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Kitchen Table Talk
Aunt Dinny sat at Mother’s kitchen table snapping green beans for our supper. I sat across from her, shucking ears of sweet corn to be steamed, cut from the cob, and frozen. Mother had bought the fresh produce from our neighbor, who had a vegetable garden in his backyard. Looking down at the beans as Read more
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Family Photographs
After my mother died, a box arrived in the mail. I didn’t go back home to Cumberland, Maryland, to attend her funeral, despite the fact that I was her only child. She had a brother and several nieces and nephews who took care of the arrangements. They cleaned out her house and disposed of her Read more
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Another ‘Bad Mother’ Memoir
As the daughter of a bad mother, I admit that I am drawn to memoirs in which a child dishes dirt on a parent. When I saw the title of Molly Jong-Fast’s recently published book How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, I suspected that, like Jennette McCurdy in I’m Glad My Mother Died, Read more
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It Happened to Me; It Happens to Others
Shortly after my poetry chapbook, Falling: A Memoir in Verse, was published, I was asked by the university where I taught at the time to give a reading on our campus. I write about difficult subjects. My instincts prod me to face experiences from my past that cause me the most discomfort and to write Read more
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My Parents’ Hearts: Fragments from a Maybe Memoir
Grandma Swayne said that when she made my mother, she started with an oblong stone. She found it at the edge of Sideling Hill Creek by Little Orleans—the area of Western Maryland where my grandfather was born. She took that stone, smoothed by the creek’s ambling waters, and around it wove the flesh of the Read more
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My Hillbilly Parents: Vignettes from a Someday (Maybe) Memoir
I didn’t know it when I was a child, but my father was what some people might call a hillbilly. Daddy was one of the many Wilsons from Cameron, West Virginia, south of Wheeling. One of the few of them who left their birthplace, he escaped the poverty and isolation of his mountain home to Read more
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?
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