How to use this Page

Author: Jayne Amelia Larson
Publisher: Free Press
Genre: Memoir
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4001-4
Pages: 224
Price: $28.99

Author’s website

Buy it at Amazon

When Jayne Amelia Larson hit a lull in her acting career, she turned to chauffeur work to fill the gaps. This provided her a unique opportunity to drive the Saudi family visting Los Angeles for their summer vacation. In Driving the Saudis, she relates some of her experiences in this unusual assignment.

There are some interesting moments in this narrative. When one of the princesses does not handle American currency properly, it’s obvious she feels some shame. There is a bond that develops between the nanny and Larson, while chaperoning the princess and looking out for her best interests. And there is unexpected kindness that the servants show her as they all become weary of the endless work. There is also lavish spending, elective surgeries, rudeness, and high expectations that all who serve the family will do so quickly and efficiently. The long hours and many demands take their toll, but the promise of a hefty cash tip keep Larson going until the very end.

Unfortunately, this book gets off to an extremely slow start. Larson shares too much about herself, her education, and her career. She offers her thoughts and opinions of the family and their behavior, but there are few actual anecdotes. These are brief, and leave no lasting impression of the individual family members. Instead, we are given just a sketchy overall picture of the family and their collective behavior.

Reviewer: Alice Berger

Add a Comment

& giveaway contest

Judy Mandel’s story begins years before she is born. A horrifying accident begins the string events ultimately leading to Judy’s birth and her story Replacement Child. A plane crashed into the family’s home, leaving one daughter severely burned and another dead. The death of the child leaves a hold in the family that threatens to tear it apart. In an attempt to fill the painful gap, her parents give birth to Judy, their “replacement child.”

In this powerful story of love and lies, family and hope, Judy L. Mandel tells the story of being the child brought into the world to provide “a salve for the burns.” As a child, she unwittingly rides the deep and hidden currents of her family’s grief—until her discovery of this family secret, years later, changes her life forever, forcing her to confront the complex layers of her relationships with her father, mother, and sister.

Paperback: 320 pages

Publisher: Seal Press; Reprint edition (March 5, 2013)

ISBN-10: 1580054765

ISBN-13: 978- 1580054768

Twitter hashtag: #RCmandel

Replacement Child is available as a print book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.



Book Giveaway Contest:

To win a copy of Replacement Child, please enter using the Rafflecopter form at the bottom of this post. The giveaway contest closes this Friday, April 5 at 12:00 AM EST. We will announce the winner the same day in the Rafflecopter widget. Good luck!

About the Author:

Judy Mandel's writing life began as a reporter. She later worked in public relations and advertising and somehow found herself in corporate communications at various insurance companies, where she earned a living for 20 years. Her memoir, Replacement Child, grew out of early essays and the promise she made to her family to tell the story.

Find out more about the author by visiting her online:

Judy's website: http://www.judymandel.com/Home.html

Replacement Child website: http://replacementchild.com/Home.html

Judy's Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/judy.mandel

Replacement Child Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ReplacementChild

Twitter: http://twitter.com/judymandel


-----Interview by Crystal Otto

WOW: Judy, when you originally started writing your memoir what was your goal for the project? Were you initially intending to write a book for publication or did you think of it more as a personal exercise or capturing family history for your children?

Judy: I always thought of it as a book that would be published. At the same time, I looked at it as a way to give my son an understanding of who I am, and a view of how his life may still be effected by his family history.

WOW: Geneology is popular right now, what advice would you give to others as they piece together their own family histories?

Judy: I didn’t happen to use any of the geneology tools that some use, but I would say that stories emerge from the details of a family history. The general facts are usually not that interesting, it’s the individual stories of relationships that I think make for the best family histories.

WOW: What made you decide to seek publication for your story?

Judy: People have always been intrigued by the story. You read headlines like this every day. Shootings, accidents, plane crashes like the one in my book. But those people disappear from our view after a day or two. The news marches on and we lose track of the lives that have been changed forever by that news event. I felt that the long view aftermath of a tragic event, and how it changes the lives of those involved, possibly for generations, was an important story to tell.

The story of my parents struggling through the grief of losing their seven-year-old daughter, nursing their two-year-old back to health and then through years of reconstructive surgery—that was part of the story I knew would give others hope. My sister Linda, who survived the plane crash and fire, but suffered for much of her life as a result, is a story of courage that I felt a responsibility to tell. As with any courageous tale, it gives us all strength.

Then, after making the connection to being a replacement child, I also realized that my story could be helpful for other replacement children who have had no clue to the origins of some of their own personality traits and life choices. There truly is no support group for replacement children, or much recognition of their issues.

WOW: Judy, how do you feel about your place in the family after having written Replacement Child?

Judy: It is comforting to realize through the writing that I was indeed some kind of healing force, especially for my mother. My relationship with my father was complicated, but I have found peace with that as well as I understood more about what he went through. Since my sister’s Linda’s death, who died in 2009, I think I relate most to the quote from Job in the bible: “I alone am left to tell you” the story.

WOW: Was it difficult to face emotions and truths about your family while writing Replacement Child or did you find it healing?

Judy: Both really. It was almost like a magic trick that I would write my memories of certain incidents and would see a new truth emerge. When I had just begun writing and understanding some of my complex feelings toward my father, it was painful when I realized that in some way he resented me for not being his first born daughter. It was definitely a journey to come out the other side of that hurt. My mother’s secrets were not as unsettling as you might imagine. Writing through some of our times together was a pleasure that kept her with me through that part of the work. I was actually sorry to let it go.

WOW: The memoir genre is experiencing a boom in popularity. Why do you feel so many readers are drawn to memoir? Do you enjoy reading memoir and if so, do you have any favorite authors or books?

Judy: Real life is still fascinating. As they say, “you can’t make this stuff up.” In fiction, if you told some of the stories that are actually true, people would say they were too far-fetched and could never happen. In memoir, there is no arguing whether it could have happened or not, because it did! I do enjoy a good memoir. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr is my favorite. I love her down to earth, quirky voice.

WOW: You started out self-publishing your memoir. Could you tell us why you decided to go that route? Was it difficult marketing your book on your own? If you could give our readers a bit of advice you learned while marketing your book what would you tell them?

Judy: I self-published Replacement Child after I had no success finding an agent to represent it after a year of queries. There were very nice rejection letters, mostly saying they liked it but didn’t think they could sell it. I felt strongly about the book, and its potential readership, and went ahead with self-publishing. The best thing I did was to hire a professional editor. I have thirteen full revisions of the manuscript still in a cabinet in my office. And, yes, marketing a self-published book is not easy, although it’s getting easier. Since I first self-published in 2009 things have changed quite a bit. More and more are being picked up by traditional publishers, and more reviewers are open to them. My biggest piece of advice is to be persistent and pursue all avenues available for marketing a self-published book. Do your own book tour, start a blog, be engaged on Facebook and Twitter, do as much publicity as you can, or hire someone to do it.

WOW: How did you eventually hook-up with a traditional publisher?

Judy: My eBook picked up speed and sold around 14,000 copies in three months and was still selling steadily when I reached out to an agent I had met four years earlier at a writers conference. She had been receptive to the manuscript but didn’t take it on at that time. Now, with the sales coming in, she took a fresh look and sold it quite quickly.

WOW: Do you have a preference for self-publishing or traditional publishing?

Judy: Given the option, I would prefer traditional publishing. There is still a measure of credibility, still an easier road for reviews and being present in bookstores. And, I’ve had a wonderful experience with my publisher and my agent.

WOW: What are you writing now?

Judy: I’m working on a couple of projects. One is a novel, and the other non-fiction concerning replacement children.

WOW: What words of encouragement would you give someone trying to put together the pieces of their family’s history?

Judy: Start with the stories you know. If you are lucky enough to have members of your family around, pick their brains for family history details and follow the breadcrumbs. Start writing the memories that resonate with you the most. You can put things in a structure later. Write every day and revise and edit each piece until you are pleased with it as a stand-alone section or chapter.

Give yourself time. Let chapters sit for a week and then go back and look at them with a fresh eye. Read your pieces out loud. You’ll be amazed at what you find that you don’t see on the printed page. I always proof my work in hard copy and then read it out loud.

Also, try to see the arc of your story as early in the process as you can, but be patient. It may take time for it to emerge.

