Tag Archive | The Gift of Memoir
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. […]
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 Memoir Revolution
In case anyone is still in doubt about whether or not we are in the midst of a memoir revolution, fully half the ten titles on this year’s National Book Awards (American) longlist for nonfiction are memoirs. But within that flexible category is immense variety: Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s open letter to his […]
I Remember
Memory is the theme of Human Chain, a collection of poetry published by one of the world’s greatest poets, Seamus Heaney, in 2011. “What is the relationship between writing poetry and memory?” he was asked by a Toronto Star reporter. “Memory has always been fundamental for me,” Heaney replied. “Remembering what I had forgotten is the […]
How’s the Weather?
How’s the weather? That’s what we ask. Like, how’s Mom, or how’s the baby. The weather is like a close relative, something or someone we care about. Indeed, sometimes we feel embraced by this ‘relative’. Love affairs happen in sun, rain, hail, the hush of no wind, the roar of a tornado, heat waves, […]
They Left Us Everything: A Memoir by Plum Johnson
Plum Johnson plumjohnson.com begins They Left Us Everything with conflict between her mother’s needs and her own fatigue and frustration from being the primary care giver for her mother for years. Johnson goes back to an earlier time, too, to describe the old clapboard house in Oakville, Ontario she grew up in, but it is […]
Close Call on the Pacific Ocean
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 46′ 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 […]
Who is Your Audience?
It was Mother’s Day in Port Hope. In a small house, gray clapboard with blue shutters, the phone rang. Her walker was handy, but so was the phone this time. It was John. “Mom, you have to write your story!” John had just reconnected with the yoga teacher his mom had signed him up with […]
Diane Taylor 