yourpassions.tk

In one more week, 168 hours, we’ll be watching the early returns. This awful election will finally be over, and we’ll begin to have a sense of what direction things may go in the next four years. But I can't help wondering, is the light at the end of the tunnel a train? Each presidential election for the last couple of decades has grown more distressing to me. I can’t recall the last time I voted for a candidate because I thought he or she was well-suited for the job rather than voting for the lesser of two evils. That is more true this year than ever. As I contemplate this election and the state of the nation, I feel a strong urge to record these thoughts and my general political history for posterity. I want future generations to know how troubling this campaign has been for me and why I don’t trust or believe either candidate; why each one scares me, for different reasons. I want them to know my views of the issues of the times. I also want them to know about our family politica...

I’m a great fan of Natalie Goldberg. Not long ago I read her book, Living Color . The book is filled with Natalie’s glorious art, in all its aberrant color. Natalie explains her color choices on page 3: I was delighted one day to paint an adobe house blue. Stepping through the belief that I must paint mud brown, I experienced an explosion of energy and freedom. It was as though that blue paint were a sword slashing through illusion, bringing me into direct connection with the house’s essence. Objects began to dance unhinged from their proper pigment. That man is green, those sheep are maroon, that horse is scarlet, I suddenly wanted to shout with a new-found freedom as I gazed around me from the hilltop where I had drawn the blue house. Her explanation about using color to learn metaphor is hazy, but I was intrigued with the idea of playing with color that way. It reminded me of a post I wrote in September about the origins of the Inner Critic. I felt bold. I wanted to play with color...

Secrets! We all have them. Many will go with us to our graves, perhaps because they are so trivial we forget them. Ybonesy reminded me of a couple with her RedRavine post about a minor mishap she had as a newly licensed driver that she and her passengers attempted to cover up with a Secret. I wrote a comment about early driving secrets my sister blackmailed me with for ages. This type of secret is bush league compared to the Secrets discussed by Polly Kahl in a blog interview with Howard Dully, co-author of the NYT best-selling memoir My Lobotomy . In Part 2 of the interview, Polly explains her early life, the subject of a memoir she recently finished and is shopping around. For me, the meat in her material is her description of the interviews she had with people in her past as she researched and wrote her story. She interviewed family members, neighbors, all sorts of people, and got varying responses. Of one man who was twice her age of 14 when he had sex with her, she says, “...wh...

Who would think that a lifestory or memoir would be co-authored? Rather surprisingly some excellent ones are. I recently finished reading The Turkey Farm – Behind the Smile , a gripping memoir about Jennifer Keefe’s life. Jennifer survived, among other things, the brutal murder of her mother, being raised by the hippie farmer and occasional drug dealer her mother didn’t get around to marrying after she divorced Jen’s alcoholic father, early exposure to drugs, endless betrayals by family members and her first husband, and facing down her mother’s murderer. In the end, it is a story of triumph. You can read my formal review of the book on the Story Circle Network book review site . Quite aside from the content, this memoir is worth mentioning for many reasons. Among them is the fact that it is co-authored with Cheryl Archer, Jennifer’s best friend, whom she has known since grade school. In an account on Citizen.com , the electronic arm of The Citizen of Laconia (NH), the women tell of ...

The holiday season is approaching approaching like a freight train, and legions of people are looking for inexpensive gift ideas this year. Here’s an idea for you: Give the gift of yourself. If you have already been writing life stories, this may be the perfect year to compile an anthology of your stories, lay them out nicely in a single document, and upload them to Lulu.com or Amazon’s CreateSpace for printing. You can produce a fully professional volume in your choice of hard or soft cover for a fraction of what it used to cost. For example, a 220 page paperback in the standard “trade” size of 6" x 9" lists right now for $6.25 base price on Lulu.com. I used Lulu.com last year to publish The Albuquerque Years , a memoir of my life as a preschooler. It is 88 pages, full of photos, a slightly larger, wider page size (7.44" x 9.68") to accommodate the pictures and it sells (without any markup) for $6.29 on the Lulu website. You can also download a free eBook version...

For various reasons, I have not actively encouraged people to post lifestories on the Internet. Today I heard a chance remark that sent my thoughts around a corner. As I talked about lifestory writing with a Senior Center program director, she mentioned how much she wishes she had stories about her grandparents, who are all deceased. “With the Internet, it is so easy to find out facts about people, and who your ancestors were, but there aren’t any stories,” she lamented. “Wow!” I replied. “You are so right. If people put stories, even general ones, on a website, maybe in forty years one of their descendants would find it after everyone had lost and forgotten about paper copies.” The idea of thinking forty years or more into the future about something changing as fast as the Internet taxes my imagination, but it’s worth a shot. I would not post anything highly personal, and I wouldn’t post anything with enough specific information (like birth date and place, address, phone number, and s...

In his essay , Politics and the English Language , George Orwell shared a list of five Writing Tips. Rule #4 is   Never use the passive where you can use the active . This may be the single most valuable tip for improving your writing that you’ll every hear. A search for “passive tense” turns up more than a million links to advice urging you to reword your work and frame it in active tense.> I’m not going to dwell on that advice. I’m going to share the second most important tip: Get rid of the dead would .  An example of dead would follows: In the summer my friend Annie and I would often pack a picnic lunch. Then we’d head for the beach where we would set up our umbrellas. We would rub Coppertone suntan lotion on each others backs and settled onto our towels. Sooner or later the guys would show up and .... Compare that passage with this revised version that does nothing more than eliminate would : In the summer my friend Annie and I often packed a picnic lunch. Then we headed for ...

I’m grateful to Blogster for this blog site, and for everyone who reads it. I’m grateful for a huge long list of other things. I’m a great believer in the power of gratitude — the attitude of gratitude, that is, not just the word. I didn’t always understand gratitude. In fact, although I’ve known the word forever, it’s a relatively new concept to me, as a state of mind anyway. Sure, I always knew the importance of being thankful, but for me, being thankful doesn’t have the same ring to it, the same gut feel, as gratitude, and it's not nearly as powerful. I’m grateful that I learned about gratitude, and have come to understand the importance of this simple emotion in enhancing both mental and physical health. I first began to focus on Gratitude as a specific mindset three or so years ago when an invitation to join the first 42 Day GoGratitude experiment arrived in my e-mail. Each day for 42 days, I received a zany thought-prompt about gratitude. The founders chose 42 days, because ...