Tag: memoir

Why I’ll Never Write My Memoir

Life can evolve much differently than we expect.

I often fall back on the old adage to explain life’s twists and turns: “(Wo)Man proposes. God disposes.”

I started writing this blog over a year ago to grease my writing wheels. One day – I told myself – I would write the “great North American memoir.” Admittedly a grandiose ambition, but if you are dreaming anyway, dream big say I.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to learn by writing a daily blog for a year. What I eventually learned surprised me. In terms of writing my own memoir, my lust and ambition had subsided.

I realized I had already written a memoir, in fact, but not in a conventional way. My memoir was written down in a thousand daily journal entries in dozens of journals.

In plaintive emails to friends and supporters. In counseling sessions. Family not so much. Family was more often the subject of painful emails than the recipients.

When the time came for me to set out on a blog writing journey, my intention was certain. I would eventually gather all the words I wrote after that pivotal year and compile those musings in a book that was sure to become a New York Times bestseller.

That bestseller would put me on par with revered writers Mitch Albom and Anne Lamott and dozens of other insightful spiritual and psychological authors whose wisdom I’d ingested over the years.

As you can tell, writers must have considerable hubris and ego to believe sharing their words and insight might have any universal appeal.

I had an unstable and violence-riddled childhood. My parents were unstable and troubled. So they passed on what they knew to me and my two sisters. In logical order, those qualities carried on in me through adolescence and young adulthood and beyond.

Underneath all of the emotional muck that had built up inside me over years, I held onto a single belief: I was worth something and would one day make a contribution to the world that would justify all the pain and upheaval I had lived through and caused.

That once seemed like a noble, if presumptuous, ambition. I now realize that it was an acquired survival strategy. A decades long “Hang in there” mantra that kept me moving forward when I all I wanted on many days was for the ground to open up and swallow me whole.

For the life of me, I could not figure out how a seemingly bright and well-meaning sort, such as myself, could go through daily life and repeatedly make so many dumb and incomprehensible life choices.

I couldn’t figure any of it out until I learned about the impact trauma and neglect can have on a child’s delicate and emerging psyche. I couldn’t figure any of it out until I learned there such a thing as “personal boundaries.”

More pointedly was the learning that it was up to me to set those boundaries for myself and my life and that those boundaries were supposed to be inviolable. And if they were to be preserved and strengthened, it would be my job to do so.

Duh.

How odd these revelations must seem to “normal” readers. Those who grew up with “good enough” parents who provided the necessaries of life and a safe home environment without fanfare or expectation of laud.

Only much later in life did I come to realize my narcissistic mother had an addictive and almost pathological need to hear what a great job she was doing and had done for her children. It was her survival strategy and often tenuous attachment to sanity.

My life today is 180 degrees from the life I lived as a child. I have everything I need and much of what I want. I have a strong and loving relationship with an equally flawed and delightful human being in my husband.

I chuckle a little when I realize my assertion about enjoying a happy marriage would have had as much currency in my family as claiming the moon is made of green cheese. Incredulous and ridiculous my mother would surely say. Yet, here we are.

I am not old enough to have arrived at the rigorous stock-taking phase in old age about what my life was, the part I played in it and how I feel about it all. In truth, some chapters and paragraphs are too painful to revisit. But not all by a long shot.

I had an interesting balance of experiences, adventures and learning opportunities that balanced out the tragedies. There are many stories from those positive experiences that are worth sharing.

Trips to Europe, Egypt, India, Nepal in my youth. Argentina, the Arctic, China, Korea and Hong Kong in mid-life. And now the biggest trip of my life by marrying, pulling up stakes in my home and native land and immigrating South. Who knew it could be even more educational (if by times utterly perplexing) than any of my earlier travel adventures?

Writing and publishing “the” memoir has receded in importance. I have internalized the lessons learned by wrestling with the myriad of issues my childhood forced me to confront and deal with.

