This is a place for people who read and write about real life. I’m your host and tour guide, Sarah White.
I’ve been leading life writing groups* since 2004. I feel something’s missing from my life when I don’t have a workshop in progress. The purpose of this blog is to fill that gap, for myself and other writers like me.
Here’s where I share the thoughts I might bring up for class discussion. Here’s where I post the writings of my fearless, peerless, workshop participants. Here’s where I share stories from my own life, as well as my pet peeves, pointers, and personal observations. I hope to create the atmosphere you find in my classrooms.
For more about me, visit my website: www.firstpersonprod.com.
*I’ve struggled with what to call this work. Are we writing memoir, autobiography, reminiscences, life stories? Precise word use is of ultimate importance to a writer. Each of these terms captures something of what we do when we write about real life. But each carries nuances of meaning, that shift depending on the meaning each of us brings to the word. Which one works best for you? Cast your vote!
Hello, Sarah,
I have come to serious writing very late, though that might not be totally true. I discounted some things I wrote as if they were not real writing. Like winning my Senior Essay way back in 1956. I didn’t even keep it for myself, never mind posterity. I know its title, but I tossed the content. So here I am, trying to think of myself as Senior, when the mirror belies it, my energy level denies it, my mind decries it and my husband still thinks I’m beautiful. After a lifetime of thoughtful letter writing of support, condolence, insight and general visiting which brought me admonitions of “You should be writing!” I’m writing my memoir, a tale rich and full of incredible people and of some abusers. It is about abandonment and orphanage, about the triumph of little kids who survive all that to become productive adults. It revealed to me the true personhood of my mother, her strengths and weaknesses, her good and bad choices and her disappointments in her circumstances. But it also showed me I’m writing a bigger story, outside of my family. In this society we abandon and abuse each other casually and without thought or responsibility, with blatant disregard for or interest in each other. It explains the treating of women “Like shit”, it explains the mind boggling divorce rate, the discarding of our children, the disconnect that breaks homes before they are even built by couples who even lack the tools to know what they are supposed to be building. Out of all that comes failure families if family is achieved at all. I had no idea this was what underlies my writing. So what I thought was memoir is a whole other thing!
I write essays in a workshop with Sheila Bender,discovered by sheer dumb luck, and find it to be a healthy diversion from my memoir while that thing cooks and cooks in the back of my brain and spews forth what it’s worked out in regular cycles, ready or not. A full computer crash very recently nearly unhinged me, derailed me for a week and has me rebuilding a lot of what I lost, though thankfully, not my documents which held my memoir first and second drafts and an editing by my teacher/editor
I know so little about the mechanics beyond the writing, so I find even your website for submission of memoir/essay for your contests to be daunting. I think that’s not your fault. There is material I find crazy hard to process, like contracts and instructions on how to operate my Keurig coffee machine. So since my husband will return before your August 16th deadline, he will be able with his engineer’s mind to translate for me so that I get my submission entered correctlly, so it’s not turfed out of hand.
I am so happy to have found your blog and to read the writing of other women. The women of WW2 have a massive story to tell that has been told in pieces and parts by still capable women, but other than Rosie’s Daughters, the segment of the female population that made munitions is not well told. My mother was a boom boom girl. Her gender in that era deserves their own story. This goal will interrupt my memoir even as it is a strong part of it. Who she was before she was widowed at the age of 29 with two kids and one on the way, who she was as a leader in the munitions plants during that war, who she was when she put her kids in an orphanage, who she became when relegated again to a small town, an apron, and countless cigarettes marking her endless boredom after a glimpse of what she could have been in that world, is what needs telling. In your own way you have encouraged me mightily, though you don’t know it.