WOW: What or who was most helpful as you put your memoir into print?

Judy: That’s an easy one. By far, it was my husband who encouraged me and believed in me. He was my first reader for everything, even though people warned me against that. I am positive that I would not have had the faith in my writing if it hadn’t been for him. Of course, there were others who were instrumental, like my sister Linda. She had some of the information I didn’t know.

WOW: What's the most useful piece of writing advice you've ever received?

Judy: Not to expect your first draft of anything to be great. It takes editing and revising to create good writing.

----------Blog Tour Dates

Monday, April 1 (today!) @ The Muffin
Stop by for an interview and book giveaway!
http://muffin.wow-womenonwriting.com/

Thursday, April 4 @ Words by Webb
Stop by to find out what Jodi has to say about Replacement Child, a memoir about complicated family dynamics, by Judy Mandel.
http://jodiwebb.com

Wednesday, April 10 @ CMash Reads
Don't miss Cheryl's take on Replacement Child, a memoir about love, loss, and family by Judy Mandel and a chance to win your own copy!
http://cmashlovestoread.com/

Monday, April 15 @ Choices
Today is your chance to hear from Madeline about her thoughts on Replacement Child, a memoir of growing up as the replacement child by Judy Mandel.
http://madeline40.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, April 17 @ Tiffany Talks Books
Don't miss Tiffany talking about her thoughts after reading Replacement Child by Judy Mandel. This is a great memoir about family and loss.
http://tiffanytalksbooks.com

Tuesday, April 23 @ All About Audry
Stop by to learn more about Judy Mandel, author of the memoir about family, Replacement Child.
http://www.allthingsaudry.blogspot.com

Thursday, April 25 @ Mrs. Mommy Booknerd
Fact or Fiction? That's the topic today with memoir writer Judy Mandel, author of Replacement Child.
http://mrsmommybooknerd.blogspot.com/

Thursday, May 2 @ White Elephants
Enter to win a copy of Replacement Child by Judy Mandel and find out what Chynna has to say about this memoir about life, loss, and love from a child born into a family that had suffered the loss of a
daughter.
http://www.seethewhiteelephants.com/

Friday, May 3 @ Memory Writers Network
Enjoy an interview with writer Judy Mandel and discover why she felt the need to write her memoir, Replacement Child.
http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/

Tuesday, May 7 @ National Association of Memoir Writers
Stop by to learn more about a riveting memoir, Replacement Child, and its author Judy Mandel.
http://www.namw.org/

To view all our touring authors, check out our Events Calendar. Keep up with blog stops and giveaways in real time by following us on Twitter @WOWBlogTour.

Get Involved!
If you have a website or blog and would like to host one of our touring authors or schedule a tour of your own, please email us at blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com.

Book Giveaway Contest: Enter to win a copy of Replacement Child! Just fill out the Rafflecopter form below. We will announce the winner in the Rafflecopter widget this Friday, April 5.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Good luck!

Display Comments Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Not much into developing character?
Confused about what exactly is your character's flaw?

Plot Tip:
Explore your list of scenes in the beginning quarter of your story.

In Scene #2, your protagonist gives up easily and runs away. Where else in the beginning scenes does she give up? In Scene #5 she run away from her problems again. This time, when she stops running, she refuses to give up and determinedly devises up a plan.

At this point, ask yourself what depletes your protagonist of her power and what fills her with energy? You determine that her actions in these two scenes, though they advance the dramatic action plot, show inconsistent character emotional development in seesawing back and forth between giving up and taking charge.

In Scene #8, her actions show her to be emotionally immature. We understand she does not have the emotional steadiness because she refuses to buy into the prevailing belief system around her. A character willing to defy convention based purely on passion and conviction has the makings of a hero and further demands consistency in how her character emotional development is introduced in the first quarter of the story of plot.

With careful plotting, a few scenes later, her first true act of rebellion leads to the End of the Beginning scene.

SPECIAL EVENTS:
1) Plot Whisperer and Literary Agent Virtual Workshop
10-Hour Workshop to hone your plot, shape your concept and perfect your voice and write with goal of readying your work for today's market.

2) How to Get Moving on Your Work in Progress: A Review of The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts by Sue Bradford Edwards on WOW! Women on Writing. Enter to win in the 5-Book-Giveaway for The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing

Knowing what to write where in a story with a plot allows for a more loving relationship with your writing. Whether writing a first draft or revising, if you falter wondering what comes next in a story with a plot, follow the prompts in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing

3) Feature Article:
Emotional Elements of Plot
Showing how a character feels fuses the relationship between characters and the audience or reader. Showing how the character transforms delivers on the promise of your story. Learn the difference. Plot tips how and where to develop transformational emotional maturity. Read the entire article:
http://www.scriptmag.com/features/emotional-elements-of-plot.

Today, I write.

To familiarize yourself with the basic plot terms used here and in the PW Book of Prompts:
1) Watch the plot playlists on the Plot Whisperer Youtube channel.
2) Read The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
3) Fill out the exercises in The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories
4) Visit:
Blockbuster Plots for Writers
Plot Whisperer on Facebook
Plot Whisperer on Twitter

Add a Comment

Relish by Lucy Knisley

First Second

A few years ago, if you were told about the rise of the Internet and asked to predict one of the top things that people would blog and post about, can you honestly say food would have been up there as a contender? And by food, I don’t mean cookery, recipes and dedicated food sites, but Facebook statuses, Tweets, Instagram photos, all that jazz. Out of all the little banalities of life, who would’ve thunk that narrating what we eat would be the common denominator of web sharing, and in such a wholly ubiquitous fashion.

Telling strangers on the net what you’re eating isn’t groundbreaking, constructive or thrilling to others in any way- by and large it reflects a personal enjoyment of consumption that has or is about to take place, made more understandable, I think, if you’re of the view that food is one of life’s true pleasures, and not of my sister’s mindset; she who see food as fuel and a necessity to survive, not caring  particularly about taste as long as it’s not detrimental to her health and fulfills her needs (yes, she really is my sister).

Lucy Knisley, it’s safe to say is, is firmly in the former camp. Knisley’s Relish, a book that follows her through various periods and moments in her life framing them in relation to her culinary experiences, has been one of the most anticipated releases of the year for many- not least myself. For Knisley, these ‘taste-memories’ are no tenuous associations: she has been immersed in food culture in some form or manner since she was born- her mother a chef, her father himself a cook and discerning consoeur, her uncle owner of a food-shop selling gourmet comestibles and homemade food-  and has generally been raised in an environment filled with ‘cooks and bakers, eaters and critics.’

Growing up, food remained a strong presence in different ways; working in cheese shops, farmer’s markets, growing and sourcing ingredients, getting involved in the business side of things. So Knisley’s relationship with food is much deeper than your average persons, and despite feeling a little different for being a cartoonist, it’s a theme that turns up  naturally and with happy regularity in her work. They marry well, do food and comics.

The book is divided into chapters, with each one recounting a specific food-related memory and a recipe for that food then given at chapter’s close. Both the experiences and foods are diverse in range, from a trip to Mexico where her friend Drew learns about the penalties for smuggling porn across the border, backpacking through Europe and discovering the world’s best croissants in Venice and feverishly attempting to recreate them to no avail, to navigating horrible lemonade chicken cooked by good friends.

As someone who salivated over Enid Blyton’s terse descriptions of hard-boiled eggs and cold ginger beer, Knisley’s recollections paired with her drawings are almost a sensory overload (her move to the country with its ripe, colourful fruits and freshly plucked produce left me feeling a little light-headed).  That said, what I particularly enjoyed here wasn’t what I expected. And that’s the way in which each memory, each anecdote genuinely tells you a little about the author and her life- it’s not just ‘hey, delicious food art!’, it’s much more thoughtful and reflective than the bright colours and subject matter belie. In between food chopped and dishes cooked, there are insights into her close relationship with her mother, attempts at bonding with her father over dinners, queasy coming of age experiences shared with friends who are still friends, the developing of a cook’s resilience and tenacity.

Having said that (paradoxically) -and this is my sole criticism of the book- there is a strange sense of remove and disconnect of Knisley as a character. The reader is reading about her without any strong emotional investment or relatability on her behalf. Relish arrived in the post the same day I got Christophe Blain’s In The Kitchen with Alain Passard; in that book, a charming and effusive Blain slings an arm around the readers shoulder and guides him around, managing to thoroughly absorb him, as a novice, into the life of a Michelin-starred chef. This may have something to do with the first person narration, planted in the present but talking about the past, making it difficult to get a sense of Knisley as a person today.