That I did more or less successfully is infinitely more gratifying than seeing my name and image plastered on a book cover in bookstores across North America. (Remind me, by the way. Are there still bookstores out there? I’ve been out of touch.)

I now know that all published works are a compilation of applied intellect, imagination and creativity. Even and perhaps especially, memoir. I now write when Spirit moves me to write. Like today.

As for my childish dreams of fame, fortune and global admiration by millions of strangers? That ambition has been traded for the hundred daily satisfactions and frustrations of a happy and peaceful daily life filled with loving friends and family of choice.

For me, that is a more than satisfactory trade-off for the bright lights and big city.

Been there, done that.

The Bookee

The way I see it, if KN Literary Services is a purveyor and “booker” of book coaches, then I am a “bookee.” Yesterday I had the long-awaited ZOOM consult with KN Literary Services. It was productive. I met with Publishing Consultant Sarah Bossenbroek. I was heartened when our fifteen minutes expanded to half an hour without protest or polite dismissal.

Mutual respect is essential to a fruitful working relationship. My conversation with Sarah felt like a promising start in that regard. Sarah went over the challenges she sees in my writing project that we both feel I face when writing this memoir.

To start, the acknowledgment that there is much too much material. To address this, she advised me to think about this memoir as step one and park the remaining eras on the back burner once I’ve wrung all the juice out of one of them.

Sarah identified three distinct “eras” and stages in my life that she feels will be worth exploring: 1) Childhood 2) Young adulthood 3) Early days of parenting.

Each of those life chapters presented unique challenges and lessons for me. All were teaching experiences, eventually. Exceptionally well-disguised at first. What I took from Sarah’s summary was that creating an outline would be an effective place to start. I could then make lists of scenes, stories, and incidents from which I can pick and choose. I get to decide which scenes to develop and which to leave on the literary cutting room floor. I have to say that sounds like it would be helpful. I’d been leaning that way anyway.

I was also heartened to hear Sarah already has someone in mind with whom I might be a good match. Once I put a deposit down on our contract, Sarah will connect me with her and see if we are a good fit. If her first book coach pick doesn’t work out, Sarah assures me she will seek out another. And so on until I have an official book coach and partner

This book-writing project is getting real, folks, now that there is money and a contract involved. As my husband said to me early in our courtship, “You know a man is getting serious when he lays money on the table.”

I have moved out of the giddy excitement phase about starting off on this book-writing path. I am moving inexorably into the “real work” phase. It is odd how my mind processes words differently when it knows one day there may be in front of an external reader out there. I am having more internal discussions about what to include and what to exclude from the narrative. What moves the story along. What is extraneous and what is interesting enough to keep in.

Earlier I made a comparison between book writing and making a cake. The “birth-day” is today. I have to assemble the ingredients. I need to decide if I will proceed with KN Literary Services to commit and engage a book coach.

Where I did say earlier that engaging a book coach might be premature, I now believe the investment might be the difference between getting the book done or not.

Going forward, I will let you know what I decide. Full disclosure, I am leaning heavily into the “onward” camp. I’ve come this far.

Margot’s Argot

In an earlier post, I talked about my pleasant interaction with a book coach following the Perfect Your Process Writing Summit. Presently, I’m neck-deep in researching my subject matter, dates, places, events, and so on, and learning what I need to do to eventually get myself over the book publishing finish line. That seems like plenty to tackle for now.

But I’m not gonna lie. Having a knowledgeable someone to hold my hand and kick my ass in the doldrums could be helpful. Even better, it feels great to think that there would be someone else I could blame for my procrastination. Or failure.

The first challenge in finding such a person is imagining who that special someone might be. In that regard, bringing a book coach into your life feels a lot like falling in love and setting up house. Without all the sexual tension and dirty dishes. So how does an aspiring author go about acquiring and hiring such a person? Make no mistake. Acquisition is precisely the word. There is a marketplace out there with no end of well-meaning book coaches hawking their wares. And just like any corner of the capitalistic marketplace, the offerings are widely diverse.

