Posted in Blog on Feb 12th, 2012
This week, I have invited one of our regular blog readers to share a mini-memoir. Here are Richard’s reflections on his relationship with his father: One of the fortunate things about getting older is that it affords one the opportunity for more experiences in life. What we sometimes call ‘maturity,’ allows you to modify your [...]
Posted in Blog on Feb 6th, 2012
We often think of intuition as some mysterious wisdom that arises inside ourselves, though we can’t say exactly where it is located. Does it live in your mind, or does it arise in your heart? Many people would say it’s a gut feeling as well and I go for all three. But I’ve noticed that [...]
Posted in Blog on Jan 23rd, 2012
I imagine that you’ve heard something on the news or read an article on Indie Publishing, a form of self-publishing. Since I am choosing that path for my memoir detective story “The Woman in the Photograph: The Search for My Mother’s Hidden Past,” I am very excited about this modality. For me it is an [...]
Posted in Blog on Jan 16th, 2012
This week was the two year anniversary of the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. The news tell us that generous help was offered from all over the world, yet so much is needed and the Haitian people still live by and large in extremely primitive, and often unhealthy conditions. As a [...]
Posted in Blog on Jan 8th, 2012
Dear Friends, Happy New Year. I hope this year brings you many blessings and opportunities. I apologize for my absence this last month and thank those of you who were concerned about why my blog posts disappeared. Even without many holiday plans, the stimulation of the last month just took over and I couldn’t focus. [...]
Posted in Blog on Nov 28th, 2011
Gratitude. What else can I write about this week? It’s been so beautiful to hear people use the holiday as a chance to appreciate their blessings and the generosity of life even amidst the challenges and struggles. I am also very grateful. But I was wondering how gratitude translates into our everyday lives. In many [...]
Posted in Blog on Nov 13th, 2011
Have I already mentioned the concept that stream of conciousness is where voluntary and involuntary memory meet. If I have, please forgive me, but I can’t get that theme out of my mind (is that voluntary or involuntary?). How much choice do we have regarding what we think, what leaps into our minds, what images [...]
Posted in Blog on Oct 31st, 2011
I can’t say enough about the joy of blogging. I think in our hearts, every one of us yearns to have a platform from which to share our thoughts and observations. Somehow, in the act of blogging, one senses that there are people out there listening. The very state of having a listener is a [...]
Posted in Blog on Oct 25th, 2011
Last week was the 20th anniversary of the East Bay firestorm that swept through the Oakland-Berkeley hills on October 20, 1991. Many of us who live in the East Bay remember where we were that day, and have friends who lost everything. Some people seemed to have found the resilience to start over. We have [...]
Posted in Blog on Oct 17th, 2011
My old friend was visiting from France and I took her on a walk along a trail that meanders along the Bay. That’s what’s great about the Bay Area. Ten minutes from home and we’re sliding on seaweed slicked rocks and watching pelicans. I started to tell her a story that dated back thirty plus [...]
Posted in Blog on Oct 10th, 2011
A nonfiction or memoir writer has to navigate a complex relationship to memory. It isn’t reliable, not just sometimes, but never. Even as experiences are happening, we are already modifying them to fit into some framework of association, expectation and interpretation to make sense out of them in relation to past experience and learning. There’s [...]
Posted in Blog on Oct 2nd, 2011
Since last week I talked about tree planting, I thought this week I would focus on the family tree. If you have never sat down and drawn a diagram of the members of your family, you might be surprised at how many insights and observations that process can provide. There are several sites on the [...]
Posted in Blog on Sep 26th, 2011
A friend stopped by for tea and gave me her favorite quote of the day. “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” How often do we regret a missed opportunity or think it’s too late, and then miss another opportunity. When I started looking for [...]
Posted in Blog on Sep 19th, 2011
I recently attended an anniversary party for a couple married 60 years, and every family member talked about how they were the people you could count on when you had a problem, needed to borrow the car, or got stranded in LA. Of course that was sometimes true and sometimes not true, but it was [...]
