by marionroach on March 17, 2010
IT’S HERE. FINALLY. You think I mean Spring, or gardening season, or college-acceptance season, right? I don’t. Maybe I’m referring to prepare-to-get-into-bathing-suit season? Nope. Not that. Or, more to the point, all that plus this one other altogether totemic annual moment: that first run of holidays (as opposed to the November-December sleigh ride) during which memoir writers are given ample opportunities to take notes. Get out your notebooks, writers: Your family is on its way to your holiday table. [click to continue…]
by marionroach on March 2, 2010
I’M SO GRATEFUL for She Writes, the online community where women writers converge and discuss, share, encourage and generally provoke one another into thinking about these writing careers of ours. The site has done wonders for me, including introducing me to writers whose work I already admired. One of these is writer Meg Waite Clayton, whom we currently feature in our TSP Galleries. Why? Listen to how she describes her topic of choice for her three novels: [click to continue…]
by marionroach on February 3, 2010
SOMETIMES I CAN BE SUBTLE. And while no particular incident of that comes to mind right now, I maintain that I can be. Sometimes. I’m sure of it. Though never when teaching memoir writing, and so I know for certain that I was not a bit subtle in a recent class when I simply declared a total moratorium on the self-congratulatory. Let me explain.
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by marionroach on January 21, 2010
THERE ARE TWO QUESTIONS no husband or partner should ask a woman, and both begin with “How many?” Both inquiries are gasoline on the fire that is a woman’s soul, and while neither question should ever be either asked or answered, I’m sure you’ll agree on which of the two is far more deeply private, far more tied up in secrecy, and way more important to the ongoing health of any relationship. That’s right, sister: it’s the question that ends in the word “shoes.” [click to continue…]
by marionroach on January 20, 2010
NO MORE WRITING EXERCISES. Have any of those stupid prompts or morning pages ever gotten you published? Has writing from the right side of your brain, or getting in touch with your angel’s feather, or scribbling pages put you where you want to be as a writer? I doubt it. I suspect that those manners of nonsense have instead stolen what little time you had for writing. How do I know? Because the memoir class I’ve taught for 12 years is filled with people recovering from those very exercises, people whose sole relationship to writing was practicing, not writing for real. Right now, I’m running two Master Classes consisting of a total of 24 people who have made the New Year commitment to finish their books by the end of June 2010. They are writing for real. Want to join the wave of success? [click to continue…]
by marionroach on November 25, 2009
READY, SET, WRITE! That’s how most people think writing a memoir will go, whether it be in blog form, a series of essays or a full-length book. There once was a time when I was terribly polite about this work and what it requires. At cocktail parties when someone asked me what I do, and just above my string of pearls I’d smile and reply, “I’m a writer,” and nearly to a person, he’d say he was going to write when he retired. Nodding, I’d wish him the best with it and slink off to find the canapés, wondering what was wrong with me that I was going to devote my whole life to writing, when clearly people who were smarter than I could put it off until they got around to it. [click to continue…]
by marionroach on November 4, 2009
THINK IN PROPINQUITIES. It’s a phrase that makes me sound more prim librarian than not, I know, but I love that word “propinquity,” and its reminder that you think of your angle shots when the topic you want to write up is Thanksgiving, for instance. Don’t give us a Polaroid of the day, but rather some side view that illustrates how you learned a new way to give thanks. It happened to me when I brought a New York City cab driver to Thanksgiving dinner. [click to continue…]
by marionroach on October 27, 2009
TRANSFORMING LOSS INTO LITERATURE has never been easy, but when three of your best friends do it, it’s worth writing about, as did Nancy Doyle Palmer in this extraordinary interview with Amy Dickinson, Lee Woodruff and Wendy Burden. Memoir writers to the max, two of the three have been on the bestseller list, and after I got an eyeful recently on a reader’s copy of Wendy Burden’s upcoming (Spring, 2010) memoir, I can predict from here that it’s destined for the list, as well. Make a cup of tea, get cozy, and read on. (Photo from Huffington Post.)
by marionroach on October 5, 2009
SCHOOL IS BACK. After a long summer of not teaching, I am back where I love to be, three weeks into a new class on memoir. And it’s a great class: Twenty-one eager writers, all with their own tales, all willing to do the work to get the pieces on the page. And each week I ask the same question: [click to continue…]
by marionroach on August 11, 2009
WRITER’S BLOCK? NONSENSE. There is no such thing. Despite the fact that writing books are chock full of time-wasting exercises with all manners and ways to get you to emerge from that supposed thing, I say nonsense to all of it since there is no such thing. Don’t believe me? Well, come along with the sisterhood of writing and we’ll change your mind. [click to continue…]
IT’S HERE. FINALLY. You think I mean Spring, or gardening season, or college-acceptance season, right? I don’t. Maybe I’m referring to prepare-to-get-into-bathing-suit season? Nope. Not that. Or, more to the point, all that plus this one other altogether totemic annual moment: that first run of holidays (as opposed to the November-December sleigh ride) during which memoir writers are given ample opportunities to take notes. Get out your notebooks, writers: Your family is on its way to your holiday table. [click to continue…]
First time here? Here's the idea: 
No surprise, really, that sisterhood, often life’s longest relationship and always one of its most important, has been the Muse for so much creative self-expression by women, and also by men. 
As the suffix of its name suggests, 