Some book coaches have developed their own “processes.” They lure you in with their assertions to the secret world of publishing. Soon you are learning the special language of the publisher and the publishee. Just follow them, step-by-step, they exhort, and you shall be a published author in no time flat. When I came across one particularly comprehensive sales pitch, I checked out their website. I have never been so confused in my life.

That link led to this welcome page and then you sign up for the community here and, while you are at it, submit some of your writing so that others can critique it and that page will lead you back to a page where you can critique the work of others and if you get your draft submitted within this timeframe, you may get some of your money back and … whew. I am exhausted and I haven’t even talked to anyone personally yet. Maybe I’m not supposed to.

I have always had mixed feelings about argot. That special language professionals use to deem you an “insider” or an “outsider.” Think lawyers, doctors, and engineers. Professional training is in large part, language training. Argot – according to Merriam-Webster: “The language used by a particular type or group of people: an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group.” Well, that definition seems straightforward enough. I read further in the American Heritage Dictionary. “A secret language or conventional slang peculiar to thieves, tramps, and vagabonds devised for purposes of disguise and concealment.” Now that resonates a little too close to home. I am a recovering lawyer after all.

This is not to suggest that book coaches do anything improper or untoward in offering their offerings. But it does have that uncomfortable feeling of “one size fits all.” The promise that anyone can write a book but only if you follow their inherently, foolproof methodology seems a bold statement to me. You can’t argue with success, of course.

If I can be persuaded that countless numbers of illiterate aspiring authors were trained up to become New York Times #1 bestselling authors by following a certain prescription, I would eagerly jump on board. But neither words nor authors adhere that closely to prescriptions in my experience. There is the X factor that makes Stephen King who he is or more accurately the writer he became. He developed his voice over years and years as most successful authors do.

And no one who devours a steady diet of Stephen King’s books necessarily wants to read F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not even The Great Gatsby in Grade 11 English class. After graduation, even less. There is a fairly marked stylistic divide between those two particular genres. As is to be expected in the alchemy of developing a voice.

A book coach may be a good idea up the road but seems premature for me. A conventional first draft book manuscript runs around 50,000 – 70,000 words. I will be more comfortable hiring a book coach when I am at least halfway to that word count, which I presently am not. What happened to the days when intrepid authors sat in their grottoes and submitted query letter after query letter in vain to numerous disinterested publishers and toiled in oblivion for years before their great talent was recognized and, finally, fame, stardom, and wealth inevitably followed? Ya. I don’t really think that ever was a thing except for the favored few. Particularly for those with a trust fund or a wealthy spouse.

For me, for now, I will continue to toil in obscurity in my grotto. Seriously. Given the stage I am presently at in writing this book, getting my word count close to something that eventually impresses me that I am a real author is more urgent. Getting there would at least convince me I am becoming one. PS This is my thirtieth consecutive blog post. That accomplishment is helping me feel like a real writer. In any case, it’s a start.

Ladies Lunch

The memoir progresses. This vignette shines a light on the hypocrisy-ridden social class into which Mom had married. In a small, mid-century Maritimes town, she could be a shocking, therefore, slightly suspicious character. Yet fitting into Fredericton society was my mother’s highest ambition. But she was determined to do it her way. The path that country-born little girl chose to achieve that ambition, which she eventually did, was fraught and not without considerable collateral damage. Mom’s strategy in navigating those social strictures could be clever if alienating – both for her and for her family. In a bigger city, she might have been featured in a woman’s magazine as a rising feminist. But this was the Fifties and the widescale feminist movement was many years away. Mom had to make do.

“Once she had married a lawyer, Mom became a de facto member of the local “lawyers’ wives” club. These women’s only social connection was what their husbands did for a living. In the Fifties, that was considered enough.

The lady wives all arrived shortly before lunchtime toting their contribution to the potluck in Pyrex casserole dishes. The crisp cotton knee-length dresses they wore were usually set off by a dainty string of pearls. Their huge diamond wedding rings were on full display. Lunch would be set up on a buffet side table and then each lady served themselves before sitting down.

