November is always a month that stirs a lot of reflection on my part. Thanksgiving is such an important holiday in my family, and always has been since I was a kid when we'd drive from Michigan to West Virginia to celebrate with my father's extended family.  In all those years that my siblings and I rolled down snowy hillsides to become human snow-people, and went inside to vie for one of the drumsticks, I never thought of what my mother was doing that day while she was alone.  My parents divorced when I was five, so she never came on those yearly visits to my father's homeplace. So why am I sharing this here? This year I've been writing a memoir as a follow up to my novel, Evelyn Evolving , which is the story of my mother's life. That book ended when I was about five years old, and readers have asked, "what happened next?" so I thought my story would answer that question. What I didn't realize is how hard it is to write a memoir. There are so many ch...

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...

Authors wanting to write about a major life upheaval in their life must decide the best way to do so—write a memoir, or fictionalize aspects of the story and instead write a novel based on true events. The first offers the chance to unsettle readers with naked fact; the second allows you to maximize the story’s impact along a certain premise. Either way, you endeavor to write an engaging story that ultimately arrives at the truth about life and human nature. After years of waffling on this front I’ve made a decision that delivered me right to the doorstep of my second traditional book deal! As I wrote in a previous countdown post , this summer I’ve been putting together a couple of novel proposals. I’d been working on shaping my second novel since April, writing then boiling down an extended synopsis and polishing the first fifty pages until my agent said, “I love it.” Hoping that love could carry us into a two-book deal, she asked about a third project. I did have a story...

“The muffled drum's sad roll has beat  The soldier's last tattoo; No more on life's parade shall meet The brave and daring few. On Fame's eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards with solemn round The bivouac of the dead.” – Bivouac Of The Dead, by Theodore O'Hara  Formerly known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day originated after the Civil War to commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died. By the 20th century Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died in all wars. Many of us visit cemeteries and “decorate” graves on Memorial Day, and it is traditionally seen as the start of the summer season. As writers, many of us can find fodder for our craft in the history of our wars and our ancestors who fought in them. My own father was a veteran of WWII and met my mother, a German nurse, during the American occupation. Their love story is the basis of one of my upcoming novels. A friend of mine, J...

  N ella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife , 49 . Edited by Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming. Profile Books. 2006. I became intrigued by Nella Last when I saw "Housewife, 49," a 2008 British televison drama based on the book, Nella Last's War . Nella Last, a forty-nine-year old housewife who felt stifled by her marriage, gradually empowers herself through her work for the Women's Voluntary Service, a British wartime volunteer organization, and through keeping a diary for the " Mass Observation " project. The book is an edited collection of her diary entries for this project during World War II.  Mass Observation was a social research program created by Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson in 1937 in an effort to help British people gain a greater understanding of themselves in everyday life. They recruited volunteers to "observe" their daily lives through the keeping of diaries which were submitted weekly to MO headquarters...

Awards come and go, and it pays to be cautious especially in these days of increased book publishing opportunities. Here is a new award I can personally vouch for having been a member of the Story Circle Network for years. ~ Dani Greer ~~~~~ May Sarton under her portrait By Paula Stallings Yost The winner of Story Circle Network's first annual Sarton Memoir Award will be announced at  Stories from the Heart , the biannual SCN National Memoir Conference, at the Wyndham Hotel in Austin, Texas, April 13-15, 2012.  The award is named in honor of May Sarton (1912-1995), the distinguished American poet, novelist, and author of twelve memoirs and journals. Readers have found Sarton 's work to be inspiring, moving, and thought-provoking. While widely acclaimed for her fiction and poetry, Sarton ’s best and most enduring work may lie in her journals. In these honest, probing accounts of her solitary life, she deals with such issues as aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, ...

My inability to ask my friend for permission to write about him in my memoir, Standoff at Ronnie's Place , (read part one of this post here ) made me realize something: I was willingly participating in yet another standoff. My memoir puts forth two: the ten-hour police action born of my husband’s stubborn determination to die on the farm of his dreams with his family intact, despite my divorce proceedings against him; and the twelve-year standoff born of my own stubbornness to face down his act by adhering to our decision to raise our sons there. My summer home friend had also been ending a long relationship at the time Ron died, and our deepening friendship was both life-affirming and misunderstood by everyone involved—perhaps most importantly, by him and me. The pain Ron’s suicide caused him eventually eroded our friendship in a way that kept him from talking to me for 12 years. A whole new standoff began. I could no longer perpetuate the problem. We'd once had a strong base ...

I was scared to call him. I had told myself I was free and clear to write my memoir, Standoff at Ronnie’s Place , about my first husband’s suicide. My sons, now 22 and 24, had generously given me the green light. Ron’s parents had died, the executor to his mother’s estate had died, my father had died, and my mother suffered from a dementia that would keep her from reading it even if she wanted to. My siblings had provided input and would not stand in the way. The first chapter had even been published . The stakes for completing the project were on the rise. Last summer I found out that Ron’s first wife, who’d been a staunch cheerleader for the project, was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). She also happens to be my target reader. I’d overcome that first nasty fear of the memoirist—“Who would want to read about me?”—by answering, Deirdre does. She’d always said, “But you and Ron had children together. How on earth did you raise those boys after Ron killed himself?” I aimed ...

