Tag Archive | love
Irish Lament
I’m Irish. That’s the short story. My father’s parents were born in the small seaport of Sligo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. I never knew them; they both died before I was born. In fact, Dad doesn’t remember his mother because she died when he was just three—of peritonitis from infection after an appendectomy; […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
From Love Letters to Memoir
I stood by my table of books at Chapters in Peterborough earlier this month for a book signing, just inside the front door. Several people stopped by the table to talk about memoirs. Suddenly a familiar face with a dazzling smile appeared. Joanne Culley http://www.joanneculley.com who took my course on memoir writing four years ago, […]
Diane Taylor 