SOMETIMES THE NEWS is simply too stupid to be ignored. Don’t agree? Did you read what the writer V.S. Naipual said recently about women writers? No? You should. He said that no women writer is his equal. He did. Not even Jane Austen, he claimed.

Yes he did. And after you stop laughing right out loud at his inane, self-serving remarks, you might, like I did, get just the eeensiest bit pissed off.

Not one to ever burn any book ever (except that one algebra text book after squeaking by in high school; really it was more a celebration than a bonfire), I’m thinking up uses for my considerable collection of Naipul books. As padding between the air conditioner and the window sill, perhaps? As a step stool, to reach high up on my shelves to get to the truly great writers? Open, on the floor, as a bathmat, to absorb my castoffs from the shower?

Got ideas, sisters? I’m making a list. And you know how we love those.

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ON THIS DAY in 1934 is the birth of one of the goddesses of conservation, Jane Goodall. She was 26 years old in the summer of 1960, when she arrived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa to study the area’s chimpanzee population. We are grateful every day that she stuck with it, and designate her a sister we admire. You know we do this on occasion, yes? No? Either way, please read on.

In 1977, was the founding of the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation. They provide ongoing support for field research on wild chimpanzees. Its mission is to advance the power of individuals to take informed and compassionate action to improve the environment for all living things. The Institute is a leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats and is widely recognized for establishing innovative community-centered conservation and development programs in Africa and the Roots & Shoots education program in more than 70 countries. Want to get involved? This is the place to visit, but don’t go alone. Take a child and make an introduction to one of the most admirable people in the world, Jane Goodall. Change a child’s life. And a chimp’s. www.janegoodall.org

How do I know this? I write and record the daily almanac piece entitled The Naturalist’s Datebook, heard exclusively on Martha Stewart Living Radio, Sirius 112/XM 157. Listen up. And see my other TSP almanac pieces here, including a piece on how I change my diet each month at the full moon, as well as at the new moon.

For the other sisters we admire, please see here.

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FULL SNOW MOON. That is the name of February’s full moon. We take our names for the full moon from the Native American tradition, and this one seems obvious, especially this year, when there has been so much snow, including in places that rarely sees such events as snowstorms. But this moon has also been known as the Full Hunger Moon, which addresses the tragic circumstances when something occurs to affect what food was put up for the winter, and supplies have run out, resulting in widespread hunger in the villages. And while the name of this month’s moon may need no explanation, maybe the moon’s position could use a little. Have you noticed that the moon’s position in the sky seems to change with the seasons?  The path changes as one month leads to the next having to do with the sun and the tilt of the earth. That being the case, full moons are very high in the sky at midnight between November and February and low from May to  July.

How do I know this? I write and record the daily almanac piece entitled The Naturalist’s Datebook, heard exclusively on Martha Stewart Living Radio, Sirius 112/XM 157. Listen up. And see my other TSP almanac pieces here, including a piece on how I change my diet each month at the full moon, as well as at the new moon.

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LOSING A SISTER. The mere phrase makes me bow my head and mumble words of desperate hope to never confront such a tragedy. And yet, of course, we’ve all lost sisters, whether biological or befriended, and the chill of it stays with us forever. News came last week of the loss of a friend, the loss to all who knew her of a fine, brave woman, mother and sister. Lost to breast cancer. We are bereft, and reach out as we can to sisters everywhere to bang your drums, or shake your fists, pray, mourn, remember, or do what it is you do when another fine woman is taken by this – or any – dreadful disease.

I had not seen Sue in nearly twenty years. And so I feel almost as though I am intruding on the grief of those with whom she was most close; her sister Anne, for instance, who bravely posted the terrible news last week as she awaited a flight home. I bow my head to you, Anne, and to your love.

I sailed with Sue for many years, and she was always the single most dependable, funny, interesting and charming one among us. On the phone last week with the captain of the boat on which both Sue and I crewed, he and I agreed that she was the only one of us who created no drama, and yet supplied such joy. I admired that she went to Africa for the Peace Corps. I celebrated her marriage and the birth of her daughter. We sailed together through our twenties and into our thirties, and we talked for days and nights that we hoped would last forever, and I like to think that in that time, from her own exemplary steadfastness, I learned something of how to be a friend.

This is a genuine loss to the world.

