Marla manages to offer some pointed critique in a very kind way. That’s not always easy, but writers really benefit from this kind of tough love. What do you think? Any feedback for Marla?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yqaE1Wx1b4]

Easy to say. Hard to do.

In another post on voice, I described how helpful it was for me to try to visualize my voice as a farm. Today I am pondering the role of another of the senses–touch. How does one sense inform, enlarge, or restrict, another one?

Here’s a thesis to consider: a writer whose voice touches us usually has been touched profoundly by others. Have they been touched gently, intimately, wisely? Or has the touch been rough, unknowing, uncaring? What places inside us do they reach, and how do they touch us?

I first learned about voice and touch from Max DePree. Max likes to joke that he is a “born leader” because his father owned the company he later led. He eventually became CEO of the progressive, high-quality furniture company Herman Miller Inc., makers of the ubiquitous Aeron Chairs and famous for hiring the team of Charles and Ray Eames, who designed the quintessential modern chair included in the MoMA collection, the Eames Chair. When Max agreed to be my mentor, back in 1998, two years after I became president of Goshen College, I was deeply moved. I love to hear his voice, and his presence in my life has influenced me in ways neither of us can fully comprehend.

Max and me, 2008

Max has written a lot of books about leadership, most famously, Leadership is an Art (1989, 2004) and Leadership Jazz (1992,2008)

But the story that touched me most from Max comes from his experience as a grandfather rather than as a CEO. It comes from a now out-of-print book called Dear Zoe, one of the most beautiful childbirth and childhood stories ever written. Max wrote this book as a series of letters to his granddaughter Zoe, who was born prematurely (24 weeks inside the womb) and weighed 1 pound 7 ounces and was eleven inches tall. Max could slip his wedding ring up Zoe’s arm all the way to the top. When he dies, he wants to give Zoe his ring on a gold chain.

Here is the passage from that book that catches me in the throat every time I read it. It describes Grandpa Max’s encounter with a nurse after Zoe had, to the amazement of all, survived her first few days. Listen, please, to Max in his own voice:

“While we were looking at you, a wonderful nurse named Ruth came over to chat. After a few minutes she turned to me and said, ‘For the next several month, at least, you’re the surrogate father. I want you to come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe, and when you come I would like you to rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you’re caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch.’

I’m sure Ruth’s suggestion is going to be very important in our relationship together. I also have the feeling that she has given me something enormously profound to ponder.”

As I write these words, a little boy is getting ready to be born in New York City. I don’t know his name yet, but I do know that I want to touch him and that I will love his voice. He will make me a grandmother for the first time, and I hope that he will always connect my voice to my touch. His doctor says he could come any day now, and we wait prayerfully for him and his mother as they prepare for the amazing journey toward birth.

Have you learned anything about the connection of voice and touch from your children or grandchildren, if you have them?

What touches you in another person’s voice? You can describe either physical or metaphorical reality. As you read or write, are you aware of times when your voice and your touch connect? What happens?

Jane Friedman "It takes guts to be gentle and kind." (The Smiths)

Jane Friedman has 22,679 Twitter followers, some of whom could more appropriately be called devotees. It’s worth getting a Twitter account just to follow her. You’ll soon see why she has built a rabid tribe. She’s smart, ahead of the rapidly evolving book industry curve, witty–and generous.

One of the things I like most about social media is that it teaches the golden rule better than any priest or parent. Jane herself gives away many of her best ideas, and she offers her readers the present of her presence. She answers questions and encourages others online. When she mentioned me once in a Tweet, I was elated.

One example of Jane’s generosity is her “best tweets for writers” feature which shows up each Sunday on her blog. She explains, “I watch Twitter, so you don’t have to.”

Last week in her roundup of the best tweets, she included a post by literary agent Jessica Papin on writing memoir which you can see here. Papin finds Ira Glass’s explanation about story structure pertinent to memoir writers. Since I am one of those people who will sit in my car for a full 15 minutes after my trip has ended so as not to miss a minute of a This American Life story on NPR, I’ll write more about his take on story in a future post.

Naturally, after reading Jane Friedman’s Best Tweets for Writers post, finding a useful memoir post included (above), and seeing how many RT’s the post got on Twitter, I wondered if my own audience would benefit from timely, focused, content aggregation on memoir only.

One of Jane’s other suggested Tweets takes you to this good post which explains how to aggregate. It’s a little above my experience level, but I might tackle it if the interest were high.

Let me know if you want this service. I probably would do it monthly–but only if you encourage me in the comment section.  In the meantime, here’s one for those of you who have a manuscript of a memoir and want to find an agent. Enjoy agent Rachelle Gardner’s humor about ten things that annoy an agent, and take the implicit advice!

