LIKE GOOD WASPS, Paige and I really enjoy a Passover Seder, though we have our different reasons to love the celebration so much. Hers is food. Mine, well, it has something to do with an imaginary friend. Don’t believe me?

When Bibbi Geggy came to live with us, he showed up in all the best places, including the Passover table set by our dear friends. Had I known what Paige was bringing to the table, we might have snuck in an extra dinner with her before Bibbi moved on to points unknown. But all is not lost, since we’ve got Bibbi Geggy’s tale of Passover right here for you to read.

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MAKING A LIST. That’s my duty, according to Sheilaa, everyone’s favorite astrologer. And it’s advice I’m comfortable with, since I love making lists. What does Sheilaa have in store for you? Are you brave enough to look?

In her April, 2011 predictions, Sheilaa reminds us that we are in another Mercury Retrograde. During the last one I lost my kitchen. Totally. To water damage, right down to the studs and bare floor, and it was the grace of sisterhood that got me through the project.

Now Sheilaa suggests for me a prioritized list, and I’m good with that, since if you know me at all, you know how I love my lists. In fact, I have an entire category here on my blog devoted to them.

Check it out. And check out what the stars have in store for you.

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ACCENTUATE THE COMPLICATED. Yes, I know, the phrase does not have the syncopation of the wildly more popular (as well as musical), “Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive,” but as far as I can tell, the complicated makes better memoir. You might come to agree with me if you read on.

This is a constant source of struggle in my memoir class. Wanting to be heard, students write the details of their lives, and because these details are the stuff of their personal experiences, they mistakenly think that others will find them compelling. As a result, we get a lot of first drafts that say little more, for example, than how very much a woman dislikes her husbands friends. She doesn’t like one of them in particular. Not at all. She can’t stand him. Not a bit. Nope. And while the phrases of her piece change, they each merely paraphrase the one before, restating the surface issue. To succeed, a memoir needs to go deeper.

“What is it about your husband’s best friend that disturbs you?” I’ll ask, knowing that for the first go-round or two of such questioning we’ll get responses like, “He’s just so, you know, ugh, he just drives me crazy.” By the way, this is also the way my friends communicate. And no, my friend are no more interesting than yours. This is the way we’ve all learned to communicate, and it tells us little.

And yet the piece that uses not liking the husband’s friend as illustration of something probably has great potential, particularly if the writer can get to the heart of the matter – her heart, in this case. Perhaps her husband’s loyalty to his friend touches off great anxiety in the wife. Perhaps this has to do with pondering whether he has bad judgment. After all, whose judgment could be more important to her than his? In a good marriage, he is called upon to share equally in the decisions.

Oooh, now we’re getting somewhere. Feel that frisson, that little charge of electricity in the air? That’s what happens when memoir gets richer, when you take it deeper, and mine it for the universal. Now I’m relating to the tale.

Where did I learn this trick? From Dear Abby, the life-advice columnist’s column. Oh yeah. No one goes to the heart of the matter faster than Abby, answering lifelong issues in a paragraph, daily in my newspaper. I’ve written about Abby before, though previously only in culinary appreciation.

Memoir tips are all around you, folks. Read Dear Abby. You’ll learn a world about getting to the universal in the specifics of your life.

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I’M IN FOR some necessary change. And you know what? Good for me. I’ve been feeling a little stuffed up recently, and not just in my nose with the ongoing winter in the northeast, but in my life. And necessary change is just what is called for, or so says Sheilaa, our TSP astrologer, whose predictions are always spot on. Have you read what she has to say about you?

I’m an Aries. No surprise, with my red hair and fiery nature. Did you know I write about red hair here? And that fiery nature? Well, I’m a memoirist, and maybe this piece is the very best place to read up on just how hot it can get around here and whose job it is to cool me down.

