I read a few memoirs each year, looking primarily for works by writers and other real people. In other words, I avoid the tales put forth by politicians and entertainment celebrities. What is memoir? Memoir is a tiny word for a huge variety of life stories, sometimes comprehensive tales from childhood to old age, other times a few meaningful weeks plucked out of a life that may have changed that life in unexpected ways. We, as readers, often develop the habit of reading only one or two genres, mostly fiction. But real people all over the world have shared something intimate and profound about their lives and times. We can learn something different from memoir than we can from the best of the best in history books because we get a slice of that history from one point of view. History is made up of those unique perspectives. I am grateful to those writers who are brave enough to give us a piece of themselves. I don’t know anything about writing memoir, but I think it’s safe to say that t...

If this were a normal year, no pandemic and no restrictions on gatherings, I'd have a party to celebrate the recent release of a new nonfiction book, The Many Faces of Grief: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope From a Hospital Chaplain.  But... In a celebration here in my home office, I'm drinking hot chocolate, with a little something extra for added warmth. As I write this, it is 25 degrees here in Texas. Way colder than a normal February day this far from the snow belt.  And I may add a cookie or two to my extravagant solitary celebration. :-) Still, it is important to mark these accomplishments, even if we can't do that in style for the time being.  This current release is taken from a blog I wrote prior to the release of my first hardcover novel, One Small Victory. This was back when blogging was still fairly new, but my publisher, Five Star Cengage, thought it would be good to build some advance interest in the novel via a regular blog.  Since blogging is so much...

Often the best titles, and memoirs, come from seeking connections between seemingly unrelated events. This takes time. In Colorado, a boyfriend threatened to shoot me, so when I was twenty-six I moved to Alaska.

Image by Oran Viriyincy , via Flickr Ten years ago I was teaching my memoir-writing class “Making History” at a local Senior Center. It covered the decades of the thirties, forties and fifties, and encouraged the participants to share their stories of those years. One of the topics we talked about was the enormous changes in the status of Americans of color during those decades (Jackie Robinson comes to mind), although all the people in the class were white. But they had a lot to say – racism has always affected us all, no matter what our color. Here’s one of the stories told that day, by a white woman almost 80 years old. She was 21 in 1947, an office worker in downtown San Francisco. Every day she took the bus to and from work. The bus was always crowded. One evening she boarded the bus and was lucky to find a space on a bench seat facing the aisle, next to an elderly black woman. At the next stop, a man got on the bus. He was a middle-aged white gentleman, probably in his ear...