I’ve always been a big fan of Knisleys cartooning and it’s as accomplished and attractive as ever here, with line and expression on point. To my mind, she’s the only cartoonist who controls the art so deftly in terms of what it conveys emotionally, perfectly straddling the realms of cartoony while maintaining an aspect of brevity. Make no mistake, Relish is a great achievement, pulling off a truly tricky combination of genres and tones to produce a book that will not only make you want to get into the kitchen and fondling food at the farmer’s market, but one I am confident will be a highlight of the comics year.

Oh, and a top tip for when you’re reading this: surround yourself with tasty snacks because you will be needing them.

Display Comments Add a Comment

In a recent conversation with a writer, I tried to explain why a non-fiction book proposal needed more than just new information: he had to explain the significance of the new information.

We floundered around for a while trying to pinpoint what I meant.

Here's what I came up with:

Imagine that two thousand years in the future, archaeologists are reconstructing my life. I am a very very famous historical figure because I am both a human being and a shark. Everyone "knows" this because my shark image survived, as did some of my apartment and some of my writing.  (Why I am famous is left to your imagination.)

As with all reconstructed lives there are some questions. One thing though that people KNOW is I am a Zoroastrian.  They are certain of this because my writing frequently references "platform."   Historians have surmised I am a Zoroastrian because Zoroastrians place their dead on platforms (no, really!) to be eaten by vultures and thus returned to the cycle of life. What else could platform mean?



One day the archaeologists discover a cache of odd objects. Paper, bound in leather, indexed***.  It looks like a series of lists, arranged by date. Lists of things believed to be food items: pasta, coffee, creamer, Mallomars, cheddar cheese.

There are hundreds of these lists, a real find.

Historians set to work analyzing the new information.  They organize the list to see which items appear most often, and the least often. They puzzle over "lettuce" (A cache of the writings of Travis Erwin comes to light years later and that mystery is solved)

One clever undergraduate notices that periodically the lists do NOT include coffee or Mallomars. She creates an excel spread sheet to match items with dates.

It soon becomes clear that coffee and Mallomars disappear from the list for about six weeks every spring.  The dates are not consistent but the six week time period is.

The undergraduate, keen on finishing her thesis, graduating and running off to Antarctica for a beach holiday (hello, global warming) digs around diligently. She consults tide tables, weather patterns, election results, bail bonds records, astrology charts, and casting calls from Pixar Studios.

Soon she realizes the six week period is always linked to the first full moon after the Spring Equinox.

Wait a second. Isn't that the period a small sect of Christians known only as "cat-licks" called Lent, and observed by giving up things. Things like coffee and chocolate?

But we know she's  Zoroastrian, everyone knows that.

Except maybe not.

This casts a whole new light on things. It's a very SIGNIFICANT discovery because it challenges a long held belief.

And if platform doesn't mean Zoroastrian platforms, then what does it mean?  Well, that's a topic for a graduate thesis, hello Antarctica here I come.



And that in a nutshell (or a grocery bag) is what a non-fiction book proposal must explain: why this book is significant. Why it matters.

You can have the cache of grocery lists, but you have to tell me why it's significant.  You can have a great story but you have to be able to explain why it's important.  "It's my life" is not the correct answer.

This is where most personal memoir fails the "is this publishable" test: most lives are not significant. They may be interesting (or at least I hope they are to the people who lived them) but it's rare to find a memoir that includes something that is significant to a large group of people.




***no, I do not really print, index and bind my grocery lists, all reports to the contrary.

Display Comments Add a Comment

& book giveaway!

When Gloria Loring began writing about turning points in her life she realized that coincidence was a key player in many of these events. So she began to wonder . . . what is coincidence? Just a quirky aligning of timing or something more? Soon she found herself on a self-guided trip through scientific theory, religious beliefs, and more as she tried to untangle the mystery we call coincidence.

Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous is Loring's spiritual exploration of how coincidence helped her make sense of life's challenges and uncertainties. Coincidence helped her raise $1 million for diabetes research; it arrived in the form of mysterious letters during her separation and eventual divorce from actor-writer Alan Thicke; and it helped her discover and then heal from the trauma of long-forgotten childhood sexual abuse. It also brought her a chance encounter with the man she is married to today. With eloquence and humor, Loring takes readers on a quest for a deeper understanding of life's journey and the role coincidence plays in all of our lives, revealing that even the most difficult circumstances can be beneficial. Her experiences may be just the evidence readers need to begin watching more closely what they are attracting and what they are running from in their own lives.

While coincidences may appear to come out of the blue, Loring suggests that we can all play a starring role in their appearance. "For years, I'd been waiting for someone else to make (my life) better. You'd have thought I was starring in "The Perils of Pauline." In truth, I wasn't a victim, I was a volunteer. . . . Coincidence gave me an experience of the lesson I needed to learn: You don't have to wait for someone to save you."

Paperback: 264 pages

Publisher: HCI (October 12, 2012)

ISBN-10: 0757316484

ISBN-13: 978-0757316487

Twitter hashtag: #TheGloriaLoring

Coincidence Is God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous is available as a print and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well as your local bookstores.



Book Giveaway Contest:

To win a copy of Coincidence Is God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous, please enter using the Rafflecopter form at the bottom of this post. The giveaway contest closes this Friday, March 8 at 12:00 AM EST. We will announce the winner the same day in the Rafflecopter widget. Good luck!

About the Author:

When not starring on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, Gloria Loring found herself expressing herself with music. She is the recording artist of the #1 hit song Friends and Lovers as well co-composer of television theme songs Diff’rent Strokes and Facts Of Life. Gloria’s new musical show TV Tunez, a celebration of television’s best theme songs that earned standing ovations, is in development for a Las Vegas run. She is currently in the studio with producer Ted Perlman and songwriting legends Burt Bacharach and Desmond Child.

After her four-year-old son was diagnosed with diabetes, she created and self-published two volumes of the Days Of Our Lives Celebrity Cookbook which raised more than $1 million for diabetes research. She has also written Kids, Food and Diabetes, Parenting a Child with Diabetes, The Kids, Food & Diabetes Family Cookbook, and Living With Type 2 Diabetes: Moving Past the Fear. Gloria was honored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation with the Lifetime Commitment Award and the Founders Award from the National Disease Research Interchange.

The Miss America Organization gave her the Woman of Achievement Award, an honor she shares with past recipients Barbara Bush, Roslyn Carter, and Hillary Clinton. She is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who of American Women.

Find out more about the author by visiting her online:

Gloria Loring’s website: http://www.glorialoring.com/

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/GloriaLoring

Twitter: @TheGloriaLoring


-----Interview by Jodi Webb

WOW: Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous spans many years of your life? How long did it take you from when you first decided to write your book until its publication?

Gloria: Twelve years. I started the process in 1999, and at first it contained only my stories. Yet I knew I wanted it to be valuable to the readers, so I researched coincidence, reading dozens of books on the subject. And because Albert Einstein said the words that title by book, I began reading about the intersection of scientific observation and spiritual wisdom. What I found fascinated me. Then I read up on lives of the great saints and sages to better understand their spiritual experiences. All of it supported and expanded my perspective on coincidence, and yet even then I couldn’t finish the book.

Some of my hesitancy was the fear that people might think it’s a religious book, because the word “God” is in the title. But when I noticed how many books on the bestseller lists were about spiritual issues, I realized the time had come. Only a few months after completing the writing, I found an agent and a very good publisher, HCI.

WOW: Do I spot another coincidence? You’re writing a spiritual book, spiritual books are popping up on the bestsellers lists? But let’s get back to those twelve years. That is a long time. But of course, since most WOW readers are writer/something else—whether it be writer/teacher or writer/president of the PTA or writer/dog rescuer—we all understand about there not being enough hours in the day. In the beginning, how long did you expect it to take to write your book?

Gloria: I thought it might take a year or so. I was also writing the songs that accompany each chapter at that same time, and imagined them as a “book with its own soundtrack” set. I finished recording the songs and released the CD, but each time I went back to the book, I realized there had to be more depth, more common sense, more expanded understanding. I took titling my book with Albert Einstein’s words and genius very seriously!