Sheilaa tells me that my wildest dreams will come true, but only if I do the work. Such a  great challenge. Speaking only of my professional life and my wildest dreams, as well as my efforts to achieve those dreams, all this will be given a real outing this year as my book on writing memoir comes out this June, published by Grand Central. And between now and then (and for a good long time after that) you can find me and that book on Twitter (mroachsmith@twitter.com), on Facebook (The Memoir Project), teaching at The Chautauqua Institute as well as at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, and launching a new how-to-write memoir website.

Follow along by watching this space, sisters.

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Me, on the swim team, before I knew the 15 Rules.

ASKING FOR HELP. Oh, was that a shudder I saw go down your spine? What is it about asking for help that sets women on edge? No, I’m not talking about calling a babysitter. I’m talking about asking for real help, reaching out and saying “I’m not sure what to do,” or “I’m not good at this at all,” or “This makes me shake.” Maybe you are an exception to this, but I only recently came to extol the virtues of the skill of asking for help. And now I think I’ll plant a “Help Wanted” sign on my lawn. And why not?

I want help. I need help. But more to the point, I appreciate the help that I get, whether it be with life advice, with my finances, or just projects around the house. This was hard won for me. And so I am adding it to the 15 Rules for Us Girls to Live By.

Do you know the rules?

Do you know that sister Paige broke a big one recently?

Well, here’s rule number 16: It’s a smart woman who knows how and when to ask for help, and who then takes that help and does what she can with it.

What would you add to this?

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THERE WAS A time when our dogs divided us. It happens in neighborhoods, and it did, in ours. Each of us lived behind our own invisible electric fence, keeping our dogs in our own territories, allowing for no mixing of our pedigreed charges. The humans walked, we waved, but we knew little of one another’s lives, except, perhaps, that it was the woman in each home who walked the dog. That much was clear. And for a while that’s how it was: Not much contact, little to say, we walked our dogs along the perimeter of each other’s lives.

We became aware of changes in our homes only via a husband’s obituary in the newspaper, the absence of the truck in another’s driveway, the vision of one of us walking without a dog, but crying. Small inquiries at the hem of the yard, nods exchanged, solace offered, we edged closer. A new dog appeared; there is always something to say about a puppy.  Always.

Then, as that puppy grew and neared his third birthday, he got very sick, and nearly died from something, it seemed, another of our dogs had only the week before, from which she, too, had nearly died, and the exchanges, and the information, cards, a bouquet, a note, and longer conversations ensued.

What we talked about when we talked about our dogs, of course, was love.

And then last week came a pounding on my front door.

“Marion! Marion!” I heard, as I was reclining upstairs in the cool evening.

“Marion!”

My dog and I went running to find my neighbor. Smeared with dirt and tears, having come in from hours of gardening, she had just found her beloved dog motionless on the kitchen floor.

Oh no, I thought. Oh no.

Soon we two were standing over the peaceful body of her hulking animal, all 140 pounds of him. He seemed asleep. He was not. And as we knelt and stroked him, a car door slammed outside and I went out to see our other woman in our dog-friend-triangle, coming up the driveway. But something was odd. My, I thought, how thin she is. How thin. Or something. Maybe that’s not it. But there is some aspect of the equation of her body size that’s off. Just one of those snatched thoughts you get under pressure, the very thinking collapsing as I saw that she, too, was in tears.

And then there were three of us standing over the 10-year-old body of the dog we had known since he was all ears and paws.

Others arrived to help. There were plans made, and calls made, and for 30 minutes or so there was a lot of action, and then for an instant, it was again just us three in the kitchen.

We were going to take the body to the local animal hospital for cremation. Not even we could dig a hole this big, though I know that for an instant we considered it. Keeping him close. Keeping him home. But no.

And then, as we began to pile into cars, came the question.

“Do I look like shit?” This, from the woman whose dog had just died.

Only a woman would ask.

