evora’s voice, strong and oh! so beautiful, comes in from the livingroom as I pour myself coffee in the kitchen. It is early morning, and I am thinking […]

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The Kirkus Review on Peggy Kennedy’s Book

The Kirkus review on Approaching Neverland by Peggy Kennedy: A captivating memoir of love, loss, mental illness and redemption. Kennedy walked into her first day of first grade alone, with unkempt hair that both her parents had neglected to brush. So begins her saga of having a mother whose mental illness (eventually diagnosed as bipolar […]