
Memoir Workshop
I had the pleasure of offering a Memoir Workshop yesterday with this beautiful group of souls, at the Kensington, PEIĀ Senior Surfers Group.
Author | Editor | Freelance
I had the pleasure of offering a Memoir Workshop yesterday with this beautiful group of souls, at the Kensington, PEIĀ Senior Surfers Group.
“Just pretend the camera’s not even there,” Andrew said, “Just talk to ME.” Like we were at the campfire. Like we were on ski hill. Places we usually go with our four-year old boys.
Things I’m feeling are: terror, excitement, cautious enthusiasm, and more terror. In today’s marketplace, being a writer means being an entrepreneur. There’s the blogs, there are interview to organize, photos to paw through, and web pages to update. This is the total opposite of sitting in my office, in candlelight, finishing the intimacies of my memoir.
You are where my heart is happy, my next best paragraph, my acceptance letters, and the reason i continue to do what i do.
In the afternoons we heard vivid and poignant lectures by Puerto Rican writers,activists, self-published, well travelled teachers and candles in their small but important circles there, fighting for justice, for identity, for freedom.
The story is mixed in shades of darkness and stormy seas of confusion and grief, following a path of color and culture as the main character, Mo, finds the freedom to liberate the heavies in a sort of reality check taking stock of what she really has left in this world.
She wants to climb the fences. First, it was the skate park. Could she do it? The throws of adrenaline that she must have felt climbing higher and higher, as i pretended not to look on, my heart pounding, the half pipes and rails seeming miles beneath her.
According to the Stanford School of Medicine, every single cell in our skeleton is replaced every seven years. Does that mean that that I was a different person this time, on that beach in Tofino? A unique person with hopes and dreams, looking back on the shadow self of years behind me?
When I returned home from walking the dog last night, the dusk had turned to dark.