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Blanche Lippincott, 100 years old (photo by Susan Lippincott Mack) Although the number of centenarians is rapidly growing, having a hundredth birthday is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience for very many people. My mother-in-law, Blanche Lippincott, is one of those people, and I pause today to celebrate with her. Blanche was born 100 years ago in Tucson, in the newly admitted state of Arizona. Her family soon moved to Ray, Arizona, a now deserted copper mining community, where they lived until she was about twelve. When the the copper industry declined, her parents, along with a few aunts and uncles, decided to move back to Philadelphia. After high school she worked for a few years in the accounting department for the telephone company. In 1937 she met and married Ezra Lippincott, and they lived happily ever after – although ever after came a bit sooner than expected. He died unexpectedly early in 1969, leaving her a widow at only 57. During those happy years they enjoye...

“You grow into your story.” I was surprised to hear these words come from my mouth the other day as I met with a new group of lifestory writing students. I’d never thought of things quite this way, and their truth was a bolt of psychic lightening. The sentence emerged during a discussion about the need for every story to have a “moral.” Moral is a word with a lot of baggage.  We came to an agreement that strong stories include some element of change or growth as a result of events and experiences included in the story. As mentioned in the previous post , it isn’t always apparent what that insight is. I pondered for a couple of days as I reflected on the lesson learned in “ Grabbing Grannie’s Dishes .” Only as I adapted this previously written story for the Gutsy Story contest, did I realize that the initial version, written a dozen years ago, was an extended vignette, lacking the insightful closure that adds impact and meaning to a full story. As I explained to the class, I was...

Most people might reflexively answer “Sure!” to the question, “Are you a gutsy person?” then be hard-pressed to come up with an example. Others would simply demur, “Not really. I’m more the quiet type.” Sonia Marsh, author of the memoir Freeways to Flip-Flops: A Family’s Year of Gutsy Living on a Tropical Island , plans to change all that. Sonia has begun a campaign to help people find their inner gutsiness, and she’s doing that through story. She’s running a monthly writing contest, asking readers to submit their own gutsy stories. Each week she selects one entry to publish in her blog. At the end of each month, readers vote to select the winner of the  month. I need your help! Her contest is bearing fruit. My heart went pitter-patter at the thought of writing a gutsy story for this contest, but for the life of me, I could not think of a single one. I pondered for weeks before the cork popped from the bottle. As soon as I sat down to write, another came to mind – then another. I...

In two Part 1 , and Part 2 of this series, noted essay expert Sheila Bender, author of the highly acclaimed  Writing and Publishing Personal Essays ,   introduced the concept of essay writing as an adventure of personal discovery and described three freewrite exercises to start this process. In this final post, she explains how to harvest the riches of these exercises to open further possibilities for your writing. Mining the Three Freewrites: Whether you have done these freewrites in the course of one writing session or over several days, to find out what the freewrites have to tell you about an essay you might write, comb through them and jot down images and phrases that interest you. When I look over what I have written, I am grabbed by:  “overwhelmed,” “dangerously close to the white line,” “shoulder to shoulder,” “heavenly bamboo,” “thorned bougainvillea,” “the plants survive” and “like me.”  I don’t know why exactly, but these words and phrases jump out.  Next, I’ll chal...