WOW: First of all, I’m blown away that you wrote a soundtrack for your book! You have such a busy life: performing, raising money for diabetes, having a family, writing literary soundtracks! How and when did you find time to write?

Gloria: At one intensive writing time, I wrote from 7 to 9 every morning and made quite a bit of progress in those months. But then the fear arose again, “who’s going to read a book by singer and actress Gloria Loring that has 'God' in the title?”

WOW: Oh, we all know that fear, no matter what type of book we're writing. But I'm wondering about the evolution of your book. Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous doesn't feel like a book that was planned. You don't seem like an outline kind of gal. Can you give us some insight into the creation of you book.

Gloria: This book is like Topsy from the “King and I” - “It just growed.” The story in Chapter One, “Expect a Miracle,” prompted me to remark to an interviewer that it was an amazing coincidence, and he replied, “Yes, but coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Those words of Albert Einstein’s inspired my writing the book. His words stayed with me and as my life unfolded, I saw the gracious hand of coincidence everywhere I looked. I was also encouraged by a quote in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, “We must share the gifts we have been given.”

WOW: So what happened when one year turned into two turned into . . . did you ever feel discouraged about not having enough time to dedicate to your writing? How did you keep yourself enthusiastic for your book . . . did you give yourself pep talks, did you have a group of supportive writers behind you, what made you keep going?

Gloria: Until the last months, when I began to read and share chapters with others, I wrote the book with very little input. I just kept asking myself, is it true, is it real, is it useful? My favorite part was doing the research. I had files of clippings, pages of quotes. Coincidence was always working on my behalf. It seemed every time I picked up a magazine or book, I found something that fed the book.

WOW: It's difficult to pinpoint your book . . . it's part memoir, part inspirational/spiritual, part self-help. It seems there is something for everyone. If you had to describe what type of book you wrote—in ten words or less—how would you describe it?

Gloria: It’s a memoir with a message of healing and inspiration.

WOW: You included many personal stories to help illustrate points throughout your book. Was it difficult deciding what to include and what to cut? Did you worry about telling family secrets or did you find it empowering?

Gloria: Trying to understand my personal stories led me to find the wisdom, the teachings, and the scientific and spiritual perspective I found supported my experiences. My goal was to explain what I had been through and how coincidence leads us to what we need to know and what we need to grow.

Although writing of the inappropriately sexualized contact with my father was difficult, the ways coincidence led me to healing were too powerful to dismiss from my personal storyline. Telling the truth was absolutely empowering. As one brave person told me, “We are only as sick as our secrets.”

WOW: What's the single most important thing you learned during your writing?

Gloria: To never again be afraid to tell my truth.

WOW: That’s a powerful lesson to take away from your writing. I hope we can all gain as much meaning from our work. Can you tell us what will be next for you?

Gloria: I do have the set-asides from this book, a few chapters worth of wisdom I had gleaned, that already has a title as a follow-up book. This summer and fall, I will be conducting workshops based on the healing principles in the book, and am also developing twelve “lessons on coincidence” with Dr. Alvin Jones for a CD set.

I just completed the audio version for Audible.com and after reading through the whole book out loud for three days, I am thinking of creating a one woman show. The songs that begin each chapter so beautifully illustrate and illuminate the stories. I’m excited about all the possibilities ahead of me. It’s as if a new chapter of my life has begun.

WOW: Oh my goodness, that last answer exhausted me! I may have to take sympathy nap! But I would love to see you in a one woman show based on Coincidence Is God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous. Call me when your show comes to Pennsylvania.


----------Blog Tour Dates

Monday, March 4@ The Muffin
Stop by for an interview and book giveaway!
http://muffin.wow-womenonwriting.com/

Wednesday, March 6 @ A Writer’s Life
We all face times when we're "on stage" as the center of attention (wanted or not)--everything from work presentations to wedding toasts to a solo in the church choir. Performer Gloria Loring gives tips on conquering stage fright.
http://carolineclemmons.blogspot.com

Friday, March 8 @ Donna’s Book Pub
Learn more about the real person behind the Days of Our Lives character Liz Chandler with an interview of actress (and author) Gloria Loring.
http://donnasbookpub.blogspot.com

Monday, March 11 @ Colloquium
Soap opera star Gloria Loring reveals "The Good Use of Celebrity" and gives away a copy of her latest book Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous.
http://www.jhsiess.com/

Wednesday, March 13 @ Words by Webb
Learn what an old soap fan has to say about Gloria Loring’s venture into the writing world.
http://jodiwebb.com

Friday, March 15 @ Soaps
Stop by soaps.com for an interview with Gloria Loring, including a few questions from her soap opera fans. You'll also get a chance to win a copy of her book Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous.
http://www.soaps.com/

Tuesday, March 19 @ CMash Loves to Read
Learn more about how soap opera star Gloria Loring became a diabetes advocate and author enter to win her memoir Coincidences Are God's Way of Remaining Anonymous.
http://cmashlovestoread.com/

Friday, March 22 @ Lori’s Reading Corner
Gloria Loring, actress, singer and diabetes advocate, tells you how to "Make It Up and Write It Down." She's also giving away a copy of her memoir Coincidence Is God's Way of Remaining Anonymous.
http://www.lorisreadingcorner.com

Wednesday, April 3 @ Tiffany Talks Books
After you read today's review of Coincidences Are God's Way of Remaining Anonymous, you'll jump at the chance to enter and win a free copy!
http://www.tiffanytalksbooks.com

Friday, April 5 @ Thoughts in Progress
We've all had them. Some we remember fondly. Others we wish had been exiled to a deserted island. They're lousy boyfriends and that's what actress, diabetes activist and author Gloria Loring wants to talk about today! Join the fun and get a chance to win her memoir Coincidences Are God's Way of Remaining Anonymous.
http://www.masoncanyon.blogspot.com/

To view all our touring authors, check out our Events Calendar. Keep up with blog stops and giveaways in real time by following us on Twitter @WOWBlogTour.

Get Involved!
If you have a website or blog and would like to host one of our touring authors or schedule a tour of your own, please email us at blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com.

Book Giveaway Contest: Enter to win a copy of Coincidence Is God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous! Just fill out the Rafflecopter form below. We will announce the winner in the Rafflecopter widget this Friday, March 8.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Good luck!

Display Comments Add a Comment

"I read The Lover to be Marguerite Duras writing about herself," Maxine Hong Kingston posits in her introduction to this classic book labeled "Fiction." Vivian Gornick, too, writes of the book as if it is a memoir, of course a memoir, and everything we know about Duras suggests that memoir was the author's madness and method.

This is, after all, the story of a young, nearly impoverished French girl, fifteen, who conducts an illicit affair with a much older Chinese lover—determinedly, provocatively, in full awareness of the costs, just as Duras did. It involves an unstable mother and two brothers, one of whom Duras refers to as the murderer, the other as the martyred; here biography again asserts itself. The setting is prewar Indochina, where Duras was born and lived until she went to France to study. And a returning, angry, consoling theme is the unnamed narrator's wish to be a writer.

Labeled fiction. But.

I will take this as memoir, too. I will take it as memoir and I will add it to my list of books that teach those who seek to wrestle the form (in past tense, in present tense, in third person, in first). The Lover is a fierce, slender book—forthright and obscuring, declarative and confused, angry and proud. It feels like a book written in a single rush, a mirror of the remembering mind at work. This could be true, this may be true, this was true, and that was me, but that was me then. We haul our past lives forward in this life. We look around and there are multiples.

And once we were young. And once we thought we would not have to forgive or not have to love any one person more than we love ourselves. Among the many things The Lover is about is the knowledge we gain too late in life.

Which is why this book should be read by the young.

An excerpt from a story that folds in upon itself, then unfolds, that yields genre-less wisdoms like these:

People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it's happened before and it happens still. It doesn't ever announce itself as such—it's duplicity itself.... It's while being lived that life is immortal, while it's still alive.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

Add a Comment

Upon entering the Middle of your novel, memoir, screenplay, if you have a time jump, this is where to make the jump.

The end of the beginning scene you wrote based on Prompt 30 in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing moves your protagonist from the relative safety of the beginning into the exotic world the antagonists in the middle.