Also, here’s a good place for me to shout out to three other memoir blog sites. I used to have a blogroll on my home page, before my site was hacked and my son kindly migrated all my content to WordPress. Until I find a permanent place on my home page for these links, let me recommend Women’s Memoirs, National Association of Memoir Writers, and Memory Writers Network, and Narrative. They are all terrific!!

Today’s question: are there enough good memoir blog posts to do a regular online roundup of them, and how important would such a service be to you? By what criteria would one select the “best”?

Enjoy! If you are on Facebook, join The Writer’s fan page, and you will get sweet little tidbits like this one without having to come here to find them.

It’s hard enough to be a writer, you may say.  Do I really need to be a blogger and marketer also?? Well, no, if you are Anne Lamott or Kathleen Norris or Mary Karr.  But if you are not already established, you may benefit enormously by understanding some of Seth Godin’s principles. By embedding the video he republished on his blog, I hope to help memoir readers and writers benefit. And I am giving him permission, a concept he coined, to continue marketing creative publishing ideas.

What do you think? Will you try any of these ideas? Did you get inspired?

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AbvOWgI]

Myers is a psycho-therapist and writer whose book Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story was reviewed here. She approaches writing as a form of therapy and helps prospective writers develop the courage and the skills to tell the truth as they remember it.

Another item that came with my membership is a list of Myers’ 23 memoir writing tips.  I don’t think she will mind if I share her first three:

1. Write frequent vignette–small, do-able pieces

2. Use the timeline to organize your memories and stories.

3. Find the dark and light in each story as well as identify stories that are primarily dark or light.

This list confirmed the approach I have taken here (mostly from intuition and trial-and-error) to start small. A blog is a perfect place to explore and share memories, even if they still need editing and shaping before they may be ready for other forms of publication.

Do you have a place to store and record your own mini-memoirs? What other tips have you discovered about writing? Have you ever created a timeline of your stories?

I have tried a few other contests. I won an honorable mention in the creative nonfiction/memoir category at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Workshop in 2007 and in 2008 won an honorable mention and the chance to read my essay at the San Francisco Public Library though the Soul-Making Literary Contest, sponsored by the PEN women of San Francisco and broadcast on the PBS outlet there.  I chose not to travel to San Francisco to do this, but the encouragement inspired me to keep writing.

Now that my friends and readers know I enjoy contests, they send me notices of them.  The purpose of this blog is to share some of these notices and invite you, gentle reader, to consider entering one of your own.

My friend and neighbor Hope, who says she wants to be my agent, sent me this Cheerios children’s book contest announcement.

My friend Susan sent me an announcement of the contest at Writer’s Digest.  If you win, you not only get a cash prize but also a free trip to New York and a meeting with agent and editor.

If you go to the About section of this blog, or just click here, you can find an announcement of a new contest from Memoir (and) journal I reviewed here.

If you subscribe to any writer’s magazine, Poet and Writer’s, Writer’s Digest, The Writer and The Writer’s Chronicle, you can learn about scores of contests in every season of the year.  Many of these publications have electronic newsletters to alert you about deadlines and guidelines.

And this website aggregates contest announcements from all of the above!  You can just click on the month that gives you enough time your article and find several contests willing to receive it.

Will I submit any of my own writing to any of these contests?  Only if I can get a few weekends set up at Gilchrist.  Better get on the calendar!

I leave you with a poem published in the Gilchrist Newsletter, which you can subscribe to free here.

L e a v i n g  P r a i r i e  H o u s e

At Gilchrist Retreat Center, September 8, 2008

The Lancaster County country woman in me

enjoys buffing countertops clean,

wants to fling open the windows,

work up a sweat, imitating the ladies of the

sewing circle who came to clean our house

after one of Mother’s miscarriages.  Within minutes

the new shine on the kitchen floor matched

the triumphant shine of their eyes.

The contemplative in me is a wilder animal,

needs to be coaxed to come out,

needs to put an arm around the waist of the country woman,

bring her to this rocking chair for a rest,

take her dishrag in hand and remind her of Brother Lawrence

baking bread with prayers,

slowly, with great attention to every sense,

awake to the every-day miracles

of muscle, earth, air, wind, and fire

that make ordinary work possible

When these two go at it, the country woman and the monk,

tug-of-war follows.

So I rise early before the dawn.  I clean one area of the hermitage at a time.

First the new sheets, bursting smooth from caresses of all four corners,

Covered with prayers for the next pilgrim.

While I work, the sun shows up, spreading

slow, golden light across the pale sky.

I offer my applause and thanks for another day,

sitting with the last cup of coffee

in the velvet rocker in front of the fireplace,

contemplating the spent ashes of three riotous fires.