I imagined a Jello aspic with ham and marshmallows as part of the menu. After lunch, several of the wives, who lived to play cards, would stay to smoke and wile away the rest of the afternoon playing bridge. Aside from the aspic, gossip was the real main course.

One day, the discussion moved front and center to the outrageous and indiscreet affairs of Edith A. who was one of their own. She was married to powerful local lawyer Francis A. who was generally regarded as a not-nice guy. There was considerable sympathy for her deplorable marriage as he was not only not nice but not terribly attractive. It seems Edith sought comfort outside her marriage to balance Francis’ emotional – and it was said – sexual inadequacy. The ladies cooed and clucked at length about “that Edith” and her indiscretions. “A disgrace,” they all said, nodding in agreement “Her poor children. Putting them through all that. And so publicly.”

Mom and Edith were once close friends. That is until Edith slept with my father some years later and the friendship became difficult to sustain. But at this lunch, Mom was still on friendly terms with her.   Mom felt a rush of protectiveness and outrage over the ladies’ savaging her dear friend, Edith. After listening quietly for a time, Mom piped up and directed a question to one of the other lawyer’s wives. “Ann,” she asked innocently. “How many times a week do you and Pat have sex?”

There was a collective intake of breath at the table. The lawyers’ wives were clearly aghast and embarrassed. Picking up on their shock and disapproval, Mom looked innocently around the table with a perplexed look on her face: “I’m so sorry. Did I say something wrong? Everyone was talking so freely about Edith’s sex life, I thought there wouldn’t be anything wrong with discussing our own.”

Mom neither smoked nor played bridge. However, I guessed that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t stay after lunch to smoke and play cards with the other lawyers’ wives. Or perhaps it was because her ham and marshmallow aspic wasn’t quite up to snuff. Hard to say.

Graphs and Goals

In writing memoir, it is useful to have a tool to help you plot out the course of your life. It doesn’t mean everything that happened in your life will go into your book. Heaven forfend. But it is like taking a sentimental refresher to remind you where you were, what happened, and how it affected you.

Memoir is not an autobiography. Frankly, most of us don’t rate a fully-researched, detailed book that combs through every age and stage of our lives. That is reserved for global movers and shakers like presidents and Nobel prize winners. Most of us wouldn’t want that type of scrutiny anyway. I sure know I wouldn’t. What I do know is that there were key incidents in my life that shaped me. That mantra I had in the 80s about women “having it all” ruled my life for years. Turns out it wasn’t fully true.

Only in retrospect can I see what a bill of goods we women were sold. As we are just living our lives and trying to make ends meet, it is hard to see the significance of the events happening around you at the time. The power of hindsight is 20/20, so we can look back and see more clearly how a particular thing happening led to what happened next. And so on and so on until you die.

So at the suggestion of author Joanne Fedler, I am setting out to create a graph of my life from birth to the present day. Fedler advises us to create a spreadsheet starting with the year of your birth, your age in each year, significant events that occurred in your life, and also what occurred in the world at large. I remember how significant Woodstock was to me in 1969, mostly as a war story reported by those who had actually attended. I was dazzled by their coolness. Looking back now, I see it was a significant cultural event for a whole generation and marked an era of widespread social change. The music of Woodstock was just the tip of the iceberg.

I find it fascinating to reminisce with old friends about how we were and what we lived through. We had all the perfunctory life milestones to go through at the same time as big things happened in the wider world: marriage, babies, career-building, loss of parents, then friends. The predictable trajectory was often marked by outliers such as random tragic deaths close to us, a random financial windfall or reversal, or stupefying betrayals that shook our belief systems to the core. No matter how charmed, few of us get through life completely unscathed.

So I suppress my intense hatred of MS Excel to capture the signposts I need to guide me on my memoir journey. Signposts and goalposts. That is what comes next. By when will this book actually be written, revised, and published? Those goalposts keep changing.

