DATELINE—April 22, 2020. Louisville, Kentucky In the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, during the time between breakfast and lunch ______________________________________________________________________________________ Sheltering-in-place seems like an opportunity for a fabulous writing retreat. Alas, I find myself distracted, unable to adhere to my writing mantra, “Don’t wait to be inspired. Write to be inspired.” Time seems suspended. Unnatural. … Continue reading Distracted
Come together, virtually. Write now! Greetings from my home office—a high swivel stool at my kitchen breakfast bar. I love the way the light slants through this room and I can hear the birds singing, as if all is right with the world. Here I can easily distract myself when my writing inspiration wanes and I forget to listen to my own advice—"Don't wait … Continue reading Writing in the Time of Corona
I was five years old, my brother eleven, when my father excused us from the great American dining table to move to Wiesbaden, Germany, a country the Allies had defeated in WWII, its land mass the spoils of war, divided into east and west, rebuilding but endangered still. Our ship would depart the day after … Continue reading Migration—A memoir of moments
I first read about the hermit crab in Barbara Kingsolver's essay collection, High Tide in Tucson. In this true story about a stowaway crustacean, Kingsolver creates a lively lyrical first person narrative, in which the crab becomes a metaphor for how creatures habituate to their environments. Indeed, the hermit crab makes good metaphor. When you feel cramped, find a new shell to call … Continue reading Consider the Lowly Hermit Crab
A man at a party praised my husband for his determination to read all three volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — a literary tome, which “[in]several thousand pages, retraces the course of [the Frenchman's] adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters.” “Remembrance of Things … Continue reading Of Madeleines, Monuments and Memoir
Fred Rogers and his neighborhood exposed my secret skeptic. Perhaps it is the Virgo in me, or a tendency learned in my family of origin. But I am a doubting Tomasina. Will trust. Must verify. No one can be that nice, I thought, while watching Liz watch Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. My preschool daughter kept her appointment each weekday … Continue reading It’s a Beautiful Day for a Neighbor
In his free-wheeling essay, “The Meek Shall Inherit the Memoir,” writer Harrison Scott Key describes his reluctance to write life stories, afraid he might be considered a narcissist or a bore— “I mean, who did I think I was? Who would want to read about me? . . . How do I map the expressionist strangeness of my inner life … Continue reading Creating yourself as a Character
Ordinary people write what is commonly referred to as the “nobody memoir.” We lack the plot line of celebrity. No rags turned to riches. No lonely child turned superstar. We are still working on, the arcs of our plots. Neither famous nor infamous, the typical “nobody memoirist” describes the most intense incidents of a lifetime. … Continue reading The Problem of Happiness
“She’s going to be a great adult.” This nugget of wisdom, offered by my daughter’s 4th grade teacher during a school conference, was a comfort. Few teachers had recognized the diamond within my daughter’s core. Liz was not sweetly compliant, as most girls seem to be. She “questioned authority” before it became a bumper sticker. … Continue reading Well-behaved Bunnies Rarely Make Literature
Lately, I have been thinking about the memoir my father never wrote. I see him in his beige leather recliner, legal pad in lap, poised to scribe a remarkable life: from Depression era chicken farm to college, to a tuberculosis sanitarium, and then back to college— emaciated and still getting pneumothorax treatments. He was one … Continue reading Start with the Squirrels
