the Whirlwind Review posts “My Pink Book”
So delighted to have The Whirlwind Review feature my essay "My Pink Book." Sharing my words with you through this link: http://whirlwindreview.com/2016/09/19/nancy-chadwick-my-pink-book/#comment-489
i just want to write
I recently completed an online survey in answer to a request by one of those writer’s magazines. They wanted to know what I wanted to read in their magazine. It took only minutes to click my answers to their straightforward questions. But when I finished, I screamed, “I just want to write.” The purpose of the survey was to gain information for their readership: where I’ve been published, what areas of the writing world I visit, my social media inventory, my genre, if I have an MFA, do I attend [...]
the center of town
“The Deerfield Commons, it used to be over there, that entire block, with Waukegan and Deerfield roads fencing it in,” I muttered with a heavy sigh looking west as I drove north on Waukegan Road. I say it when I drive into Deerfield, the town where I grew up as I relive the memories of years passed. “This was the center of town,” I said, willing the hub back where it belonged.The center of town and I belonged with each other. On the corner across from Deerfield State bank I [...]
the magic of memoir
My essay is for all you memoir writers who speak to the conversation in your head as I have done when writing my memoir.
a writer’s lament
I seized an essay from my slush pile. I remember when I wrote the following; its history born from emotion. I was approaching the age of 40, not working full time and I was only a couple of drafts into my memoir when a critique of my manuscript told me fancy terms such as through-threads and theme, reflections and takeaways escaped my manuscript. I understood intellectually what I needed to do to turn it around, to make it the memoir I knew it could be, but I didn’t know how [...]
writing details
I implore the power of detail in my memoir writing. However, writing the details can be a distraction and a digression from the purpose of my words. Natalie Goldberg’s, Writing Down the Bones says, “We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips . . . details are then free to continue.” I continue with my detail journey, observing that which I ordinarily would disregard – my summer geraniums bursting in red knobs, the glowing [...]
the bathroom
The middle of the upstairs hall in the house on Carlisle Avenue was the kids’ bathroom where a bathtub paralleled one wall and a toilet filled the remaining small boxlike space. A beige Formica counter ran the length of the entire opposite wall with muddy blue double sinks planted in the long flat surface. And then there was the small window at the end of the bathroom with a plastic marble coating diffusing an outsider’s view – and an insider’s. The window remained open to a varying degrees to allow [...]
home
Home. A physical place or a state of being. It can even have emotions. Linear or ever-changing, it may travel like a river with ebbs and flows. Or maybe it is elusive. My memoir read like an autobiography. I was clear as I spewed vivid memories and recalled markers attained as my decades rolled on by. But I wasn’t clear about its central theme. After I recited my experiences, triumphs and adversities I had hoped that my theme would poke through the timeline like a dandelion in springtime and the [...]