Dear writing sisters, Anne Panning’s memoir Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss begins, “My mother appears regularly to me in the form of a dragonfly, or so I like to think.” From there she draws on decades of memory and experience, from her childhood home in rural Minnesota to the riverbanks of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, […]
One of the hallmarks of writing memoir is making sense of your life experiences. The very act of looking back and seeing how seemingly disparate events are connected by deeper themes leads not only to insight and wisdom but also to self-compassion. Writing about the past provides an opportunity to see who you once […]
Recently one of my mentoring clients, who is also a yoga instructor, was thinking out loud about the length of time it is taking her to write her memoir, which she began years ago and has recently returned to. “Well,” she said during one of our coaching calls, “there’s a yogi expression that goes, […]
Nothing says visibility like video. Which is why I’ve been making a video a day for the last week. You see, after two years of wanting to make video and not doing it, I finally had to admit that my inaction had less to do with the excuse I was telling myself—that I […]
“The urgency of having to fit the content into an abbreviated frame is what makes it powerful.” Dinty Moore Last week’s article defined flash memoir, and pointed you in the direction of the online magazine Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction so that you could read a handful of Brevity pieces with an eye […]