Author, Editor of Memoir & Narrative Nonfiction
April 26, 2010 I’ve detoured off the path of my parents’ journey and traveled across Austria to Vienna, a city I’ve wanted to see ever since my study of music in college. Access to internet has become harder and harder to maintain on this trip.…
April 19, 2010 I have been thinking about story today, about what qualities I attributed to my mother and her story telling, and how those qualities differ from the way I tell stories. I suppose all this pondering is to be expected since my mother…
April 17, 2010
I am sitting in a wifi cafe in Florence. These are not nearly as common in Italy as in America.
I am freezing.
I had forgotten how cold cities constructed of ancient stone can be. They retain the cold, reflect the cold. I am wearing layers and still chilled to the core.
I’m supposed to rave about the sites of Europe, right? But the fact is traveling is full of minor inconveniences that often become so big they don’t seem minor—like I’m so cold I can’t get warm even under four blankets and a quilt at the hotel, i.e. a convent turned hotel. That translates into centuries of old stone, cold old stone.
A high point though is the garden, a square of pristine quietude in the heart of the city, wisteria vines tangled above walks, trunks the size of trees, blooms hanging low perfuming the gentle green of an early Florentine spring . . .
April 15, 2010 I sat for an hour in the Sistine Chapel today. I have been there before, and I felt blessed to be back a second time. It is a place people visit once if they are lucky. I have been doubly lucky. My…
April 14, 2010 Saw the Caravaggio exhibit today (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571 – 1610) at the Scuderie del Quirinale. Big crowds. Great exhibit! Only about twenty-five paintings, but they were perfectly representative of what the exhibit terms the three phases of his life and…
April 13, 2010
I am in a sea of sound, the elegance of Italian, the gutteral punctuations of German, the fluidity of French. I am in heaven listening and listening and not talking. All around me the pulse of Rome is padded by voices like music. I walk for miles and listen.
April 10, 2010 I made it to Rome. Plane was late leaving America. I’ve been up for for about 32 hours. I fall asleep at the keyboard, and my head tumbles forward, if I pause to think, so I keep my fingers moving . .…
April 5, 2010 My mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, metastasized to the bone, on January 14, 2010. Forty-five days later she was dead. I spent those last days with her, as companion, caregiver, friend, daughter, cook, nurse, and gate keeper to all…
“The only way to transform our enemy to become our friend is dialogue, respect,” the Dalai Lama said at a conference in Seattle on April 11. “That’s a way of compassion.” As a writer and teacher of the art of memoir, these words hit home…
Click here to read my latest blog post about Owning Your Story.
What I learned when the last of my family died . . .