When we began The Sister Project, we did so at the beginning of a holiday season, and almost immediately heard from sisters everywhere that while they were glad to be part of the conversation, we had neglected the toughest part of sisterhood, that being the loss of a sister. So many women wrote to us of this that it prompted me to run this post. We call it The List That Helps with Loss.

It is all I can think to do right now, and I offer it in memory of our friend Sue.

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A KITCHEN RENOVATION can go only one of two ways: either to transcendent awareness or to divorce court. And our renovation was not elective. Not a bit. Ours was thrust upon us by severe acute water damage, and suddenly I found myself saying the one thing you do not ever want to say in your own kitchen.

“Rip out the floor and take the walls down to the studs.” That would be the brand-new plywood on the floor and the newly painted walls, since when the disaster occurred, it did so in the midst of a simple cosmetic upgrade.

After I heard those words come out of my mouth I went back up to my office and wept.

And then I called my sister, who said all the right things, and then told me to call Paige. That was right before Christmas, and on Boxing Day I was sitting with Chloe Smith, Paige’s mom, mapping out a whole new kitchen.

Chloe Smith of Lowe’s, this post of thanks goes out to you. And to the sisterhood, since it was the Margaret-to-Paige-to-Chloe laying on of hands that got me to a place where I can laugh, if only a little, about what all has been going on in my house.

I am one of the few people I know who has said forever and ever that I will never, under any circumstances, undergo a kitchen renovation. To me, all design leads to a death of art. What do I mean by that? That you can busy yourself forever designing the place in which to work and in doing so, put off forever getting to the work. I’ve seen this in my friends who build music studios in which to play, and offices in which to write, and it has lead me to this grand unified theory that I took awfully seriously about how this all causes a great gap in creativity.

Yeah, well, you can see here just what an ass I can be. But I was transcended out of this, I promise you, the minute I opened the first crate and ran my fingers over the creamy, clean surface of a honeysuckle-colored cabinet door; the non-pitted sink nearly made me swoon right into it,  as did the soft-closing silverware drawer. Then there is the counter top, whose color is the precise shade of the eyes of…oh well, you can see where this is going.

I’m changed. I’m grateful. And it was the Sisters in the Kitchen who got me here. Don’t know them? Meet us here, and give me some suggestions of what to cook first in my brand new kitchen.

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WHO SAYS SISTERS don’t arrive in the cabbage patch? That’s where I found this beauty, which reminds me of no one so much as my sister, Margaret. Organic, beautiful and snappy, while this little darling is not quite as cute as the one I found in the spring, here’s my adopted sister for autumn, the closest thing to Margaret since, well, Margaret.

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TWO SISTERS PLUS ONE BOOK equals two soups. This is the sisterly cooking math we did when our friend and uber-agent Kris Dahl sent us both a new book, and two households went on a pretty much liquid diet. But oh, what liquid!

Love Soup by Anna Thomas is a wonder, and just out by W.W Norton & Co. If I could fit the camera in my kitchen, I’d photograph the counters, stainless steel prep table, and kitchen island, except you cannot see them right now but for the produce I’ve hauled home from the CSA, harvested from my garden, and also from my compost (oh, I love those compost volunteer plants!) in just the last two weeks. I was thinking of learning to juggle squash, though that would only take care of one species of the problem, since are we are also happily full of potatoes, leeks, onions, garlic, kale and chard.

I don’t have to learn to juggle, after all, since soup (as all cooks know) is the great reducer.

So, what did the Roach sisters cook up this week? I went to an old favorite, the leek and potato, and tightened up my otherwise by-memory version, adding fresh thyme and a splash of cream, as recommended by author Thomas. Margaret mastered the book’s “green soup with sweet potatoes and sage” (the author uses lower case titles, so we will here, as well).

Thomas has made the cookbook vegan-friendly; it includes 160 vegetarian recipes, which is marvelous, since Margaret, a vegetarian, prefers this while I, a hot-blooded, meat-eating omnivore, am good either way.

And you? Love soup? Here’s your book. (And here’s what Margaret thought of her copy.)

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NOT ASKING YOUR SISTER is dumb. I should know. I learned that lesson when our daughter was 5, and told me that she wanted to be a boy. Actually, it was more specific than that. She told me she wanted a penis.

We were driving home from pre-school when she made this announcement. An eerie silence descended in the car. Having recently polished up my death-and-dying discussion when our dog went to her great reward, you’d think I’d be better than this. I mean, honestly: What’s a mere penis when compared to the great beyond? I’d covered Heaven really well, and yet here I was, stunned into silence as my daughter listed off the names of the seemingly fortunate boys in her class, ticking them off on her little fingers.

