When I was a young girl, a small glass ball threaded by a thin plastic rope through a pinhole hung over the lock of my double hung window in my bedroom. When the brazen sun enveloped the plant vase and took hold of the gnarly roots, I wouldn’t just see budding foliage, but tiny rainbows upon the refraction of light. [...]
This post originally appeared on SheWrites.com. I'm sharing with fellow writers should you and your writing be in a similar situation when embarking on promotional opportunities. I few weeks ago I contacted an editor at Pioneer Press (local publication and sub of Chicago Tribune) to tell him I was a writer and I had something to share with my community [...]
I doubted the day would come. I had been working on my memoir for over 10 years, admittedly at a more stop than go pace, chronicling the timeline of my youth, coming of age to adult years. I had recorded memories, nestled them in my mind as if contributing to my DNA, creating a map to become the person I [...]
Last fall I won a writing contest for The Magic of Memoir edited by Linda Joy Myer and Brooke Warner of She Writes Press. This was a first time I entered a writing contest and a first win for anything that had to do with my writing. A win at anything says it all, a handshake in welcome, validation that [...]
I usually don’t answer calls for writing submissions. That’s not to say I don’t read the calls but knowing that my writing is up against the caliber of professional writers is enough for me to retreat and surrender. My inner critic moves me along to the next call for submission when she reminds me my ho-hum writing may not being [...]
I found the lead to this story buried in the last paragraph. But reading through Allison Williams' thought process to get her to that point was a shared experience by most writers.
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 [...]
My essay is for all you memoir writers who speak to the conversation in your head as I have done when writing my memoir.
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 [...]
What is it about Mary Karr’s writing? Her prolific self (award-winning poet, best-selling memoirist) and compelling character studies appear to infiltrate the memoir reaches of the genre. She’s on a professional writing level, elevated and honed, where I could and never would reach in my writing. Mary’s world would never rendezvous with mine. My memoir is the antithesis of her [...]