The poet’s image of the fire fusing with the rose holds my attention

As my hands take up the dust bin and brush.

When John the caretaker comes to help take my baggage to the car,

I am ready, smiling and happy.

The country woman wipes her hands one more time on her apron

while inside her Brother Lawrence whispers:

this morning is all you have.

The only difference between this morning and

the last morning is that today

you know the time.

You know the place.

Adirondack chair overlooking the prairie at Gilchrist.

I am responding to reader requests to offer more stories from my own life as well as to offer writing tips for other memoir writers.  Let me know if this kind of post hits the mark, or not, for you.

1.  To learn more about social media by practicing it.

2.  To educate myself about the genre of memoir by reading 100 memoirs and reviewing them for a group of people also interested in memoir.  To be curious in public about our age’s fascination with personal narrative in all forms.

3.  To collect published stories and mini-memoirs of my own in one place so that interested readers can find them and that I can organize them with tags and categories for potential future publications.

4.  To find new friends–writers and readers who travel a similar path, interested in similar topics.

Evidently, Gretchen Rubin had similar goals on the subject of happiness.  She’s miles ahead of me, however, in using media to create interest in a book under construction.  I enjoy her proficiency.  The most brilliant piece of writing and marketing I have seen for some time is this YouTube “one minute movie.” It also happens to be a video that parents should watch once a month:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jgVKw9rXRg&hl=en&fs=1]

Rubin’s book on happiness will be published this fall by HarperCollins, so she is focused now on marketing. She’s got a blog with movies, newsletters, a fan site on Facebook, and she’s trolling for “super fans”–volunteers who will help spread the word. If you click on the movie, you will be invited to join the newsletter. Pretty sophisticated stuff and lots of fun to watch.

I may become a fan on Facebook so that I can observe what’s happening. I am interested in both her subject and her skill at finding and engaging blog readers who will then become book readers and then even more devoted blog readers. Ah, the wheel of life.

Who are your favorite published author/bloggers. What other uses of social media to promote books are you seeing online?

What happens when we ask how “hot” the word “memoir” is?  Apparently hot and getting hotter:  When you search the word, you can discover all kinds of information–a history of the search volume over the last five years, the countries where the search is hottest, and how the search volume compares to news mentions.

One function that allows you to compare two words to each other.  For example, let’s look at memoir and autobiography.  Usage of “autobiography” is going down.  “Memoir” is advancing.  Take any two words you are interested in and spot the trend.  Here is “spiritual” and “memoir.”  Just for fun, try “recession, bling.”

Isn’t it cool to have this way to find out which words are hot?

Anybody have another Google application you want to share?

Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure and genre–narratives, essays, and meditations.  Most of the chapters were published previously in literary journals.  The publisher is Red Hen Press.  Since publishing individual essays first is one of the routes I am considering in my own writing, I was especially interested to see how a complete set of essays, beginning with a memoir of the author’s father and concluding with a meditation on aging, would either hang together or seem fragmented.

The answer I discovered is–both.  As a product of a postmodern life in academe (a long career at Emerson College), the author is highly conscious of fragments, employing them deliberately.  Most of the essays highlight fragments in their structure, using subheadings or little printer’s breaks to indicate the loss of linear progress.  This lack of flow in the short run, however, does not stop the stream of consciousness.  As one thought or memory leaves off, another picks up–like rivulets of beaded water flowing over a dusty riverbed.  The necessary repetition of certain facts in separate essays does not seem jarring but accumulates force.  We see the author’s wife Connie, for example, through many different lenses–as teacher, lover, mother, dog catcher, partner, and independent thinker.  The same is true of the sister, brothers, nephew, parents, and colleagues who enter and exit the various stories in different roles.

Amazingly, the author, who has been honest with us about his negative feelings toward his obese, recovered/alcoholic father, and who has steadfastly refused a sentimental view of any family member, returns in his own old age to some of the same values his father held.  Like his father, he takes delight in the growth and progress of his children, even more after they leave home than before.  And like his father, he recognizes the power–even saving power–of the women in his life.

I would probably not chosen to read a book called Safe Suicide without encouragement from the author.  But I am glad I got past an initial aversion to the title to experience deeply the pastiche of a life as noble in its ordinariness as my own–or yours.  I recognized, and loved, the many Shakespearian allusions sprinkled through these essays.  DeWitt Henry is an English professor’s English professor.  He does not just read the richest texts in the English language; he literally takes them to heart.  Art is life and life is art in this memoir.

Henry concludes his last essay with words that summarize the philosophy that ties all the fragments of his life together: “Life itself is our glory and our ordeal, our measure of heart, and of passion.  We do our best. There is no finish line.”

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