And only two such friends would think before they replied. She had been gardening most of the day, on her knees, in the dirt. She had been crying. It was hot. We all looked like shit. But what do you say to move forward a woman who needs to go say goodbye to her dog? How do you not lie, and yet get her onward into the place she needs to go? How to be tender, yet prodding?

I hadn’t needed to debate this, as the other of us had this clearly covered, gently touching the voluminous shorts I now saw that had been the reason she looked so thin, so fragile, at first.

And then came the gift.

“I’m wearing my dead husband’s swimming trunks. I think we’re good.”

And I snorted. And the woman who just lost her dog belted out a laugh, as did I, a laugh so big that it propelled us where we needed to go next.

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THE SUMMER SLUMP. This is a tough time for writers–that time of year when the most seductive set of temptations to not write beckon: the great outdoors and all its wonders. I mean, who can write in this weather? Who can write when you could instead: swim/sail/run/play tennis/golf/hike, whatever? You can. That is, if you’ll willing to do a simple things. Are you? Then come along.

Despite the weather–or, more precisely, because of it–this is a hallowed time for writing retreats, the very best time of year to get people together in one place, and shelter and feed them long enough to get them working. I love such places, and next week will be visiting my favorite among them to give an afternoon talk on writing memoir.

How to sum up writing memoir in one single talk? Here are my notes.

• Memoir is about territory, and you need to know how to stake out the boundaries.
• Making it up is never an option.
• Along with lying, other known hazards of memoir writing include being self-congratulatory, which is never ever a good idea.
• To get going, how about writing some lists? Lists are good, of course, and always welcome.
• Characterization is key.
• The myth of writer’s block is just that–a myth.
• Knowing when a story is ripe for writing is essential, as I did when I waited 46 years to write the story of my fourth grade play.
• A general pitch session, when they pitch me their tales and I show them how to make them small enough to write.

And we’ll be done.

All except the writing, which I know they’ll do–if they can ignore the weather.

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JUMP RIGHT IN and enter to win a free, signed copy of my new book, Writing What You Know: Realia. All you have to do be in the contest is leave a short piece of memoir at my on-line writing group at Beliefnet.com, where May is Memoir Month. It’s that simple. I’ll see you there.

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USE THE CALENDAR. I’ve covered this topic before, but guess what? Since I love you like a sister, I have made a calendar for you to use. Oh yeah: interactive, digital, online, and with all kinds of quirky (Quirky? Me?) dates for you to use to get those fingers typing up your personal essays. Now you’ve got no reason not to come along and use it. Here’s how.

As I told you recently, I’m teaching memoir online at Beliefnet.com. We’re having a blast. And you’re invited to join, of course, though you can simply lurk if you like, and enjoy the encouragement and deadlines that only a digital calendar can give you. You’ll find it (look for the image like the one just above) in the right-hand sidebar, alongside my Beliefnet group posts…then click on any highlighted day and you’ll see the memoir prompts, as I call them, that I have added in.

And, you can add to that calendar, too. Right here in the comments below, send me those quirky dates that might get you—or someone else—writing memoir. What’s coming up on your emotional high holy days? Let me know, and I’ll enter them in the Beliefnet memoir class calendar with attribution.

So write on.

P.S.–I’m also still teaching at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in New York State (have you heard about Memoirama, a very exciting one day, all day, all-you-need-to-know-to-write-memoir, coming up in June?),  as well as in the pages of my new book. [UPDATE 1/11: My self-published book sold to a major publisher! Thought it is temporarily unavailable as a result, in late spring there will be an expanded version for sale; stay tuned for details.]

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IAM SO EXCITED TO INVITE YOU to come join the just-launched month-long memoir workshop I’m doing on the giant website Beliefnet, where (with a little prodding from yours truly) May has been named Memoir Month! The workshop is called “Writing What You Know” (sound familiar?). Why Beliefnet? Because I believe that writing what you know is the single greatest portal to self discovery. Come take a peek as we gear up, or register to join the free group class.

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