memory
Remembrance in Memoir: What Does It Take?
Dear Steve, I’m really glad you asked this question in my memoir writing workshop last week: “What three qualities do people who complete their memoir have?” Since then, I’ve consulted two authors of published memoirs who sent me their three qualities. Then, I came up with four. All in all, we now have ten […]
The Magic of Intention
Before she left for Ottawa with her parents for the Canadian Dance Festival, eight-year-old Eowyn announced, “I’m going to have my picture taken with Prime Minister Trudeau.” Ha! Once words are launched into the air, atoms and molecules perk up their ears and set the stage. The girl’s parents noted the flurry of molecular theatrics […]
An Honest House: A Memoir by Cynthia Reyes
An Honest House is a rich memoir that moves through a ten-year period of Cynthia Reyes’ cynthiasreyes.com life. In the midst of a successful career, family life with children blooming, she and her husband move to an old farmhouse surrounded by gardens they love, just north of Toronto. Against this idyllic backdrop, PTSD strikes. […]
Book Burning
When I heard, I was shocked. Ninety-year-old Sarah called to tell me one of her daughters had rounded up all fifty copies of her book, a memoir, from friends and relatives and burned them. She didn’t know why, and it was too painful to probe. Sarah (not her real name) and I had worked on […]
Refuge in Prison is a Book Club
The title caught my attention on a shelf in the Port Hope library. The Prison Book Club. A neighbor and I started a book club here in town over ten years ago, and I know how much it means to all of us. I had to find out how a book club worked in a […]
Love Is All There Is
A few weeks ago, I gave a workshop on memoir writing in Lindsay, Ontario. I ended the workshop with this quote from a poem by Emily Dickinson to sum up the state of mind to aim for when selecting words to tell the stories of a lifetime That love is all there is Is […]
Ten Ideas to Enhance Your Desire to Write
You have a story to tell. You are the only one who can write your story. Taking one or several steps in the writerly direction may offer you the necessary incentive to put your plan into effect. All the steps below are rich ingredients for a compost pile. With the right combination, the pile heats […]
The Sixth Sense
When I talk about the six senses in memoir writing, occasionally someone asks me, don’t you mean five? The Famous Five they mean are sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. A writer makes a story come alive when generous use of the Famous Five is splashed fragrantly onto an otherwise sense-less page. The reader […]
Diane Taylor 