taking a walk with nostalgia
If you’ve read my memoir, Under The Birch Tree, you’ll learn that as a young girl, I was a walker, circumnavigating the yards that surrounded my home as if to plot memories with every footprint. And to this day, I walk, traversing the woods along curvy earth trails marked by bumps and dips, or meander through the neighborhood, pivoting on smooth asphalt through square blocks. Each travel is different. And it’s not necessarily because of seeing something new—a felled house, one for sale, music wafting through open windows. But how [...]
Memoir-writing beyond its definition
Last month I wrote about how the definition of memoir, characterized by a single incident during a part of one’s life (not an entire life), can hold writers back from writing their memoir. As a writer, maybe you can’t see one outstanding incident to create memoir; there are many experiences that happened to you. And maybe you can’t see a theme highlighted in your writing. Multiple experiences or even a chronology of events can also be memoir. “I was once eager to find complicated significance in what I now see [...]
memoir – don’t let its definition hold you back from writing one
Are you a writer who is working on a memoir and sadly believes it’s not one because you feel it doesn’t meet the definition? “Memoir is supposed to be about one specific incident during one part of my life, and I’ve got a few of them over a couple of decades,” you say. Though you may not be able to pinpoint a single incident that happened during a brief time in your life, you believe you have a story to tell, and that you should be able to share it. [...]
of first pages and Hemingway
Prior to my memoir going to press, my hybrid publisher forwarded me “first pages.” As a first-time author, I was unaware of such a thing, a PDF file of how my finished book would look. First pages was essentially a last call, an opportunity to use a phone-a-friend lifeline to correct errors missed in copyediting or proofreading, and to check that formatting, visual elements, and breaks were correct before publication. I also saw first pages as an opportunity to tighten my writing. And that meant unintentional changes to meanings of [...]
a swimming lesson
When I was seven or maybe eight, summer vacation was freedom. I would be free of classes, sitting, listening to a teacher, reading from a book, studying a blackboard. I would be free from test-taking anxiety and fear of maybe failing them. Having nothing required of me that would elicit emotional responses was my definition of a summer vacation. Until I had to take swimming lessons. “C’mon we’re going to the country club to start your lessons,” my mother said waving her arm to hurry my pace. Until then, I [...]
photo not always required
I slide open the screen door and step into the cool of an early morning. Soon, the sun warms my back as the earth spins her body. With deliberate steps and a steady pace, I would leave the silence of the asphalt to meet shifting crushed gravel, my path bisecting a dense green landscape illuminated by foggy sunbeams piercing slivers of open space. The images of the woods are photographable, but I am reminded I have no means to record them through a lens. I think of writer David King's [...]
Can’t write? Use your stream of consciousness to get you started
Though it may sound counterintuitive, writers have been distracted during this pandemic. But how can we be now that we're no longer engaged in a multi-tasked life previously understood as “normal?” Self-isolation should give us nothing but time to write but we can't seem to get the job done. The absence of what filled my time, a void, became the distraction. Though I had plenty of writing to do, I couldn’t get to those works-in-progress or beyond the first draft of my novel. Thinking about my reading and writing to-do’s [...]
too much time?
I was writing my follow up to “now moments,” a previous post, when I found the writing meandering. The twists and turns reminded me of the “crooked street”, Lombard Street in San Francisco, where I lived in my thirties. I didn’t know why I was experiencing a lack of focus. Now that I have loads of time with no demands of it, why can’t I produce a simple blog post and more pages of my novel-in-progress? One would think writers now would have oodles of time to write, one of [...]