Diane Taylor

Little Big Man

(April 30 is the day the Canadian government has chosen to commemorate the acceptance of 60,000 Boat People into Canada in the early eighties when North Vietnam took control of that country under communist rule. This short story is a piece of historical fiction by David Hughes http://straightspeak.com Memoir, the focus of my blog, is generally true stories; […]

Editing an Arctic Memoir

By Diane Taylor April 24, 2015 6 Comments

(UPDATE! UPDATE! In 2018, Native Born Son was published. It’s wonderful! I highly recommend it. It will give you an authentic feeling for what life was like for some of the Arctic’s first peoples by a man who lived with them, and loved and respected them.) You know how attics can contain hidden treasure? When Marnie Hare […]

Wild: A Memoir by Cheryl Strayed

By Diane Taylor April 8, 2015 7 Comments

I was pleased and honoured when I heard that my local Hospice group, where I am a volunteer, included my book review of Wild, from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail in the course they give to new volunteers. I haven’t yet read a memoir where love and loss are not crucial to […]

Does Your Name Tell a Story?

By Diane Taylor April 2, 2015 4 Comments

I suspect that many people reading these words are toying with the idea of writing a memoir. When it comes to putting it all together, where do you start? If there is something intriguing about your name, that could be a good opening. Names can have much history, even tragedy. Names can lie, hide the truth, […]

Ten Reasons for Writing Memoir

By Diane Taylor March 25, 2015 25 Comments

In my book, The Gift of Memoir, the twenty reasons I give for writing memoir are culled from the forty-two I offer in my course. The more reasons there are, the more apt you are to finish your story. Not that all forty-two, or twenty, will be valid for everyone. Are there three or four […]

Time Was Soft There, a memoir by Jeremy Mercer

By Diane Taylor March 18, 2015 2 Comments

A good memoir is a good mentor when you read as a writer. Time Was Soft There is a romp through literary escapades in one the world’s most famous bookstores, Shakespeare & Co., situated on Paris’s Left Bank. Canadian reporter Jeremy Mercer stumbled in one day, bought a book, and wound up living on the […]

Crowd Funding My Book

By Diane Taylor March 11, 2015 4 Comments

I, who am a nitwit when it comes to computerese (computer-ease), decided to crowd fund the publishing costs of my recent book, The Gift of Memoir. My only other book came out in the last century. That was before we knew that the future would run wild with connections zooming across oceans and galaxies. Was […]

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