March 2023
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How to Use Family Photos to Fuel Your Writing (Part 1)
Memories provide a catalog of subjects for your writing. Especially if your genre is memoir, delving deeply into your past is a natural way to find your subject and focus. If you write about family, specifically about your relationships with your parents or siblings, tapping into your earliest memories can reap a storehouse of material. Continue reading
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When in Rome: A (Somewhat) Lyrical Tribute to the Lyric Essay
It defies strict definition. It encompasses a variety of forms. It demands more from the reader than other types of essays. It affords writers a measure of freedom that some find daunting. The lyric essay: the most artistic, the most poetic, the least informative, the least reliant on narrative conventions of all the styles of Continue reading
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Should We Write about Family Secrets?
At a writing workshop I attended a few years ago, the facilitator gave us this prompt: Write about something that your family would object to you writing about. Some workshop participants expressed discomfort with this assignment. Most hesitated before beginning to write. Their reluctance was understandable because we were being asked to open a long-locked Continue reading
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How to Restore an Abandoned Garden (An Experiment in Second-Person Point of View)
My thanks to Bear River Review, in which an earlier version of this essay was published. How to Restore an Abandoned Garden at a House You Bought in Ypsi First: Realize that you have moved into someone else’s house. Wander through the leavings of another person’s life. When you are a firmly established mid-lifer, get Continue reading
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Why Sometimes It Takes a Hermit Crab to Get the Person on the Page
Voice is that hard-to-define, easy-to-recognize element that contributes to creative nonfiction’s wide-ranging appeal with readers. Memoirists and personal essay writers in particular are tasked with providing readers with the sense that the written words convey a genuine personality—that a real person speaks the message. They have to get the person on the page. When we Continue reading
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Is Writing Good for Us and, if so, Should We Care?
For most of my writing life, I have resisted the idea that writing is therapeutic. Maybe it is, but so what? That’s not why I wanted to write. I wanted to create literary art. I wanted to write for an audience, not for my mental health. I used to think that those who use writing Continue reading
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
If so, this blog is for you.
Person on the Page 