I started this blog with the goal to have my own book in my hands within a year. I might not need that much time. The truth is I have been writing this book all my life. I filled countless journals as I struggled to make sense of the family craziness going on around me. I sent so many emails to friends that I’m convinced that by printing them all out and doing a deep edit, the book’s salient plot points would emerge. I have signed up for a couple of online challenges with the expectation that I’ll have a working first draft in a few weeks, not months. We’ll see about that.

I already know the theme of the book. Surviving the unsurvivable. Gratitude for life in spite of it all. Looking at brokenness with compassion and empathy – for myself and for others. There is so much out there about the value of forgiveness and to me, it’s pretty easy-peasy. You forgive your enemies not for their sake but for your own. I don’t want the damaging people in my life to take up any valuable real estate in my head any longer. I won’t likely have coffee with them, but I have forgiven them.

Effectively it has been a series of choices to get better instead of bitter. The only bitters I enjoy are Angostura in a glass of tonic water and ice with a generous slice of lemon. That is a beverage I fully plan to enjoy at each milestone that this book-writing process occasions. Chin-chin.

The Book Thief

Last night, I watched the movie The Book Thief for the first time. As an unrepentant film junkie, I don’t know how this gem escaped my notice. Talk about resonance.

Liesl, a young German girl, finds herself at the beginning of World War II about to be separated from her birth mother and grieving the very recent death of her little brother.

It turns out she has been given up for adoption to another German family who needs the labor. At school, Liesl’s illiteracy is revealed and she suffers the humiliation of her classmates. All around her, Nazis are pushing forward with their evil agenda.

The film reproduces the horror of Kristallnacht: “(German: “Crystal Night”), also called the Night of Broken Glass or November Pogroms, [refers to] the night of November 9–10, 1938, when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and property.

The name Kristallnacht refers ironically to the litter of broken glass left in the streets after these pogroms.”  https://www.britannica.com/event/Kristallnacht

It was chilling to see the deliberate destruction of people’s homes and businesses and the abuse heaped upon Jewish Germans. As we all know now, it got much, much worse.

Equally chilling was the scene where books were heaped in a huge pile in the middle of the town square and ignited in a sickening symbol of cultural and intellectual annihilation. Liesl begins a subversive journey to not only learn to read but to write.

To do so, she must stoop to theft and subterfuge on several levels that include hiding the fact that a beloved Jewish neighbor is now a refugee living in the basement. The evil and inflicted agony and base stupidity of Nazism oozes from every scene.

Not without significant losses and heartache, Liesl prevails and survives the war when many of her loved ones don’t. She grows up, marries, has children and grandchildren, and, as her legacy, leaves a lifetime of books she has written.

It is a beautiful story of survival, the triumph of love over evil, and a demonstration of the power of books and stories to help preserve our humanity. It stupefies me that promoting humanity as a fundamental value is still so threatening to some who have more materialistic and baser beliefs about what really matters in life. Without others, we ain’t much.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day. It was a day of significance for me this year least of which was that it was a day for pulling practical jokes.

The NaNoWriMo Challenge began yesterday. The entire month of April is to be devoted to producing a 50,000-word draft manuscript by the last day of the month. For a person who thrives on deadlines, that’s a pretty strong incentive.

It was also the beginning of a 30-day blog writing challenge that comes around annually every quarter: https://30dayblogchallenge.com/start-challenge/

I have been writing this blog for 21 days. What’s another 30? Yet another carrot at the end of a stick. I celebrate the expanding community of writers and writing that I am finding online.

As a learning junkie, every like or comment on my blog or a new bit of information that comes my way is like salt on my supper table.

The problem is, I like to repeat, there is too much information out there. So, just like salt, I must be mindful of how much to ingest.

I am determined to tease out the insights gleaned from all this information. I’m finding guideposts for my own life, my writing process, and perhaps, occasionally, an insight or two that may resonate in readers’ lives as well. High ambition.

