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annemariepace has created a fun new meme! After chatting with her about it today, I'm giving it an official start. You can read her answers here.Anne Marie Pace's Memory Meme
Examples: Writing Life, Books, Pets, Jobs, Relationships, Food
So here goes mine:
Give me some random number between 1 and 49 and a category and I'll tell you something I was doing or something I experienced at that age in regards to that category. My categories are Writing Life, Pets, Relationships, Food and Jobs. (feel free to ask more than one - this is helping me prime the writing pump.)
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Things to Do
Quotes
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults." Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock." Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
Is your school a MUST-SEE school? Read Oliver's blog and learn how Oliver can come for a FREE school visit!
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Comments
My world pretty much revolved around doing whatever my husband wanted to do. I had no close friends, girlfriends to do anything with, so I just hung out with him, continuing to follow him wherever he went. And he let me. Sigh.
We ate a lot of Swanson frozen dinners, pizza rolls, frozen french fries and fish sticks, chicken nuggets. I could grill hamburgers and hot dogs and chicken. The kids would eat that.
It was the time of snacks after sports events so there was almost always a cooler of juice boxes and fruit rollups in the car.
The town we lived in was very small (back then, not now) and the only fast food place at that time was the Round Table Pizza parlow which I think we kept in business.
I have very few pictures of the kids when they were kids - my ex HAD them all and now they are gone.
How about 27 Relationships?
At 27 my son was 6 and my daughter was 3. Time to myself was at a premium. And I wanted that time because I was trying to write. My son was in school and gone all day but my daughter, who was NOT an easy child, was still at home. I was a stay-at-home mom but I convinced my husband that she needed to be in day care at least part of the time so I could have time to write. (I'm still not sure how I got him to agree to that as it was a huge chunk of money for us back then.)
He didn't care about my writing and in retrospect I think it was one of those things that, as long as it didn't affect him, he really had no opinion.
By that stage in that marriage I understood that I was pretty much on my own with the kids. He didn't get involved with them unless they did something wrong and he wanted to yell at them. He did coach Little League but for the most part, he went on living his life the same way he had before we had kids.
I was struggling with my identity at that time, wondering how it was that I was married with a couple of kids and no idea what I was going to do with my life.
My English teacher was Vicki Hackett and she had us do a poetry project where we found poems we liked, copied excerpts of them, and then found pictures in magazines to illustrate them. We were supposed to do at least a dozen.
Always an overachiever, mine was the longest/thickest book in the class. But it wasn't because I wanted to be the best, but because I found so many poems that I just fell in love with. I didn't want to leave any of them out.
Mrs. Hackett was so impressed she asked if she could keep the book for the summer and have it bound. I said yes but then she never gave it back to me, which REALLY ticked my mom off. It STILL ticks my mom off if you bring it up.
My grandfather would have still been alive food was dictated by him. (My mom and I lived with him.) He was a meat and potatoes kind of guy. He was also a hunter and a fisherman. We had food by the calendar. Sunday was always a roast of beef. A few days later we would have whatever was left of the beef in a shepherd's pie. I was a picky eater and would only eat the meat and the pie crust.
The freezer was always full of duck, pheasants, catfish and venison.
I wouldn't eat cooked veggies so my grandmother would peel the carrots and put them in a little juice glass next to my plate.
In the summertime I couldn't wait for my grandfather to come home at lunchtime and share his Spam sandwich with me. :-)
I don't think I could eat the wild game your grandfather brought home, though. Especially venison. Who could eat Bambi?
We did fried SPAM in the sandwich grilled, the same one we used to make grilled cheese sandwiches with Velvetta cheese. (The flip side of the waffle iron.)
:-)
He was a giant of dope that someone nicknamed Baby Clyde, half quarter horse and half Clydesdale with a Roman nose that only a mother could love.
In the summertime we'd ride bareback down to the corner store for slurpies. That meant riding down a section of road with traffic in both directions. We got hit by a car and I went head-over-heels into the dirt. Sparky was thrown into the barbed wire fence and had 127 stitches. He also wasn't going to be able to be ridden for 6 months so my mom said we had to sell him. He ended up going to a vaulting camp up in Davis.
Whew! :-) thank you for helping me remember.
I love reading your responses, Susan. Great stories, all of them! You've got to be filling in quite a few spaces in your spreadsheet by now.