Posted in Blog on Sep 12th, 2011
Writing takes courage. You always have to push yourself past the taboos you carry inside about what is okay to say, and who will take offense. Otherwise you are only telling half the story. I remember how clear this was to me many years ago when I read an best selling memoir by Geneen Roth, [...]
Posted in Blog on Sep 6th, 2011
We are in a wonderful age where computers make it so easy to write. And busy as we are, we do have time. When you sit down and let your words and ideas flow, you become the witness to your own process. Now that we have the technology to scan the brain, we are learning [...]
Posted in Blog on Aug 28th, 2011
Tell me about your first job. Will you describe the tasks you did? or what you wore the first day? or what you were feeling on your way to the location? We each focus on different things. Often what remains in our memory is not the most significant thing but some visual image, or a [...]
Posted in Blog on Aug 14th, 2011
I’m going to talk about “The Woman in the Photograph” today. Though the core manuscript is written, my understanding of the journey continues to evolve. Tell me if this sounds clear to you. When the Berlin Wall fell, all this shocking (yes, it really was) information about my mother’s hidden life landed in my lap. [...]
Posted in Blog on Aug 9th, 2011
Thank you for the thoughtful comments on several of the latest posts. I want to respond here to some of them, like speaking to your elderly mother (or getting there) and asking her questions. If your mother responds with interest, it is as much for her as for you to learn more. Of course if [...]
Posted in Blog on Aug 7th, 2011
I’m going to switch gears for a moment and talk about writing itself. Maybe writing is like doing a science experiment. (Maybe it isn’t–I don’t know much about science.) You have a vision of something that inspires you or that you think matters, and you believe that it might matter to other people too. If [...]
Posted in Blog on Jul 31st, 2011
Are you a legacy changer? The term just jumped out at me as I was thinking about the theme of my manuscript-book-to-be. Did you look at the lives of your parents, your uncles, your aunts, other people’s families and say this isn’t what I want for my life? I want to change the legacy. Of [...]
Posted in Blog on Jul 18th, 2011
Here’s the problem with family patterns. Bear with me while I tell you a little story. My manuscript is just about finished and has been receiving rave reviews from friends and some strangers who all say they couldn’t put it down. So I had a fit of impatience and decided I didn’t want to wait [...]
Posted in Blog on Jul 10th, 2011
People tell us so many stories, yet sometimes the most significant are the ones they don’t tell. Thanks to BG for the comment about the set of silver. We used that set in my childhood. We used the elegant silver forks to pry open tuna fish cans and all the tines are bent at the [...]
What do you know about the family members who came before you? Do you care to know? It’s so easy when you’re young to dismiss those folks in long dresses or black suits and unsmiling faces, or even them more recent ones with polka dot dresses as being old fashioned and not like you at [...]
Posted in Blog on Jun 30th, 2011
In the seventies and eighties we heard more and more observation that you can’t talk about a person’s behavior or challenges without looking at them in the context of the family system. Suddenly it was important to see that a person had assumed the role of family clown, or mascot or scapegoat because the other [...]
Posted in Blog on Jun 27th, 2011
I visited a friend today and saw a photo on her dresser: a 5X8, beautifully framed picture of a smiling woman, hat at a jaunty angle, hair bobbed, flower on her lapel. The woman must have been in her thirties, at a period full of vitality and even a hint of daring in the twinkle of her eyes.
Who is that woman? I asked, knowing in my heart exactly who it was.
My mother, answered my friend.
Thank you to Michael and Blaise for sending comments. I’m excited about the subject of legacy because I think we underestimate how much we are influenced by those who have come before us. I remember years ago sitting in a presentation by Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nat Hanh. He told us to look at our [...]
Posted in Blog on May 26th, 2011
Hi friends, Welcome to this blog. As you can see, I am making a fresh start and am excited about bringing your attention to the subject of family legacy. What do I mean by that? I mean more than the repeated stories and the framed pictures on the mantel. I mean the stories they didn’t [...]
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