Scenes vs Chapters

It was validating yesterday to hear a book coach encourage us to write scenes instead of chapters to complete a memoir. I really like this approach.

My background is full of scenes. Scenes with my sister over ice cream. (I was holding two. So sad that I dropped “hers” and not mine.) Scenes of battling parents. Schoolyard scenes of playing marbles and pounding a tetherball into submission. Scenes of barely contained laughter at a funeral.

In his eulogy for my great-uncle – a man he did not previously know – the minister solemnly intoned about his “deathbed” conversion to the “word of Jesus Christ, Our Savior,” I tried to hold my legs tightly together and my arms folded across my chest to hold in the laughter. I beelined for the bathroom outside the sanctuary and barely made it inside before blurting out an explosive guffaw.

If you knew my great-uncle, you’d get the joke. Not a reverential man. When I returned to the pew – red-faced, shaking (mostly with embarrassment), and with my head hung down – a kindly lady patted me on the arm and said, comfortingly: “There, there, dear. It’s alright. He’s gone to a better place.” I smiled wanly.

I could devote a whole chapter of scenes to funerals. Both the hysterical and the horrific. The tone usually depended on the circumstances of the decedent’s passing. The funerals of older people were generally hushed and respectful. Mourners murmured platitudes about the blessing of a long, well-lived life. Sometimes tinged with relief. When young people died, however, the church was often filled with anger as well as despair at life’s cruelty and unfairness. Unfortunately, there are all kinds.

The online writing webinars happily consumed much of my day yesterday. A shoutout here to Perfect Your Process Writing Summit host and organizer Daniel David Wallace. Of particular value was learning there are countless helping resources should I start to falter in this writing process. It is a common writer’s complaint that we start to flail mid-process with our material, our fears of insignificance, rejection, motivation, and numerous et. al. of all types

As the webinar day wore on, other authors, influencers, book coaches covered a wide range of subjects. There were helpful sessions about how AI may actually relieve the drudgery of non-creative writing. The world is still in a postpartum period after the birth of this newborn technology. We’re all adjusting our lives and anxious to see how it/she/him grows.

Today, a seven-hour marathon writing session is planned on Zoom. instead of our usual 3X Weekly Writer’s Accountability Group. The same 3X weekly folks have committed to this extended writing session today to see how deep and far our writing will go inside that container. I’m pretty excited.

As I have committed myself to birth this memoir, the Universe is faithfully bringing me insights, support, solutions, and guides that I may well need up the road. The rest is up to me. You may not go for that wooey-wooey framing of this process as the Universe’s doing. That’s okay. We all draw motivation from somewhere, whatever we choose to call it.

What Color Should My Mother Be?

Final night at the Murphy Writing School in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The twelve memoir students read in the dance studio what they worked on this week. Throughout the readings of these diverse pieces of writing by diverse writers, I was transported to eras, countries, and life situations to which I had no previous exposure or knowledge. If I did know about them at all, my knowledge was glib and superficial.

These memoirists shared raw, wretched, deep, delicious, hilarious, poignant, wry memories and observations. We spent time in a psychiatric hospital with one writer tonight. When the writer’s husband left her for a 17-year-old girl shortly after the birth of their first baby, she mused that there was only one difference between her and her patients: she had the keys.

A young first-generation Vietnamese told the wrenching story of the long COVID his mother was suffering. She shunned conventional treatment because she followed the orange-headed leader’s claim that bleach would kill the bug and cure the problem.

An older American fellow revealed what he went through to extract a psychiatric evaluation to keep him out of Vietnam when he was drafted. Agemates of his were not as fortunate. One Vietnam veteran casualty was buried close to his family’s plot in their hometown.

A woman of Filipino descent shared her father’s World War II stories. One, in particular, underscored his futile attempt to stop a Japanese pilot friend from committing kamikaze, or, “divine wind.” It appears young Muslim suicide bombers have stepped up to weather the mantle of martyrdom.