I used a spreadsheet, too, when I first started brainstorming my memoir. Two of them, in fact. One was a timeline, and the other was brainstormed scenes out of sequence.
What memoir-writing book are you reading, by the way?
What I loved to eat there was a cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake. Which is what I would have when I went with just the girls. (Amazing the calories I could burn off skating every day back then.) But when I went with "the boy" I would pretend to lose my appetite and have just a small coke.
It about killed me to watch him eat everything I wanted to eat (except for his strawberry milkshake for which I never acquired the taste) but for some reason I couldn't eat in front of him. Ever.
Probably a good thing I didn't end up marrying him. :-)
I didn't want a bunch of "how to" stuff because I'm not trying to write a memoit, I just wanted to remember things.
Her book is working perfectly for me.
This prodding via friends has helped. I wish I had 100 questions to answer because I am doing much better at remembering things this way. Oh well - maybe I can do it again once I've built my readership back up again.
I'm glad that you are finding the CD helpful for you.
While living in New Orleans I had sold my first picture book, well, actually I had sold one before but then then company when out of business so it was never published. So it was the first PB that would be in print.
Can I Pray With My Eyes Open? Came out just a about a month before my 40th birthday.
I still had stars in my eyes about the business back then. My agent for that book told me the book would be "evergreen" and in print forever. Alas, last year it went out of print.
I still believed that one book sold to a major house like Hyperion meant that many other doors would suddenly open to me.
I still believed that telling a good story was enough to be a success.
Tell me about Writing Life at whatever age you were when Hugging The Rock was published, if I may.
(these tales are so informative and interesting -- not set of random silly questions on "Getting To Know You" could ever come close to these in matters that matter most).
Of course, remember my post back here on what it means to be a success.
http://susanwrites.livejournal.com/1382
I love these sorts of tales too so I'm glad you are enjoying them. You are helping me in ways you perhaps don't realize. Part of the self-work I am doing right now is to try and break down the wall of so many feelings kept hidden. I need to own my experiences, be here, be now. It can only help my writing.
Hugging the Rock came out in the fall of 2006, just a couple of months after I turned 48.
Life checkpoint - I had been married to my soul mate, my best friend and my biggest fan for about 7 years now. The only time I have ever had a partner who believed in both my ability to write and my right to write. My adult son who did not live with me had been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy a few years before and was having trouble adjusting to the disease. Still does. My adult daughter had a 3 year-old little boy, my grandson, who doesn't know who I am. Will I ever be called grandma? I doubt it. What does any of that have to do with writing? Nothing and everything.
E and I were living in a rented house, much bigger than the little place we had rented for much longer than we ever should have. I had been ecstatic to have a house with a yard for the dog and the cat....two great trees for the cat to climb. Alas he died a sudden death the week we moved in and never climbed a single tree. I had an office of my own but I didn't work there. I don't think I wrote a single poem in that room. It was just a bedroom and I had my bookcases and my file cabinets and a desk for my computer but I couldn't work in the room. It had bad something in it. Even the dog wouldn't go into the room. I wrote most of the poems either on the edges of agendas when in meetings at work or on the couch at home. Longhand first.
Tricycle Press bought Hugging the Rock after a long stretch of time. The book had been circulated by my former agent K.and had nice rejections but no sales. I had an adult book, a NF coffee table book, that I had been trying to sell but K was interested in adult books. So I tried to find an adult agent which got me in via the back door to my current agent. More waiting ensued while new agent read the book, asked for revisions, sent it around, etc.
By this time I had been in the business for over 20 years. I had sold hundred of articles, various books (few of which anyone has ever heard of) and short stories. But for the first time, during the process of editing of Hugging the Rock, I felt like a REAL WRITER. I had been writing for years, submitting and selling for years, even speaking about writing for years, but this was the first time I was ever included in the editorial process. Rounds of emails went back and forth discussing line breaks and the art of commas and whether or not we really needed one more poem to show what Mom was really like. It was probably the happiest time of my entire writing life thus far, culminating in the wonderful book launch filled with so many friends, including a great many non-writing friends, and I wondered how anyone could ever want to do anything else with their life but tell the stories they were meant to tell.
No, those aren't stars in my eyes. Not anymore.
It's just the way the tears glisten in the sunlight as I wonder if I will ever get the chance to feel that way again.
Sad, happy. Up, down. Forward, back.
A handful of paragraphs written by a writer about the writer.
Thanks for this peek inside!
wow.