May 2023
-
Writing about Family Secrets: God, Father, Power
My career-long exploration of contemporary memoirs has led me to examine stories in which writers choose to reveal family secrets—those skeletons that families try to keep locked in their closets, those uncomfortable truths that they choose not to share with others. Two memoirs stand out for me as good examples of instances in which a Continue reading
-
Moment on a Bridge in Western Maryland (An Experiment in Memoir)
A police officer stood in the road ahead signaling for me to stop. I had just left the campus of the community college where I taught and had driven less than half a mile when I saw him standing under the freeway overpass. He seemed to be stopping traffic for no reason. No one else Continue reading
-
How to Leave Your Problems on the Page
Do our problems define us? Have our past experiences, especially those that were difficult or troubling, made us who we are? Are they an integral part of our identity? In their 1990 book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, family therapists Michael White and David Epston observed that people sometimes define themselves in terms of their Continue reading
-
The Sign (An Experiment in Memoir)
One year a few weeks before Easter, we in the hills of Western Maryland received a sign. As the new light of a spring morning appeared over the mountains, a man trudged down Baltimore Street in Cumberland dragging an eight-foot log cross. He shouldered the cross beam and leaned forward at an acute angle, pushing Continue reading
-
How to Begin a Personal Essay
No one wrote more provocative first lines of poems than Emily Dickinson. Who could read an opening line such as I felt a Funeral, in my Brain or I heard a Fly buzz—when I died and not feel compelled to read on? When we write introductions for personal essays, our impulse may be to rely Continue reading
-
This Is Only Partly True
Try this. Freewrite about a time when you faced a personal conflict. You might choose a time when you felt vulnerable or embarrassed, a time when you thought that you were treated unfairly, a time when you believed that you failed at something, or any other tension-filled time. Begin anywhere and write about the experience. 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 