 In satisfying the reader's expectations for conflict and plot twists early-on in your story, the reader moves forward into the story with trust. The beginning quarter of the story operates as a plot within a plot and ends on a high note of anticipate -- what happens next?

Jumping now in time, creates more curiosity and wonder in the reader as she moves into the great unknown of the middle. Now the story develops around the contrast between the world where the character started and where she is now.

SPECIAL EVENTS:
Book Giveaway: Next week, a couple of awesome websites are hosting a book give-away and party in celebration of The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing release last month. Stay tuned for more information.

Plot Webinar: Join me virtually on March 6th to Track Your Plot at the Scene Level, webinar hosted by the Writers Store.

Knowing what to write where in a story with a plot allows for a more loving relationship with your writing. Whether writing a first draft or revising, if you falter wondering what comes next in a story with a plot, follow the prompts in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing.

Today, I write.

To familiarize yourself with the basic plot terms used here and in the PW Book of Prompts:
1) Watch the plot playlists on the Plot Whisperer Youtube channel.
2) Read The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
3) Fill out the exercises in The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories
4) Visit:
Blockbuster Plots for Writers
Plot Whisperer on Facebook
Plot Whisperer on Twitter

Add a Comment

By Prompt 32 in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing you are beginning to better understand your story. You also understand how many holes you've created and you often feel like you're floating without a net. By now, you also appreciate the discipline it takes to write a story with a plot from beginning to end.

Now you know or at least are beginning to suspect that the reason you procrastinate about writing has nothing to do with being blocked or not knowing what to write next. The daily prompts in PWBook of Prompts do that for you.

The reason you procrastinate is because you're afraid. You're afraid what you write isn't good enough or clever enough or witty enough. You worry you'll never capture the brilliance you see in your head and translate it to the page and, even if you do, you know it won't be perfect so why bother. Or this, you delight in your own writing and still, you resist, it all seems like such hard work.

Replace your belief in scarcity with the belief that so long as you sit down, read the next prompt, open yourself to inspiration and write your intended daily word count, you have enough, you are enough. You always have been. You always will be... enough.

SPECIAL EVENTS:
Book Giveaway: Next week, a couple of awesome websites are hosting a book give-away and party in celebration of The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing release last month. Stay tuned for more information.

Plot Webinar: Join me virtually on March 6th to Track Your Plot at the Scene Level, webinar hosted by the Writers Store.

Knowing what to write where in a story with a plot allows for a more loving relationship with your writing. Whether writing a first draft or revising, if you falter wondering what comes next in a story with a plot, follow the prompts in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing.

Today, I write.

To familiarize yourself with the basic plot terms used here and in the PW Book of Prompts:
1) Watch the plot playlists on the Plot Whisperer Youtube channel.
2) Read The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
3) Fill out the exercises in The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories
4) Visit:
Blockbuster Plots for Writers
Plot Whisperer on Facebook
Plot Whisperer on Twitter

Add a Comment

Read by Simon Callow
Produced by Naxos AudioBooks
Genre: Memoirs
ISBN: 978-1843796886
Length: 4 CDs (Total time 4:10:00)
Price: $28.98

Buy it at Amazon

Charles Dickens hoped that none of the many letters he wrote would ever surface after he was gone. In fact, he implored his friends and relatives to destroy them. But, luckily, many of these letters have survived, and they paint a fascinating picture of him as a man.

Always the actor and novelist, Dickens loved to assume a character in his writing, seeking to entertain his audience as much as convey information. Letter writing seems to have been as much a joy to him as working on his novels.

In this audio presentation of Charles Dickens: A Portrait in Letters, Simon Callow shares some of his more interesting letters. Focusing on themes like friendship, work, travel, the theater, and love, the letters are arranged to dig deeper into his personality. And the letters themselves are read with the sense that Dickens is reading them aloud as he is writing them. Interspersed between the letters, some general information about Dickens or the intended recipient are provided.

The novels of Dickens have enchanted readers, and his fans will enjoy a more intimate look at this very interesting man. I highly recommend Charles Dickens: A Portrait in Letters.

Reviewer: Alice Berger

Add a Comment

Here's a piece of a recent post by Kari Dell, one of the Fabulosity:

Since joining the board of directors at our local historical museum, my views on memoirs, family histories and even diaries have changed tremendously. I'd always thought of these things in one of two ways: either you had to live a big, important life to be worth writing about (aka, selling) or it only mattered to your family. Now I've seen how these personal accounts of a normal life can be a treasure trove for historians.

Rather than blathering on, I'm going to refer you to one of the masters, William Zinsser, whose book On Writing Well is considered a touchstone for non-fiction writers. This article from The American Scholar is a wonderful read:  How to Write a Memoir

From that article I condensed this nugget, a bit of advice any writer in any genre should heed:

"When you write...don't try to be a writer....Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away."

So write your story, large or small. You never know what value they will hold for those to come.

could not have said it better myself (which is of course why Kari is the writer, and I am the ...not)

Display Comments Add a Comment

Prompt 30 in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing prompts you develop a scene showing the end of what has been in your novel, memoir, screenplay thus far. Next comes the middle where the real struggle begins.

For some writers, you couldn't get to the end of the beginning scene quickly enough. You followed prompts 1- 6, creating scenes and developing characters and relationships, conflict and dramatic action, setting and theme. Then, about halfway through the beginning section of the prompts book, you found yourself flipping ahead, combining more than one prompt in a scene, skipping prompts and struggling to develop meaningful characters goals and create enough tension and find the exact right secondary characters and becoming more and more impatient to get to the exotic world of the middle.

Other writers found the beginning prompts wondrous places to linger as you introduced things as they are in the story world starting out. The nearer and nearer you came to Prompt 30 and this final beginning scene, the slower you wrote. You took time to research authentic details rather than write, you filled out the exercises in for the beginning section The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories.

However you find yourself here, celebrate your achievement. You have written an entire quarter of your story.

Knowing what to write where in a story with a plot allows for a more loving relationship with your writing. Whether writing a first draft or revising, if you falter wondering what comes next in a story with a plot, follow the prompts in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing.

Today, I write.

To familiarize yourself with the basic plot terms used here and in the PW Book of Prompts:
1) Watch the plot playlists on the Plot Whisperer Youtube channel.
2) Read The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
3) Fill out the exercises in The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories
4) Visit:
Blockbuster Plots for Writers
Plot Whisperer on Facebook
Plot Whisperer on Twitter

Add a Comment

The editors of Conte, an online journal of narrative writing founded in 2005, announce an open submissions call for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction for our eighteenth issue, slated for publication in Winter 2012-2013. Recent contributors include Norman Dubie, Erika Meitner, Bruce Weigl, Robert Wrigley, Sandy Longhorn, Jim Daniels, Nin Andrews, Thorpe Moeckel, and E. Ethelbert Miller, among others.

Visit our website for specific guidelines and past issues. We accept simultaneous submissions through Submittable and strive to respond in three months or less. We look forward to reading your work!

Add a Comment

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam: An Illustrated Memoir Ann Marie Fleming

This is two stories-- the story of how Ann Marie tried to find out about the great-grandfather she just discovered was a world-famous magician and vaudeville performer, and the story of his life.

It’s a graphic novel, but more. There are a lot of photographs and documents in with the drawings, telling this tale.

And what a tale it is.

Long Tack Sam’s origins are a bit hazy (there are a few versions) but he rose to become an international superstar. He was Chinese, his wife was Austrian. They traveled the world and lived all over, fleeing wars and performing.

The family remained largely international in origin and much of Fleming’s work revolves around being multiple ethnicities, visas, and citizenship. Fleming herself was born on Okinawa when it was UN protectorate. She couldn’t leave the island because she didn’t have an exit visa. She didn’t have an exit visa, because you needed an entry visa. She didn’t have an entry visa because she was born there. It’s pretty representative of many of the issues her family goes to through over the years.

After WWII, Long Tack Sam could become a US citizen, but his wife couldn’t because Austria wasn’t under Russian threat.

Visually, the mixed media works really well. Fleming weaves her stories and broader themes in and out in way that makes for a great read and draws you in. You’re fascinated by Long Tack Sam’s life and fame, but also by Fleming’s journey of discovering her family history.

I appreciated the sidebars of contemporary world events that helped ground the story in time. It’s a sweeping story that takes much of the twentieth century and is affected by much of twentieth century history.

