Tag Archive | memoir

Soul Food Stories

A young shark took the bait that was left overnight on a fishing line at the end of the dock on Pine Cay—bait that was intended for snapper, or grouper or other delectable dinner fish. When Raymond found it on his slow-gaited inspection walk around the dive shop just after sunrise, it was dead. Sharks […]

The Sixth Sense

By Diane Taylor December 2, 2015 17 Comments

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 […]

Operation Turtle Migration

By Diane Taylor October 15, 2015 14 Comments

(The environment is a necessary part of any memoir. It is the setting where the narrator’s story unfolds. Indeed, its existence is why the human species survives at all. Here, activist and naturalist Joan Norris relates how hundreds of doomed turtle eggs and hatchlings were given a chance to survive with strategic intervention.) Have you […]

Close Call on the Pacific Ocean

By Diane Taylor June 24, 2015 20 Comments

Below is an incident I wrote in 1972 after a four month sail from San Diego through the Panama Canal and up to Key West, under sail alone—no engine, in a 42′ trimaran, similar to the one shown. We were a crew of four: the captain and his thirteen-year-old son, and my partner and I. This […]

Ten Reasons for Writing Memoir

By Diane Taylor March 25, 2015 23 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 […]