Four days after my father passed away on May 4th, 2020, I began to write about his passing and his life. As I wrote, more memories came out… more about my mother and father meeting, about my growing up in a State Department family, about the loss of my mother, and more about the destruction of my marriage. There was so much about loss in the natural world, and about extinction–a concept that has always frightened me.
And now, a year + later, here is a whole manuscript, a memoir of loss… Continue reading “Creativity Talks: On Writing a Memoir”
I was connected with Jodi Paloni when I was searching for editorial expertise on a memoir I was writing. “You’ll love working with Jodi,” said our connection. “She is into the natural world, and relationships, and loss like you are.”
In 2009, I heard about Matt Sesow, a D.C. artist who was described to me as “a modern-day Picasso.” I was skeptical (I tend to be skeptical about most things just-met dates tell me). But when I looked at Sesow’s website, I felt as though my fingers had just been stuck into an electric outlet: the paintings’ energy pulsated, jumped and vibrated. His colors burned.
I was in Utah for my birthday this year, visiting my sister. She pulled–from where, I do not know–a pair of Norwegian mittens and a reindeer hat my mother had knit before she went blind, long before she died in 2017.
As the daughter of parents who went through the Great Depression of the 20th century, I grew up hearing–and believing–that “just because something broken is no reason to throw it away.”
Recently, I had to have my computer’s hard drive wiped clean in order to recover some 13,000+ mysteriously missing photographs.