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.

A well-crafted first line in an essay or book not only intrigues or “hooks” the reader, it also points to the theme. I had a colleague who loved to trace the structure of the whole book by dissecting the structure of the first paragraph.

Recently, a Facebook friend, Richard Kauffman, challenged his readers with this message: “find a more provocative opening line from a memoir than this: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’–Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Or just post your favorite opening line/s from a memoir.”

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?

I especially want to thank several other bloggers, GutsyWriter, Babsland, OKChelsea,  for commenting frequently, both on the blog itself and on FaceBook. A few months ago a former student joined the blogging world and can now be found at workinginmypajamas.

MemoryWritersNetwork blogger Jerry Waxler found this blog early on and added it to the blog roll. I eventually became a member of the National Association of Memoir Writers and discovered the founder Linda Joy Myers, whose books I have reviewed here. Through the search function of Twitter I am beginning to assemble a group of new writers to follow who are interested in themes that interest me: memoir, love, forgiveness, and compassion.

Special thanks to Paul Harvey at the amazing and amusing USreligion.blogspot.com for using some of my posts about Mennonite memories and pop culture in one of his own.

This year’s birthday present from Anthony was an hour of consultation with one of his favorite social media experts, Britt Bravo, whose website, podcasts, and blog can be found here. If you are looking for someone to help you get started or someone to suggest improvements to your fabulous professional blog, I highly recommend her.

I leave you with one line I got from Britt: “Half of blogging is listening.” As I look ahead to a year from now, I hope I can say that I not only was able to keep up the pace of blogging at least twice a week but that I also made many new blogger friends, commented on their posts, and offered them encouragement, support, ideas and great content they can use.

Isn’t it great that the internet rewards altruism?

All you bloggers out there, what have you learned about “listening” online? What do you do to help other bloggers? Are you on twitter? Facebook? What tips can you offer? Posts you want to share?

Blogging gives those of us who are spending the majority of our time doing something else the chance to write, get feedback, write, get feedback, and get better!

But Godin and Peters say it so powerfully in this video link that you will want to hear it straight from them.

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?

This book contains an equal measure of travelogue, mystery story, medical diary, and cultural history.  Underneath the excitement of the courtroom drama, murder trial, and many escapades in a new culture, lies the story of how one man’s spirit grew, first in his own country and his own faith and then in a new country with a different faith.  Welcome to spiritual autobiography as only a Mennonite medical missionary could write it.

The number 100 plays a significant role in Dr. Miller’s story because it is an important number in both Muslim religion and Somali culture. A crucial piece of information, explaining the title, is that the blood price for a murdered male in this culture in 1972 was one hundred camels.

But the number 100 plays another, more subtle, role. Somali prayer necklaces contain thirty-three beads that are fingered three times each during which time the ninety-nine names of Allah are uttered.  One name for Allah exists, not in the mind of human beings but in the mind of another creature, a nearly sacred animal in Somalia-the camel.  The camel contemplates what humans cannot know-the one hundredth, unmentionable, name for God.

Throughout this book the careful reader can find many clues about the mysterious nature of God as the young, humble, resourceful Midwestern American doctor attempts to share his faith in action.  Curiosity is one of his gifts.  Even though he has an incredible number of medical and language challenges, he does not focus just on work.  In his youth Dr. Miller thought he would become a veterinarian.  He grew up on a small farm and continues to be fascinated by animals.  Africa opened great opportunities to explore the animal kingdom, and he shares this amazing world with the reader. He is alert to the signs of the holy, connecting all of nature to its Creator and recognizes the central role of the resilient desert animal, the camel.

Because Dr. Miller deeply respects the Muslim culture in which he finds himself as an emergency replacement on a one-year assignment, he does not question either the ninety-nine names for God or the unknown hundredth one.  Having asked God at the very beginning of the time in Somalia for help “that we might show through our actions Jesus’ love,” Dr. Miller’s prayer is answered. He sees God in other people.

These people have names like Martha, Pauline, Elsie, Chester, Catherine, Harold, Barbara, Neil, Margaret, Velma, Anna, Mary, Shari, Marlis, Stephen, Perry, and Lucille.  They also have names such as Hussein Sadad Hassan, Fatuma Abdulle Mohamed, Hassen Nur, Mariam Mohammed Hassen, Lul Abdurahman Hussein, Mohamed Aden, Omar, Ibrahim, Uglo, Akim,Hawa, Lul,and Abdi.

He sees God in the Southern Cross constellation in the night sky and goes to sleep to the “circular beat” of drums.  He sees God in the “bright orange flowers of the flamboyant trees” and the “fragrance of white frangipani blossoms.” He sees God in all the presenting problems of his patients-cataracts (he teaches himself how to do surgeries and provides sight to scores of people), worms, wounds, Rabies, leprosy.  If the patient needs his rare blood type, he gives his own.  If a baby loses his mother in childbirth, he brings the child into his own home. He recognizes the wisdom in the ancient proverbs he hears and incorporates many more into the written version of his story more than thirty years later.

Because he looks for God, finding new names for God in a Muslim, African, country, Dr. Miller is prepared to pass his greatest test:  trial for murder.  What is most amazing to me about this story is not how big a role it played in his life, but how small.  When one lives within a community in which Jesus and his willingness to suffer for the sake of love is one’s true north-or Southern Cross-false accusations with potential felony, or even capital, consequences lose their ability to shake the ground upon which one walks.

Dr. Miller tells us that a chance encounter on an airplane prompted him to think about writing his story.  We can imagine that an unmentionable name for God passed between these two men sitting side-by-side.  And we can imagine a camel lumbering along in Jamama, Somalia, smiling.

A few weeks ago, I began to notice something.  One post I wrote about Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s book included the phrase “beautiful sentences” in the title.  That post has risen to near the top of my “most popular” entries, and the term “beautiful sentences” is one that has attracted more readers than any other in the last week.

Are you a discriminating reader who thinks about writing at the level of the sentence?  Do you have a few favorite quotes–beautiful sentences?  I invite you to submit them to a new contest located right here in the comments section of this post. The inbox will stay open until May 27 at 10 p.m.  I will gather up the quotes and make a new post out of all of them and then ask readers to vote on their favorites.  The winner will receive a memoir selected just for him or her from my overflowing memoir bookcase. Feel free to submit a sentence of your own! And enjoy the hunt for beautiful sentences in everything you read in the next week.

As you know, it was a contest that got me started writing memoir.  Maybe this one will get you started too!

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:

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?