100 Memoirs

Now that Dr. Gerald L. Miller’s memoir, A Hundred Camels: A Mission Doctor’s Sojourn & Murder Trial in Somalia, has been published, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, I will share with you the foreword I contributed to the book which I hope can do double duty as a book review.
This book contains an [...]

Today’s guest blogger is writer and editor Lanie Tankard who is a long-time friend.  My husband Stuart enjoys taking credit for Lanie’s romance and marriage to Jim Tankard, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, because Stuart suggested that Lanie contact Jim about a summer program–back in 1972.
This picture of [...]

How long have I been teaching memoir writing? On its face, the answer is, “not very,” but I can also truthfully say “about 40 years.”
How can both be true?  The recent teaching comes in the form of workshops I have blogged about previously– three sessions at the Fetzer Institute and two about workshops given at [...]

I remember reading this breakthrough book soon after it was published in the late 1980’s.  I don’t remember how I bought the book, and I don’t have the old copy on my shelf, so I may have loaned or given it away, Mostly, I remember how I felt after reading it. High!  I had never [...]

Last weekend I enjoyed sunshine, warm air, a beautiful room in the carriage house of the Phoebe Pember House affiliated with the Sophia Institute, a long walk in historic Charleston, a wonderful memoir workshop, and delightful conversation with Natalie Goldberg, the workshop leader, at the Slightly North of Broad Restaurant. Here she is, on the [...]

Today I finished leading the last 1.5-hour workshop in a series of four which took place at the Fetzer Institute. I think the title of this workshop–Timed Writing–may have scared away potential participants.   Sounds as jolly as retaking the SAT.  Despite the title, and despite the fact that four people on the list could not [...]

Yesterday I led a second workshop on spiritual autobiography at my church.  Most of the people who attended the first one came back, and about ten new folks showed up also.  The big table was full!
We shared a meal together, recalling rituals from our childhoods–mealtime prayers both serious and comical, night-time prayers.  We talked a [...]

Tomorrow I lead a small group of colleagues in a workshop much like the one I taught at my church several months ago.  I will again use the Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s essay published in Weavings.  But this time I will also talk a little about Tristine Rainer’s book,Your Life as Story, which I am enjoying [...]

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.“  –Rainer Maria Rilke
I am trying to go deeper with my understanding of this famous quote, which I loved from the time I first read it in Letters to a Young Poet.  Like most mothers, especially [...]

Wallace Stegner once said that you can’t teach writing but you can awaken it.  That’s what I hope for in the class I will teach next Monday.  We begin with creating space and thinking about the environment, both of the physical space and the social, emotional, and spiritual safety within that place. To teach is [...]