This post originally ran here at The Blood-Red Pencil on December 29, 2010.  It first ran as a column in the Plano Star-Courier when I was known as the Erma Bombeck of Plano, then I incorporated it into my humorous memoir, A Dead Tomato Plant & A Paycheck. Enjoy... The day after Christmas was usually one of the best and one of the worst days of the year for our family. If that doesn't make sense to you, don't worry, I'm not sure it does to me either. But let me try to explain. It was the best because: There were now 364 more shopping days until Christmas. It was the one day of the year when perhaps the kids were just as tired as we were, and they’d sleep off and on all day. All the build up for the Big Day was finally over, and the noise level in the house had dropped about 20 decibels. I didn’t have to cook since we had all those leftovers from Christmas dinner. (If we didn't have a big Christmas dinner, I was in trouble on that score.) The kids would dec...

();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUgr-Yfo6anD0CGGt_EqdWwRtoEMauom82h8fWcW9grgY6NOadJf8Tx9d_o29RJCS0WYD_NG93TFO6Gzgcrz-dFDmTKzXO2-zBLNyQO-9U-jZLuW0L8qP1RHMDNPgOA4_pnHL9z_GpmRg/s1600/Inklings.jpg"> ();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjieiaWv1jMPrjpFM9eYa6I6EJ0z4n9HmJmkZ5914G4ymWKYlucP6btz9tsGfJ5CGOf9c6n23RLDWzfC-EbD2MckpqouvFVeMJQR9_AxrXDIcX0GMOPS7KWBgvdOZeRjsdQ72k8OUdinn4/s1600/600+hours+of+Edwardcover.jpg"> More Gift Book Suggestions I recently read two books that would make great gifts for the upcoming holidays, especially for writers. One is a memoir by nationally syndicated political cartoonist, Jeffrey Koterba, titled Inklings. This is a funny, poignant, and interesting look at Koterba’s life journey that was anything but smooth and easy. In it he writes freely about his dysfunctional family, led by an alcoholic father who also had Tourette’s synd...

Five Years at Sea by James V. Lee is a unique book. It’s part memoir, part travelogue, part insider’s view of being on board Navy ships, and all interesting. Lee spent five years, from 1989 to 1994, traveling the world aboard 13 different Navy ships as a civilian teacher of English as part of the Navy College Program for Afloat College Education. Since he was former Navy, he presents a unique perspective on shipboard life. He enjoyed his years teaching students under difficult circumstances, and he talks about these men who, having found purpose and structure in their lives, are eager to learn. He also took advantage of the opportunity to visit places all over the world and interact with the people who lived there. He takes readers along on his many journeys to places most tourists don’t go. Those years also provided him with a front-row seat to some historical events. I’ve never been in the Navy or even on a ship, but I enjoyed reading and looking at all the pictures Lee includ...

Memoir Week has drawn to a close, but perhaps it’s not too late to explore one of its relatives—the family history. Broader in scope than a memoir, the history of a family provides roots for many who feel like they’re floundering in our transient society. When I was a child, I enjoyed a lot of family togetherness. Several times a year we met at my paternal grandparents’ home for food, fun, and festivities. My mother and aunts gathered in the kitchen, first for meal preparation and then for dish washing and drying. (Grandma didn’t own an automatic dishwasher.) I remember so much cheerful conversation and laughter emanating from that room, accompanied by mouth-watering aromas that promised my favorite foods would soon be on the dining table. Children take such experiences for granted and expect them to continue throughout their lives. But too often that doesn’t happen. As my generation grew up, it spread out. We went to the east coast, the west cost, south to Florida and north to Seattle...

Today we welcome Susan Wittig Albert, prolific author of numerous mystery novels , perhaps less commonly known as the creator of the Story Circle Network , and now author of her first memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dani: Susan, we've talked all week about memoirs, and earlier we discussed the Story Circle Network which you founded. What prompted you to start that group ten years ago? Why then? Susan: I’d been teaching lifewriting (journaling and memoir) to women for five or six years, and I’d just written Writing From Life . I wanted to encourage women to document their lives--to tell the true stories of their experiences--and it seemed to me that what we needed was sustained personal encouragement from other women. A book can help give guidance, but I felt an organization could best do that job. (For more backstory, click here .) Dani: Why write a memoir? Susan: There are lots of reasons: to record your life; get clear ab...

After I have come to understand, have intuited, as best I can, the person and the message and even the audience of the book, then it is time for me to think about the clothing of the cover. In fact, I do not design the cover until the interior is fully designed and, usually, not until the inside of the book is formatted and has been returned to the author or copyeditor for editing. By then I will have spent enough time with the book, with the person and message, to get a sense of what the clothing should be. Sometimes the clothing should be strong and bold as the writing inside, even garish. Sometimes the clothing should be quiet and unassuming and yet so beautiful and pristine in its simplicity that it catches the attention of the passing reader who will want to pick it up. When I go into a bookstore, what catches my eye is what responds to the mood I am in when I am in the store. If I am in the mood for something quiet, I gravitate to a cover that is quiet. If I am in the mood for so...

To me a book is like a person, especially a memoir. It is like a person’s spirit or soul. And the cover is like that person’s clothing or how that person is first seen in the world. In designing a memoir, I always start with the inside because I want to get to know the person, or the story or message or personality or soul, first. I read as much as I can of the book. Sometimes all that’s necessary is a synopsis, along with a few chapters. Sometimes I need to read the whole book. But when I read, I listen with my entire being. I listen to who the person is who is writing and what he or she is writing about. I want to hear the nuances with my inner ear. Is the author someone who is out in the world in a very fast-paced way? Or writing from a place of solitude? Is the author extremely forceful, bold, aggressive? Or gentle, quiet-spoken, spending most of his or her time in a place in the clouds or in the river? What are the subtleties of the person who falls somewhere in between? And what ...