He went off to the Korean War and never came back When her only brother went off to the Korean War as a medic, my mother was a junior in high school. They lived in the small town of Geneseo, Illinois, southwest of Chicago, near Davenport, Iowa. Born late in…
May is Motherhood Memoir Month, a time to celebrate motherhood by writing about it. Or maybe you don’t feel like celebrating- write about that. Maybe you’d just like to read some tall but true tales until you get inspired, or yarns for commiseration. You’re welcome to read mine. With six…
…there is something about writing a personally challenging piece (on motherhood, of course) that feels deeply refining, like fire.
Dear Mother,
I should’ve cleaned your fingernails before you died. I know dirty fingernails never bothered you, but in that last photo I took of you where your hands wrap around the ceramic mug of fresh coffee I brought with real cream, instead of the styrofoam cup of instant with powder packets you’d been getting—-in that picture the gleam is back in your eyes, feisty again, but a dark, dirty rim lines each fingernail. I regret not offering to clean your nails, but at the time it didn’t occur to me. You had lots of life left in you. You could’ve cleaned your own fingernails….
She wasn’t the mother she’d wanted, but she was the mother who’d shown up (from Wildcat by Amelia Morris). What does that prompt you to write?
The other day our middle daughter came over to celebrate our youngest daughter’s 15th birthday. Arielle asked what we were having for her birthday dinner. Chicken Alfredo? I said, knowing it’s her favorite. Where is the chicken from? Arielle asked. She’s taking AP Environmental Science in her freshman year at…
Do you ever draw as a warm-up to write? It can relax your reticular activating system (RAS) that makes writing seem like a risky activity, creating resistance and procrastination. Try drawing and breathing for just three minutes before you start writing. You might find it is the ticket in to…
Are you ready to write, even just 5-10 minutes exploring your story in May? If so, bookmark this site and subscribe to my newsletter… which I admit I’ve never actually sent out. I write my blog posts (here and more regularly on Ekphrastic Mama https://lorilyngreenstone.com/) but I don’t bother with…
“…It almost killed me.” -Harry Crews, author of A Childhood: The Biography of a Place Both shocking and understandable if you write memoir, right? Have you ever felt gutted when writing your stories? The natural reaction to pain is avoidance. Quite often we flinch and move away from that hot…