100 Memoirs

It had to happen. Since the Google Super Bowl Ad was creative, popular, and infinitely repeatable, we had to start seeing parodies of it. But so soon?
Three days after the Super Bowl, five parodies, from light to dark in tone, have reached Mashable! You can watch them here! Google must be bursting with pride, since every [...]

For me, this ad was the best part of the Super Bowl! What did you think?

Want to hear people from all over the country call in their life stories in six words? It’s a pretty good way to spend 17 minutes! Just click here.

Philippe Petit has blown me away. And so has this film about his life, focused on the day in August,1974, when he walked on a cable stretched between the South Tower and North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I loved the music, graphics, and juxtapositions in this film. Petit is such a clown-like, dancer-like, Kokopelli-like [...]

Two days ago I posted an NPR story summary with my own slant on it. It got picked up on www.expectingrain.com and reached hundreds of viewers, instantly becoming my most viewed post. That was exciting. Thanks, Expectingrain.com!
Come to think of it, NPR stories on the arts almost always fascinate me, and I can tell I [...]

I have always been a sucker for a good sports story–even though as a Mennonite farm girl I was not allowed to play competitive sports myself. One Saturday afternoon in the mid 1960’s, while I was performing one of my weekly chores–vacuuming my parents’ bedroom–I tuned the radio dial to the local station hoping to [...]

Capitalism: A Love Story opened nationwide yesterday, and Stuart and I made the movie our Friday night date. If you have not seen this film yet, I encourage you to do so.

Of course, I was watching and listening with a memoir lens. In this film we see pictures and home movies of little Michael Moore [...]

You know Roger Ebert as a film critic, one of the best in the business.
But on August 25, Roger Ebert came out to the world as a recovering alcoholic in his blog in the Chicago Sun-Times called “Roger Ebert’s Journal.” After 30 years of sobriety and an operation that left him physically unable to drink, [...]

If you missed Parker Palmer’s appearance on Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, cheer up.  Here it is.
Apparently, the broadcast about illusion and reality in our current economic crisis, which included Parker talking about depression in his own life, cheered many people.  Funny how truth does that–in just the paradoxical way that Parker himself explains better [...]

If the 21st century is the memoir century, then the job of this blog is to catalogue, comment, and critique.  In the next weeks, you can expect to see more posts about the uses of memoir in the media world, whether that world is “mainstream,” “social media,” book publishing, online publishing, radio, television, film or [...]