I was an only child in Chicago in the 1970s. At age eleven, I lost my mother to cancer, an isolating and then emboldening — (maybe not quite empowering!) — experience that I mine in my writing. My memoir, Girl Next Door: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Early Loss, traces the bleak changes to my life and, later, my reliance on my inner compass and the strength instilled by my mom. I’ve finished revising it and am ready to send copies to six beta readers for their feedback. I wrote this book to share with other motherless daughters and those who…
“GIRL NEXT DOOR” is “The Tender Bar” meets “Harriet the Spy” plus lyrical natural beauty. A mom who dies in her 40s leaves her little girl with inner strength to get through the hardest of times, and to make a safe-enough path to adulthood.
Playing music was the most beautiful way I’d watched people express connection and togetherness. I had a persistent fantasy of playing guitar and singing for someone I loved. I couldn’t have articulated that, and I wouldn’t have dared to anyway.
I’m participating in a public reading on Zoom, Wednesday July 19, starting at 5 PM. I’ll read an essay titled, “I Was Lucky,” part of my story of growing up in the shadow of childhood loss. I’d love to have an audience of friends and acquaintances and readers of my blog. I’ll send out the Zoom link in a group email in a few days. To get the Zoom link, enter your email into the Email Update form on the left side of this page, which will also let you receive occasional short pieces of my writing. Thank you! Note:…
Today I met in the final Zoom session of a 10-week writing workshop program called Pocket MFA. It’s a new organization, founded by poet Joshua Roark, and I was in only the second cohort. Their goal is to provide writers an accessible, supportive version of the rigorous core of an MFA in Creative Writing. And they did. I was in a class of four writers and one teacher or “mentor.” We were trained in a specific method of giving feedback to a peer’s work: 1) Readers share moments of meaning from the work, vivid bits, parts that hit us in…
The scenarios I thought I confronted were:
1) Be erased by meeting the standards of a universe in which I can’t exist; or
2) Resist and prevent rites of passage that can neither be resisted nor prevented.
One way to build your writing community is to share and boost the work of other writers and artists. Panelists at AWP23 agreed this is one of the most rewarding activities.
By the time I wanted to apply to college, which was after I’d already graduated from high school, I believed my mom had been wrong about me. I wasn’t extra smart, in fact I was unable to do what it took to really get somewhere.
The “Fran” character in my memoir goes from being a secure little girl whose boisterous, tomboy personality shines, to feeling as lost and frail as an abandoned baby animal, then through a meandering path of uncertain steps until she recognizes herself again as the smart, outspoken girl she was meant to be.