My Personal Creative Nonfiction
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Five Things I Love about My Aging Body
First, a confession I’m known to whine about my weight, lament my diminishing strength, grumble about aches, and otherwise hate on my physical self. If you spent much time around me, you’d probably laugh at my claim that I love my body. I know that when I thought about it, I laughed. What is there… Continue reading
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Why We May Doubt Our Memories of Childhood Trauma
When I was growing up in my mother’s large, tightly-knit extended family, I was subjected to sexual abuse. Mother warned me not to tell anyone what was happening to me. Instead, she made up a story — a tale of a child nurtured and cared for by a kind, loving family — that she instructed… Continue reading
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What Health Experts Get Wrong about Seniors and Solitude
“Chuck all that!” says GCHiker in his YouTube video Why I Avoid People. Responding to health experts who advise older people to maintain social contacts to avoid a variety of age-related health problems, GCHiker heartily disagrees. An intrepid hiker and solitary wanderer, he says he has grown quite comfortable in his later years with being alone. Confessing that… Continue reading
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The Myth and the Truth about My Great-Grandpa
I always knew something was wrong with the story. When my mother described Great-Grandpa to me when I was a child, he seemed like a mythical hero — mysterious and larger than life. She spoke of him with admiration, but reluctantly, as if his story was a secret with which I was too young to… Continue reading
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Dr. Rick, Can You Help Me? I’m Becoming My Mother
Aunt Peach used to tell me I was Daddy’s girl. When I was a child, she reminded me often that I looked like my father. “It’s good luck for a little girl to look like her daddy,” she said. At the very least, I suppose, it suggested that her mother had stayed on the straight-and-narrow,… Continue reading
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Retired Women: Snow Us In, But Don’t Count Us Out
January’s selection was Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere. As I read it, I anticipated what some of our book group members might say about the story. When women in a book group get to know each other through the texts they read, their reactions sometimes become predictable. Eloise, a former concert cellist, might identify with… 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.
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