Originally, Fleming told this story in film, and the book comes from the film. Sadly, I can’t find the film anywhere to watch. I’d love to see more of this story.

While this is a book published for adults, I think teens will really enjoy it-- especially the exploration of identity and family.

The Nonfiction Monday roundup is over at The Flatt Perspective. Be sure to check it out.

Book Provided by... my local library

Links to Amazon are an affiliate link. You can help support Biblio File by purchasing any item (not just the one linked to!) through these links. Read my full disclosure statement.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Powerful, surprising, and fascinating personal essays are also “reader-friendly essays” that keep the reader squarely in focus. So how do you go about writing one? In this excerpt from Crafting the Personal Essay, author Dinty W. Moore shares a variety of methods for crafting an essay that keeps the reader’s desires and preferences in mind, resulting in a resonate and truly memorable piece. As Moore says, “Privacy is for your diary. Essays are for readers.”

Writing the Reader-Friendly Essay

Good writing is never merely about following a set of directions. Like all artists of any form, essay writers occasionally find themselves breaking away from tradition or common practice in search of a fresh approach. Rules, as they say, are meant to be broken.

But even groundbreakers learn by observing what has worked before. If you are not already in the habit of reading other writers with an analytical eye, start forming that habit now. When you run across a moment in someone else’s writing that seems somehow electric on the page, stop, go back, reread the section more slowly, and ask yourself, “What did she do here, put into this, or leave out, that makes it so successful?”

Similarly and often just as important, if you are reading a piece of writing and find yourself confused, bored, or frustrated, stop again, back up, squint closely at the writing, and form a theory as to how, when, or where the prose went bad.

Identifying the specific successful moves made by others increases the number of arrows in your quiver, ready for use when you sit down to start your own writing. Likewise, identifying the missteps in other writers’ work makes you better at identifying the missteps in your own.

Remember the Streetcar
Tennessee Williams’ wonderful play, A Streetcar Named Desire, comes from a real streetcar in New Orleans and an actual neighborhood named Desire. In Williams’ day, you could see the streetcar downtown with a lighted sign at the front telling folks where the vehicle was headed. The playwright saw this streetcar regularly—and also saw, of course, the metaphorical possibilities of the name.

Though this streetcar no longer runs, there is still a bus called Desire in New Orleans, and you’ve certainly seen streetcars or buses in other cities with similar, if less evocative, destination indicators: Uptown, Downtown, Shadyside, West End, Prospect Park.

People need to know what streetcar they are getting onto, you see, because they want to know where they will be when the streetcar stops and lets them off.

Excuse the rather basic transportation lesson, but it explains my first suggestion. An essay needs a lighted sign right up front telling the reader where they are going. Otherwise, the reader will be distracted and nervous at each stop along the way, unsure of the destination, not at all able to enjoy the ride.

Now there are dull ways of putting up your lighted sign:

This essay is about the death of my beloved dog.

Or:

Let me tell you about what happened to me last week.

And there are more artful ways.

Readers tend to appreciate the more artful ways.

For instance, let us look at how Richard Rodriguez opens his startling essay “Mr. Secrets”:

Shortly after I published my first autobiographical essay seven years ago, my mother wrote me a letter pleading with me never again to write about our family life. “Write about something else in the future. Our family life is private.” And besides: “Why do you need to tell the gringos about how ‘divided’ you feel from the family?” I sit at my desk now, surrounded by versions of paragraphs and pages of this book, considering that question.

Where is the lighted streetcar sign in that paragraph?

Well, consider that Rodriguez has

• introduced the key characters who will inhabit his essay: himself and his mother,
• informed us that writing is central to his life,
• clued us in that this is also a story of immigration and assimilation (gringos), and
• provided us with the central question he will be considering throughout the piece: Why does he feel compelled to tell strangers the ins and outs of his conflicted feelings?

These four elements—generational conflict between author and parent, the isolation of a writer, cultural norms and difference, and the question of what is public and what is private—pretty much describe the heart of Rodriguez’s essay.

Or to put it another way, at every stop along the way—each paragraph, each transition—we are on a streetcar passing through these four thematic neighborhoods, and Rodriguez has given us a map so we can follow along.

Find a Healthy Distance
Another important step in making your personal essay public and not private is finding a measure of distance from your experience, learning to stand back, narrow your eyes, and scrutinize your own life with a dose of hale and hearty skepticism.

Why is finding a distance important? Because the private essay hides the author. The personal essay reveals. And to reveal means to let us see what is truly there, warts and all.

The truth about human nature is that we are all imperfect, sometimes messy, usually uneven individuals, and the moment you try to present yourself as a cardboard character—always right, always upstanding (or always wrong, a total mess)—the reader begins to doubt everything you say. Even if the reader cannot articulate his discomfort, he knows on a gut level that your perfect (or perfectly awful) portrait of yourself has to be false.

And then you’ve lost the reader.

Pursue the Deeper Truth
The best writers never settle for the insight they find on the surface of whatever subject they are exploring. They are constantly trying to lift the surface layer, to see what interesting ideas or questions might lie beneath.
To illustrate, let’s look at another exemplary essay, “Silence the Pianos,” by Floyd Skloot.

Here is his opening:

A year ago today, my mother stopped eating. She was ninety-six, and so deep in her dementia that she no longer knew where she was, who I was, who she herself was. All but the last few seconds had vanished from the vast scroll of her past.

Essays exploring a loved one’s decline into dementia or the painful loneliness of a parent’s death are among the most commonly seen by editors of magazines and judges of essay contests. There is a good reason for this: These events can truly shake us to our core. But too often, when writing about such a significant loss, the writer focuses on the idea that what has happened is not fair and that the loved one who is no longer around is so deeply missed.

Are these emotions true?

Yes, they are.

Are they interesting for a reader?

Often, they simply are not.

The problem is that there are certain things readers already know, and that would include the idea that the loss of a loved one to death or dementia is a deep wound, that it seems not fair when such heartbreak occurs, and that we oftentimes find ourselves regretting not having spent more time with the lost loved one.

These reactions seem truly significant when they occur in our own lives, and revisiting them in our writing allows us to experience those powerful feelings once again. For this reason it is hard to grasp that the account of our loss might have little or no impact on a reader who did not know this loved one, or does not know you, and who does not have the emotional reaction already in the gut.

In other words, there are certain “private” moments that feel exhilarating to revisit, and “private” sentences that seem stirring to write and to reread as we edit our early drafts, but they are not going to have the same effect in the public arena of publishable prose.

Final Thoughts
In the last twenty years of teaching writing, the most valuable lesson that I have found myself able to share is the need for us as writers to step outside of our own thoughts, to imagine an audience made up of real people on the other side of the page. This audience does not know us, they are not by default eager to read what we have written, and though thoughtful literate readers are by and large good people with large hearts, they have no intrinsic stake in whatever problems (or joys) we have in our lives.

This is the public, the readers you want to invite into your work.

Self-expression may be the beginning of writing, but it should never be the endpoint. Only by focusing on these anonymous readers, by acknowledging that you are creating something for them, something that has value, something that will enrich their existence and make them glad to have read what you have written, will you find a way to truly reach your audience.

And that—truly reaching your audience and offering them something of value—is perhaps as good a definition of successful writing as I’ve ever heard.

Add a Comment

Display Comments Add a Comment

Review: In the Country of Empty Crosses
Michael Sedano

Arturo Madrid (author), Miguel Gandert (photographs). In the Country of Empty Crosses. The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781595341310

The handful of protestant kids in Arturo Madrid's rural New Mexico public school struggled to voice their own prayer. Their pastor had forbidden them to participate in Catholic practices. "Forgive us our debts" the protestant kids insisted, while the Catholics prayed to be forgiven "our trespasses."

When Europeans first trespassed into indigenous tierra that would become New Mexico, those Mexican Spaniards set into motion a pattern for dominating what was there before they came, that would repeat itself when Anglos trespassed onto hispano land. Arturo Madrid’s memoir, In the Country of Empty Crosses. The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico, recounts impacts of that dominance.

Just as indios found themselves marginalized by the gente from down south, hispanos and their Catholic religion found themselves, too, squeezed out by foreign language-speaking interlopers as prickly as the barbed wire they strung after seizing land. Former landholders got their only compensation in the sound of a judge’s gavel echoing the Terminator’s command to the helicopter pilot, “get out”.

