This past weekend, while writing a segment in my memoir about my son in the context of my larger family history, I felt a stirring in my chest, i.e., in my heart chakra. As I wrote, the stirring became a swirl that expanded through my chest cavity. When this energetic swirl began to buzz, I […]
The voice is the creature of the body that produces it. Nancy Mairs In order to recover your voice, you have to return to your body. Indeed, writing is an embodied activity. After all, our voices are housed in our bodies. As Nancy Mairs puts it, “No body, no voice; no voice, no body. […]
One of my many highlights from this year’s AWP conference, which I attended last week in Minneapolis, was Under the Gum Tree magazine’s reading on Friday evening. I was honored to read my memoir essay “The Bruise,” which appears in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. It occurred to me during the reading that, because […]
One of the questions I get asked often by women writers, whether they’re writing short memoir stories or a book-length memoir, is How do I know where my story begins, and how do I know where it ends? It’s an excellent question because when we write memoir we are writing from our life […]