MaMoMeMo
May is motherhood memoir month

Memoir

cut-out 1950s head of a woman

Paper doll Mom

Memoir

Have you ever imagined a character you’re writing, or your mother, as something you might play with, some relic from your past? I’m going through my dead mother’s artifacts when I find a youthful head shot of her, colored and cutout, like the bust of a paper doll. Back before color photography, my mother painted her sepia photos with a set of Marshall’s photo-oils, bringing a rosy glow to her cheeks, shading her lips to set off her straight white teeth, dotting her eyes deep blue, and adding a touch of auburn to her hair. In the 50s, my mother was starlet pretty, a once-upon-a-time model, so the tinted head shot of her, taken before she stood next to the wrong man, is easy to imagine as an iconic paper doll I’d dress with my youngest daughter, the last one left at home. She’s 11, on the cusp of adolescence,…

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Devious Dolls

Memoir

What do you do with your mother’s doll collection after she dies? No one wanted them, except my youngest daughter, but we had to fly home from Las Vegas, and she already had too many dolls for the size of our house. “You can have one box of dolls. One small box,” I said, giving in, trying to think where we would put them when we got back to our down-sized house in the Pacific Northwest. We’d gone from 6 kids to 4, to 2, and now finally, to one; one child who still wants to play with dolls at 11. In today’s grow-up fast culture that’s got to be a good thing, right? A year and a half later, as our daughter turned 13, she asked for only one birthday gift: a dollhouse for her American Girl dolls, which are quite large. But when your quarantined daughter becomes a…

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Being Called Dottie

Memoir

Escape from the murder hornets with me for a moment on this first Monday of May during the sequester and let’s write something fun. Does life feel crazy? Do you have a crazy mother? All good subject matter… Last spring I wrote this: Two men sitting on a bench waiting to play pickle ball greet me as I walk up. You look like Dottie, one says. I was thinking the same thing, says the other. I smile, then laugh. That’s my mother’s name, I say, surprised by the amusement in my voice, the lightness in my heart. She died about six months ago, I add. Oh, I’m sorry. We’re in a group now, all heading out onto different courts calling for players. Well, we all die some time, I say, wanting to keep it light. I don’t want to be comforted by these men I don’t know. Actually, I don’t…

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Writing About Bees

Memoir

I’m writing over at Ekphrastic Mama (LoriLynGreenstone.com) most of the year, and here in May… come over and see what’s happening: Here’s a post about my life as a neophyte beekeeper (not the right word since one really can’t “keep” bees…). https://lorilyngreenstone.com/my-second-swarm/

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bird by bird and word by word- how writing gets done Photo by Samuel Zeller

Day 31 of 31 Days of Memoir

Memoir

This is what I’ve got: A skeleton, a story with a beginning, middle, and end, the bones in place- not as much sinew, ligaments or flesh as I would like yet, or lumps of flesh that will need liposuction later, but enough, definitely more than I’d have if I hadn’t committed to writing everyday for the month of May. Next up: an excerpt from the memoir I’ve been working on about my being my mother’s daughter, and my three daughter’s mother in the face of my mother’s recent death–for an anthology with a due date halfway through the month of June. And more writing, more wrenching. “No matter how self-aware you are, Mary Karr writes in the introduction to The Art of Memoir, “memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self–your neat analyses and tidy excuses.” It’s tempting to excuse myself and take…

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He went off to the Korean War and never came back

Mother’s Only Brother

Memoir

A Memorial Day reflection on the trickle down effects of war deaths He went off to the Korean War and never came back My mother was a high school girl when her older brother went off to the Korean War. Not until her recent death have I thought deeply on how this event affected her young life. She only talked about her brother in brief outbursts, then tears overtook her, as if she were experiencing his death all over again. This mystified me. It was so long ago, why wasn’t she over it already? As a child of 10, I remember awakening one night to the cacophony of her playing both the piano and the organ at the same time. They sat at right angles to each other in our open dining room. I peeked out from the sliding pocket door that separated the hallway to my bedroom from the…

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get back on the horse- Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash

Back to the Bones

Memoir

the skeleton of the story- Photo by Danielle MacInnes After a mid-month slump (something I’ve come to expect might happen now, and maybe because of that it just does…), I’m back in the saddle with writing a memoir in a month, at least the bones of the story. I return to the bones, that inner framework; every story has a skeleton it hangs upon. The backbone of this memoir is a series of three trips made in one month to see my dying mother. All flashbacks and side stories hang from this time frame, the central story. But how to stick with just the bones and not get carried off with the flesh at this point- this is the challenging question. I’ve pondered the pantser vs. plotter assessment and know that I’m not as much a plotter as a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants writer. But I also know that every story, including memoir, has…

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Mother's love letter to Marvin, lost for 70 years
lost love letter 1949

The Secret Letter

Memoir

Tucked into the flap of The Sphynx, my mother’s high school yearbook from 1949, a folded note falls out. It begins Dearest Marvin, an old love letter that feels like a find, a message from beyond the crematorium, a hidden bit of my mother’s life. There is so much I didn’t know, may never know, but here is her voice at 17, penciled onto a piece of yellowed notebook paper from 70 years ago. The letter was lost, or forgotten, a chance find when I noticed the outer binding separated on two sides to reveal a hidden pocket. I’ve been going through my mother’s stuff with renewed interest since she died. When she was alive, her manic meanderings about people I didn’t know didn’t interest me, and I was impatient with her continual complaints. I was interested in her past, but I could rarely get a cohesive answer when I…

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In Over My Head

Memoir

Photo by William Daigneault Ask yourself every once in a while: Am I in over my head? Am I posing questions in my work to which there can never be satisfying, final answers? Am I trying to tackle a project here that is well beyond my capacity as a writer? Am I just a little afraid of the direction that all of this is going? If the answer to each of these questions is yes, then you are heading in the right direction. Steady on. These questions and quote from the The Mindful Writer by Dinty Moore speak directly to where I’m at on Day 8 of Memoir Month.

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Running from Writing

Fitness

Why I run to and from Writing ( photo by nathalie d. mottet) Writing makes me run. Sometimes I sit down to write, get a few sentences in, and want to jump up. Suddenly something seems more important- I’ll be able to work better with more coffee, or water, or a snack, my mind says. This is not my higher calling mind. This is my primitive feed-me-now toddler mind, the one that does not want to work hard. The one who loves pleasure and avoids pain. There is something both painful and pleasurable about writing. But most of the pleasure comes after the work of writing, so I discipline myself to stay on the ball (I sit at my desk on a balance ball) and keep writing for as long as I can. The pleasure, if it comes, is usually later, after I’ve written, maybe when I’m reading over what…

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