Another woman mused tenderly about the inevitability of death for us all and how she wishes to embrace it when the time comes. A woman living with a stroke wrote about constant vacillation between hope and despair with her and others in physical therapy. A woman raging against the physical vagaries of age spoke hilariously on behalf of hundreds of thousands of aging women. In her diatribe, she spoke convincingly about the necessity of undergoing the same sort of renovation for her body as her house had recently been through.

The poetry readings last night and the memoir excerpts tonight had similar impacts: both were powerful and highly humanizing. School director Peter Murphy says, “Yes. This happens every time.” People’s personalities and characters emerge and their issues take shape when they focus on their writing And even more powerfully when their work is witnessed. Murphy continued: “Whether it is a smaller group like ours with under 50 students, he said, or workshops with 200 or more. There is magic in the doing of the writing. It changes you and it changes those who hear or read it.”

That, at the very least, is my dearest hope and ambition. Has the title of the post confused you at all? Well, me too. if I’m honest. I meant to talk about where my mother will likely fit in my life story and how I am going to capture the wealth of events and anecdotes. For a physically slight person, she was fairly imposing and affecting. But why do I have to decide what “color” she will be is TBD – to be decided. A next step in the book writing process.

As I leave this nourishing workshop environment today and head back to “real life,” you’ll just have to hold on to your questions until I fully explain tomorrow. I believe that is called a cliffhanger in LitSpeak.

Getting Away to Write

Nestled on the Atlantic Coast of Florida, the setting of the Atlantic Center for the Arts is a writer’s paradise. Florida itself is a sun-filled paradise in the middle of March for those who make their way here from chilly northern climes. Coming by car, I turned the corner into the Center and the imposing black iron gates opened with the assigned code. Wooden walkways lead to various studios and buildings at the Center and, happily we are warned, keep one elevated above the resident rattlesnakes. I now dearly wish I’d brought my Wellies. The room is both spare and inviting. All the necessary amenities like a coffee maker, microwave, small fridge. Both windows in my room look out on a cacophony of gangly palm trees and exotic jungle-like greenery. The copious greenery is equal parts soothing and stimulating. I’ve come to this writing retreat as a Writer-in-Residence to focus on writing and to rub shoulders with 42 other writers for six days. The Murphy School of Writing is based at Stockton University in New Jersey and had hosted retreats here for decades until COVID. Now the School, like the rest of the world, is getting its’ feet under it again and holding in-person retreats here and in New England and New Jersey. This retreat offers two dedicated workshops specializing in Poetry and Memoir. Led by Writing School Director Peter Murphy – a Welsh-born American – and author Nancy Reddy respectively, the students meet and write together for four hours daily. As the Memoir workshop was full, my goal here is to inject much-needed rigour into the writing process I’ve undertaken. I aim to produce the book that has been simmering in my head for decades about the strategies I used to overcome an unstable and fractious childhood. There will be quite a lot of juicy bits about pitfalls and backsliding along the way. The process feels like subjecting myself to a university course while chasing a degree again. I know my focus and several scenes have already solidified. The required research has started. The themes are emerging and clarifying. The necessary discipline, according to nearly every writing guide I’ve ever read, is to write for at least two hours a day until a draft manuscript is produced. The greatest writing advice out there for those in need of guidance? “Put your bum in the seat.” “Shut up and write.” Having a manuscript in hand, there is more work ahead to review what’s been written, edit, polish, rewrite, edit, proofread, cut, and review again until there is a collection of words that hangs together to ultimately attract several readers’ interest. That’s the goal at least. There is alchemy involved, I know. And part of the alchemy is starting down the path with the belief that with constant application and elbow grease, my goal will be achieved. And there are all of you, of course, to keep me on the straight and narrow. Hopefully, along the way, there will be sufficient tidbits of information about writing and general observations about the ludicrousness and beauty of life to keep you engaged. Or at the very least, even if you are bored stupid, you will be kind enough to refrain from saying so. Writers need that kind of support and encouragement.