Interloper. As the old order changed yielding place to new, Arturo Madrid’s protestante familia found themselves interlopers in their own tierra not once, but doubly.

In the hispano community, they were outliers owing to their election of the anglos’ religion.

In anglo churches, hispanos were targets for missionary work, separate and unequal; bilingual hispanos attending the mainline services found themselves only a little more tolerated but advantaged as intercultural negotiators for gente who'd become interlopers on their own tierra.

Madrid opens the memoir with a telling illustration of hispano exclusion. Taking a sentimental journey to his familia’s former tierra searching for vestiges, the cosmopolitan Madrid—he is a Professor of Literature comfortable in elite Unitedstatesian circles—meets a local vato Madrid terms “the Marlboro man.”

The visitor asks the local if he’s familiar with a location, the long-abandoned places his bisabuelos settled. Madrid especially wonders where the old familia camposanto lay. The Marlboro man corrects the outsider, “you mean the campo herejes.” To some Catholic hispanos, protestantes remain heretics, 400 years after the last inquisitor left New Spain.

Madrid recounts a telling encounter with the anglo minister’s wife in Chama. Performing a self-imposed Christian obligation, Madrid and his mother knock on the parlor door with an offering of fruit and vegetables waiting in the truck. The woman cracks the door and gestures her visitors to go around to the back door. At the back stoop, the pastor’s wife asks through the door what she can do for the two Mexicans? Madrid’s mother issues a sharp rebuke, “do something for yourself” by accepting the crates of fresh fruit and vegetables loaded in the pickup.

We cut across the lawn and make our way ccarefully through untended shrubbery still wet with dew. The warm air smells of pine needls and pinesap. As we enter the shade at the back of the manse, the fresh smell of pine is displaced by the acrid odor of moist coal cinders. The backyard is dark and bare. Tall firs cut out the light, making it cold and dank as well. I am glad to be wearing a light jacket. The manse has a screened back porch, and my mother pulls on the handle to the entry door, but it is latched. (155)

Details like these add to the rich texture Madrid’s elegant prose creates throughout In the Country of Empty Crosses, the Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico. Madrid has not written with retribution in mind, however near to revenge some incidents sound. Indeed, the author sets forth incidents as facts, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the cultural fusions and transitions that would create contemporary mores of his tierra.

A few years later, Madrid encounters the Marlboro man’s brother, and receives a decent welcome and useful information. Back at the manse, as they drive away from the Chama parsonage, the rude woman seems to be abjectly ashamed. And she’ll have to schlep the heavy crates by herself.

Madrid’s literary occupation shines brilliantly in this readable text. The writer avoids easy sentimentality, packing detail and telling incident without imposing a political stance that might deflect from the memoir element. For example, recounting that his boyhood home in Tierra Amarilla was the site of a raid by chicano nationalists, Madrid doesn’t mention the murder of the anglo forest ranger nor name Reies Tijerina as the shooter. Since Madrid no longer lived in Tierra Amarilla when he learned of the tragedy, the event is not part of his cultural debt.

Throughout his 213 pages, the author doesn’t wallow in regret that the rural New Mexico of Madrid’s youth doesn’t exist anymore, despite his subtly pointed illustration of inexorable change. The retrograde attitudes of the various brands of Christianity on display in the author’s memory probably continue to divide communities today, but that may be a function of individual venality rather than culturally imposed norms. Madrid chooses to omit such considerations.

Chicanas Chicanos who, like me, grew up in rural Catholic settings outside New Mexico will recognize Madrid’s tierra and its denizens, and that’s another good reason people will enjoy reading the memoir.

Raza are more alike than different, though differences inevitably crop up. “The manse,” for example, is the pastor’s home. The term jumps out at me for its unfamiliarity. Madrid notes the Baptists were ascendant in the local protestant community; I wondered if the sect had subtly imposed a plantation mentality to go along with their manifest destiny?

I asked a preacher’s kid what his family termed their home. It was always “the parsonage.” Other friends told me they knew “the vicarage.” “Rectory” is the priest’s abode in Catholic parishes. Webster’s tells me “manse” is common usage among Presbyterians, and Madrid’s gente followed Presbyterian dogma, diluted by that Baptist influence.

Madrid’s writing flows elegantly, a tapestry of memory he weaves or unravels thread by thread, laying patterned motifs with a word or image on an earlier page that the writer expands into paragraphs and rich chapters later. Readers will note lilacs, railroads, sunflowers, smells and landscape motifs. The story so richly textured becomes deeply engaging to the point the book’s liberal display of excellently wrought photographs becomes invisible. Once noticed, however, the fotos enhance the pages, illustrating more the ambience of the chapter than necessarily a single sentence. Photographer Miguel Gandert’s captions appear in the afterpages.

The book itself is laid out like an art book, so much so that designer Kristina Kachele places the CIP page at the back instead of obverse the title page. She provides ample white space via wide margins, generous leading, a pleasing serif font, and a page size that sits the palm without burdensome bulk. The publisher elected a medium weight bright white coated stock that not quite ideally supports the photographs, but nonetheless holds much of the detail and care Gandert invests in his exposures.

Cultural baggage being what it proves to be, I did not “get” the title’s “empty crosses.” Catholics display the crucified Christ on a cross, protestantes don’t. Madrid sees the empty cross, too, as a symbol of redemption, though who’s redeemed remains ambiguous and subject matter for spirited discussions In the Country of Empty Crosses, the Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico is sure to engender.



Michael Sedano (mvs) - You tell about that resentful anglo boy who challenged your selection to lead a school ceremony. Did you see the memoir as a chance to get even with tipos like him?

Arturo Madrid (am) - Laughs. No, although friends have told me there may be elements of that. But I want to recount accurately as far as I remember. There is so much in our history that bears examination I have no time nor interest in getting back at people.

MVS - You write about the pressures of being a principal's kid (his father) and son of a local government official (mother), how you were constantly under observation by all eyes. Did your research lead you to read the book Preacher's Kid, about the same phenomenon?

AM - Several people told me about the book, so I might. I wanted to convey a different sense of history so my work didn't require much of that type reading. There are many contradictory tensions that come more clearly out of experience, observation, conversation.

MVS - The principal theme of the book is being an interloper. The anglos were interlopers on your tierra, yet you see yourself and before that, your parents as interlopers into protestant worlds. You don't spend a lot of energy investigating their motives nor addressing a justification for their determination to become cultural blenders.

AM - That was so far in the past and difficult if not impossible to know. They were biliterate and bilingual;  their parents were literate people. That is what their society needed.

MVS - The Tierra Amarilla raid  by La Alianza Federal de Mercedes was an awful event. You don't mention the murder or Tijerina.

AM - I heard about the incident while driving in my car, so it wasn't part of my experience. I met Tijerina years later and found him interesting and companionable. I didn't go into the raid because I was living in Texas and Tierra Amarlla wasn't my story.

MVS - You populate the book with lots of synaesthesia and visuals, there's a sense of longing in your narrative focus. What do you miss about your tierra?

AM - Living 20 years in San Antonio, in the city, I miss the open spaces and being able to see long distances, see mountains. I miss the smells of New Mexico, the piñon forest, the creosote bushes, the mix of smells after a rain.

MVS - Has time healed the divisions you recount? Have gente managed to subsume the hard feelings or do these divisions remain, perhaps as krypto cultural norms exacerbated by propinquity?

AM - In rural New Mexico people are occupied making a living and manage to put aside such divisions out of self-interest. It's different in the city where divisions remain and probably don't improve much because of propinquity and the nature of big towns.

MVS - What are you reading now?

AM - I'm reading Hilary Mantel's book on the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. She's a wonderful historian and writer who won a Booker Prize. I enjoyed Fludd. I'm also the judge for the Texas NACCS Book Award, and have five titles to read.

MVS - Miguel Gandert's photographs illustrate the book beautifully. But I got wrapped up in the story and tended to ignore the fotos the first time through.

AM - I've had that response from several friends. Miguel's photographs are so striking that originally the publisher wanted to limit illustrations to just a few but the images demanded to be included.

MVS - What do you want readers to know about Arturo Madrid as a result of reading In the Country of Empty Crosses?

AM - I want them to think this guy can tell a good story, that he has a good sense of language, and beyond that he knows how to use language to create a wonderful environment.


