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This graphic featured on Rosemary D’Amato Karas’s Pinterest site caught my eye. It looks like this list originated as a brainstorming exercise to teach students what respect is and how to show it. I’m sure it worked well for that purpose. I saw something else too – a dandy exercise to prepare to “show” respect in your writing rather than “telling” about it. For example, a first draft may include the line, “He didn’t show me any respect” without going into any detail or telling you what that means in this particular situation. Perhaps on the second draft you might write, “He kept interrupting me and answered his phone three times while I was trying to talk to him. I finally asked him if he was listening, and he snarled ‘What do you think?’ He had no respect at all!”   You may notice that I turned the list inside out in that example and wrote about the lack of respect. That’s the neat thing about exploring a concept like respect. You can use opposites. For example, interrupting ...

On a recent trip to Bolivia and Peru, our tour group stopped at the mysterious Sillustani burial towers near Puno, Peru. As we hiked up to the site, I was amazed to see a young alpaca nearly as big as the mother root for swigs of milk between mouthfuls of succulent grass. I was equally amazed that Mom didn’t seem to notice. Female  Alapacas are obviously mom enough, I thought, zooming in for a closer look at a picture I took. My thought harks back to the May 21 Time Magazine cover . Its provocative picture of Jamie Lynn Grumet breastfeeding her three-year-old son as he stands on a stool created a predictable storm of controversy. The caption, “Are You Mom Enough?” added fuel to the fire, seeming to throw down a gauntlet to advocates of early weaning. A quick search led me to an article showing that the proper age and process for weaning alpaca crias is as controversial among ranchers as the human topic. You know where this is all going: story time! I became a mother just as L...

Amber Starfire is a valued colleague who shares my passion for life writing and photography. Her recently published book, Week by Week is a treasure trove of tips and prompts to supercharge your journaling. (Read my review here .) In this guest post Amber gives tips on how to get even more value from past entries as you work on lifestories and memoir. Journal writing is good for so many things: sorting out problems, recording life events, healing, self-reflection, and personal growth. Often, we process events and emotions in writing and then stack them on a shelf or in a box and forget about them. We rarely make use of our previous entries. So, what would you say if I were to tell you that your journals are full of precious memoir-writing gems just waiting to be discovered? Journals are wonderful places where images, metaphor, sensory details, as well as stories about events, people, and places are mixed in with the emotional ups and downs of daily life. Try this: Browse jou...

Lynn Henriksen, aka The Story Woman, is a woman with a mission. As she explains in a blog post on Telltale Souls.com, since her mother’s death over a decade ago, she has been collecting “Mother Memoir” stories. She publishes collections of these stories, and teaches people how to write them. Although I have not yet read it, her newly released how-to book, TellTale Souls Writing the Mother Memoir , is said to be a comprehensive guide to remembering and capturing the essence of your mother’s story – and probably your own in the process. Memoirs about mothers abound. Since nobody came into this life without a mother, it’s hard to imagine writing a book-length memoir that didn’t mention the author’s mother at least in passing, but some dwell on the mother-child relationship in more depth than others. Flavorwire.com recently posted a list of “10 of the Best Memoirs About Mothers.” Many titles may be new to you, but chances are you’ve read (or at least heard of) The Glass Castle , by Jea...

This guest post is reprinted by permission from Fresh Views, a monthly newsletter published  by Sharon Eakes, an internationally acclaimed  personal and executive coach and a treasured personal friend. Her focus this month on “snippets” is reminiscent of terms like watershed moments, turning points, or shimmering images used as story prompts and memoir organizers. You’ll be hearing more about snippets in an upcoming post or two based on epiphanies I experienced during a recent trip to Peru.   Snippet: a small piece of something, a bit, a scrap, or fragment THOUGHTS I recently visited my daughter, Lisa, in California. Driving to the coast, we passed the Lagunitas Deli. I had a vivid memory of going there over twenty years ago on the way to a picnic. I asked the clerk, “Do you sell single rolls?” and he handed me a roll of toilet paper. “No, no, a sandwich roll,” I laughed. And he gave me the other kind of roll. Nothing worth remembering about that encounter, but I remember w...