I RECENTLY RE-WATCHED Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s 2010 TED talk on “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory,” which is about the difference between what he calls the “experiencing self” (that part of us that experiences life moment by moment) and the “memory self” (that part of us that remembers our […]
I AM PLEASED AND HONORED to introduce Sara Etgen-Baker. I met Sara virtually when she submitted her work for inclusion in the anthology, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s and 70s. Since then, Sara has been a regular reader of and commenter on Writing Through Life, and we […]
SOME PEOPLE only write their stories when they’ve got nothing to lose. But others write their truth even if they’re risking their reputation, their livelihood or their close relationships in order to do so. Certainly we can see this in books and movies. Take The Help as an example. This […]
All Hallows’ Eve — Halloween — has never meant much to me. When I think back to my childhood, an image surfaces of a dingy, frayed rabbit costume, handed down from child to child and worn until each of us grew too large to wear it. And I remember my […]
The article, “The Centenarian’s Secret,” in the 5-Minute Memoir section of February’s Writer’s Digest Magazine caught my attention. In it, author Diane Speare Triant describes her chance meeting with 103-year-old Nelson McNutt and of subsequently writing and publishing an article summarizing his life story. After his death two years later, […]
I can’t help but breathe deeply. The world is blossoming around me, coming to life through leaf and stem, flower and fragrance. With the late spring rains and near-constant cloud cover, it hasn’t been nearly warm enough for me, but the pink dogwood outside my back door doesn’t seem to […]
It happens all the time. Someone says, “Tell me a little about yourself,” or asks, “What do you do?” or I’m asked to introduce myself to a group, so I grab a piece of my history, mix it with a bit of now, and spin a tale for my audience. […]
THINK for a moment about the sense of touch (the ability to feel temperature, pressure, vibration, and texture) and how much it affects our lives. Now ask yourself, how much of your journal or memoir writing includes the wonderful details this sense offers us? If you’re like me, we don’t […]
MOST PEOPLE carry some form of story around with then. When someone asks who we are, we recite what we do for a living, the roles we play (mother, daughter, husband, father, son, caregiver). And when we tell the stories of our lives, we repeat the things we’ve decided are […]
WRITING THROUGH TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY clarifies perspective and strengthens decision-making skills. We all have times of change in our lives, times when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, when the future seems to be engulfed by a vague, gray fog, inaccessible and maddeningly disconcerting. When confusion seems to […]
AS I WAS LYING ON MY BACK this morning, groaning through one of my yoga stretches, I was thinking about the journal entry I wrote earlier. I had, in the spirit of my weekly Journaling Through Life E-zine, written an entry using one of this week’s writing prompts. The topic […]