“Ben has a penis,” she said. “And Alex has one. And Brian.”

As we pulled into our driveway I bought a little time by suggesting we wait until we were in the house. Inside, coats off, it was here that I made my tactical error. This was when I should have placed that lifeline call.

Instead, I over-corrected just the eensiest little tiny bit.

“Darling, I have a book that will help us with this discussion.”

I admit it: I went looking for my battered copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” that cosmic map of the female body, and not only that—oh, no—I flamboyantly launched into an ambitious preamble to how the sexes differ, actually mentioning Sigmund Freud (remember: the child is 5. Five.), teetered around the topic of sex, and dropped in more than a smattering of anatomically correct names of body parts, all the while amusing myself with a judicious omission of any easy shots at the pros and cons of the penis itself.

Oh, I was on a regular roll.

Until I noticed that my child had her hand on her hip and was shifting her weight from side to side, looking a little bored.

“Where was I?” I asked.

“The penis.”

Defaulting to some maternal sincerity, I crouched down in that earnest way mothers without a clue often do, asking, “Why do you want one, dear?”

“Because the toilet seat is so cold,” she said.

Ah, yes. Well, there is that, isn’t there?

Had I taken that minute I’d been given when we first arrived home and called my sister, Margaret, or my friend Elizabeth, I’d have perhaps saved some face, by being reminded by one of them to simply address the issue my child was raising, instead of learning the hard way that sometimes what a child needs from a parent isn’t a Big Answer, after all, as much as a little understanding.

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I TOLD THEM, AND I TOLD THEM, and I told them again. And still the doctors did not listen. I awakened during procedures; worse, I never fell asleep. Then, finally, science backed me up and I had something to show my doctors before they brushed away my claims of both needing more anesthesia and feeling more pain than most people. Turns out that I am one of a rare breed of mutants who does. Are you?

Redheads. We know we are different. Getting others to know it too has always been an issue. And while I wrote about all of this in my book, The Roots of Desire, pieces of this research keep resurfacing, each time causing the same astonishment. People are shocked to learn that redheads are actually a breed apart, though any redhead could have told you that.

Now we can tell you why, since last week the story was back, this time on CNN health. This time relating the inability to knock out a redhead with her fear of dentistry. Well, duh.  And while any redhead could have told you that we are harder to subdue than any blonde ever wished to be, now we can show you the facts on why.

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EVERYONE HAS A STORY. It’s true. And the evidence has never been more obvious. Have you seen the size of the scrapbook aisles at Michael’s or A.C. Moore? Have you read any blogs today, or watched as the number of printed personal essays continues to climb, even as the number of pages of our newspapers and magazines continues to decline? But are we writing it as well as we’d like, or are we just saying more? Would some how-to tips help, perhaps?

To ensure that you’re not just writing for height and distance, but actually saying something to your audience, is what separates those memoirs of interest (printed or digital) from those that just blah-blah blah all over the page. We know the difference when we read it, of course. But how to foster that ethic as we write?

To help, I am offering memoir tips, honed from my 11 years of teaching a memoir class to more than 500 students who have assuredly taught me more than I have taught them. The sisterly thing to do, of course, is share those things that have been shared with me.

One of the first things I learned teaching memoir is that most people are hung up on the fact that there are two sides to the story. Yes there are. At least.

If you live in a family you know that even the dog has his point of view. So, with that in mind: How do you get those competing sides under control? Try this tip. And now, how to get only your side on the page? This might help.

And with all those versions whirling around, whose story is it, by the way? Asked and answered right here.

Is your sense of privacy being sorely tested as you write your family’s tale? You’re not the first writer to consider this. Maybe this will help.

As I write this, I realize I’m really suggesting that there are guidelines for writing memoir, and that they include everything from what makes good memoir, to how to shape your characters, even if you know them well.

These guidelines include:

• Writing it all down. Keeping notes and how to organize them.

• Learning that just because something happened doesn’t make it interesting.

• Choosing topics that are right under our noses.

• Selecting details that enliven your pieces.

• Wrestling against that great desire to make it all up.

• And my very favorite device of all devices: making lists.

How is your memoir going, whether it’s an actual manuscript, or a particular series of blog posts, perhaps? Need some help? TSP is dedicated to helping our sisters and brothers get their story on the page, or screen. Keep coming back. There’s lots more where these came from.

Write on.

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