My 44th Anniversary


January 15, 1969 was a Wednesday. If I slept the night before, I don't remember. I had a 0700 appointment at the Santa Barbara bus terminal.

That final night my three best friends and I--Barbara, Mike, and Bryan--cruised the streets of Santa Barbara for one final look-see. At a stop sign--would I go south to Haley Street, or north and back to Isla Vista--a cowboy hat in the rearview mirror honked impatiently then he rammed his clunky pickup truck into us when I didn't pull away. Pulling around me, he honked and gave me the finger, screaming, "Fuck You, Four F." I exploded in laughter.

In the morning, with a Josh White tune running through my head, "there's a man going round taking names,"someone called my name. I hugged my wife and kissed her good-bye. I stepped onto the bus and in a few minutes, it pulled away. Barbara had kept up a brave mien all week as the clock ticked away. I glanced out the window to see she'd finally given in to her tears. Her hands covered her downturned face and she missed seeing me wave goodbye.

Forty-four years ago today, I reported as ordered by President Richard M. Nixon and accepted involuntary induction into the United States Army.


I was lucky that day. As a gruff Sergeant herded our skivvy-covered asses upstairs to the final set of examinations before taking the Oath, one Draftee sat red-faced under the sign that read "United States Marine Corps."


The Gluten-free Chicano
Las Dos Gildas Make Tortillas de Harina

Last week's Gluten-free Chicano segment exulted in finding the palo his mother used in rolling tortillas de harina. Because wheat is poison to the gluten-afflicted, the GF chicas patas shared the recipe for egg and tortillita as alternative to making flour tortillas.

This week, Las Dos Gildas, the renowned cooking site, provides a suitable recipe for those forbidden treasures. Gilda Valdez Carbonaro has amended the recipe to feature vegetable oils rather than the lard that produces the authentic flavor of homemade tortillas de harina.

The Gluten-free Chicano recommends using lard in the same volume of oils. Click here for Las Dos Gildas' recipe. Rolling a perfect tortilla with your mother's palo will have to be a matter of trial and error.

http://dosgildas.com/tortillas-de-harina/


On-Line Floricanto. Antepenultimate Tuesday of January 2013


Lacerated Dreams by Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar
A veces ~ Sometimes by Lupe Rodriguez
The Stadium by Kenneth Salzmann
Dream Warriors by Dde TheSlammer


Lacerated Dreams
by Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar

it ain’t got to be so complicated
knowledge should be available
free and running like water streams and shit

love should not be incarcerated
neither should dreams be lacerated
amongst barbed wire fences and shit

no body parts should feed the desert
no last breaths should be taken at the edge of dreams

why is it gotta be so damn complicated?
Filling out papers and shit
Singing hymns and chants to the empire
Why should some hide their red
While others call it patriotism?
Yet, the sinister of their practice is glorified and praised and shit
Praised like Jesus.. en el nombre de Cristo Jesus

A pregnant woman left to starve
While pedestrians watched
And children recorded
Children,
Children beaten by life
Children who beat other children unconscious
Drug dealing children
Prostitute children
Illegal alien children
Poor children
Poor colored children

Why has shit got to be so complicated?
We as a society feed off their flesh
Their voice, their fall from grace
We feast off their broken spirits
Cash checks over their corpses
And we demand more

What type of society are we
That we demand doom
While claiming privilege and shit?



Mother in Chains
by Colleen Krinard

bleeding silently at the edge of the road
mother stands weeping, watching, waiting.

they have stripped her naked.
and with greedy joy have bound and raped,
pillaged and plundered
her wholeness into tiny grains
of dust and rubble turned
to profit
by the kings
and queens of
paper green
and silicon ink.

her tears of broken waters fall
on muddied treaties trampled long ago
by a destiny so manifest
that it has lost itself
in lives of
ruin and contempt.

her soul yet waits for eyes of passion
and hearts of fire
to listen
and to hear her song
of coming home.

with ears of yearning
and arms outstretched she knows
this dance is not yet done.

come to me now
oh my children and friends
who know the joy of the
sounds of sunrise and
the quiet of the dancing stars and moon.

take your places around the table
once set long ago by dreamers
much like you.

find each other,
and in celebrating your homecoming,
restore us all.



A veces ~ Sometimes
by Lupe Rodriguez

I hear the voices of elders
in dreams
so close to me
I can feel their breath....
their warmth....
their touch so soft...
afraid to awaken...
to lose...
their touch and presence...
I remain.....
eyes shut even when awoken...
my palms extended and awaiting....
a touch no longer....almost forgotten...
es un sueno...just a dream...
A veces....sometimes I wish.....
I'd never be awoken of that dream....
que bonito sueno fue.....
what a beautiful dream it was.....



The Stadium
by Kenneth Salzmann

This is no game, remember,
Because the elevated rumbles still
Through the kitchen smells of each
Wave of ever-dark-eyed strangers
Ever cooking up strange dishes
Strangely spiced, and all the while
Slipping strange words
Into the spiced atmosphere
Hovering over 161st Street
To rise above the
Train's insistent jazz,
To swell into an unequivocal
Roar that will be joined by ghosts
As surely as forgotten ancestors
Will never let us go.
America is dark-eyed, too,
Against all its wishes,
And speaks in tongues,
And can't subdue
Its hunger for a common language.



Dream Warriors
by Dde TheSlammer

We came to live the American dream
We just found some nightmares along the way
We want the dream for our families
The good job
Shoes for our kids
Food in the home
Walls that are built
Not just shacked together
But sometimes when you dream
The events of your days
Can shift your dreams into nightmares
Meantime we work honest jobs
Making it ironic that we have 2 jobs
Yet make half the pay
Working twice as hard
Dreaming of the America we were lied about
The America we would have died about
The America that is a daily bout
Of us vs your lack of acceptance
But lately nightmare ideologies
Are creeping into our daily lives
Making even our accents suspect
To these Freddy Krueger “protectors”
Carrying batons that resemble
Razor blades bound in leather gloves
Used to slice our innocence like we were children
Molesting our freedom
Uniforms that look like sweaters
Stained from the black oozing
From their standard issue hearts
And red stripes from the blood splatters
Of mandatory beating quotas
Faces burned with the fire
Of their hatred for us
But we are dream warriors
Using our wishes to give us the tools
To fight back against the deformed society
That says we disgust them
But I know why you really hate us
Its because we are living
The first American dream
The one we were introduced to
The daily celebration of Columbus Day
To arrive in an inhabited land
And say we live here now
and in response you tell us
Papers please
Star of David
Skin tone mentalities
Arizona acted initially
To be in the middle
Of Nazi regime
Papers?
Please by all means
Because instead of wrapping smallpox in blankets
We wrap weed in the papers we use
To keep you manageable
Your government has its papers for us
We have our papers we govern to you
No wonder you throw us in joints
That’s why we drive low-riders
To prove we aren’t always high
We're well grounded
As in not going anywhere
Hell isn’t a place you leave
Just to go back because
Our wings got tired
We are angels who didn’t fall from grace
We had our land ripped from under us
You opened the ground
And it swallowed us
It was just a matter of time
Before we ascended again
Without the use of rope
We aren’t the bane of your existence
We are the dark knights of your redemption
Robin you of your false sense of superiority
And you two-faced jokers
Who like to use and abuse us
You are out of our league
Our shadows shine brighter than you
We illuminate the American dream
So you can wake up and see
That finally
We have come back home


BIOS

Lacerated Dreams by Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar
A veces ~ Sometimes by Lupe Rodriguez
The Stadium by Kenneth Salzmann
Dream Warriors by Dde TheSlammer


Xuan Carlos Espinoza-Cuellar. Xuanito identifies himself as a third world xueer/ista, mexican@, artivista, izquierdista, radical, proud person of size, estudiante y poeta. a person who believes in social justice and that poetry has the potential to revolutionize the world, cada palabra is a spark of consciousness, cada poema una transformacion profunda. A highly recognized poet and performer who dares to interrogate issues impacting our queer and immigrant communities. his performance ranges from cabaret to slam poetry. Xuanito has performed at several venues such as universities, gay clubs, book stores, pupuserias, glbt centers, straight bars and art galleries. his/her vision is one of reclaiming art from and to the margins, dignifying our forms of expression and use laughter to fight oppression and exploitation.

"Xuanito will slap you with knowledge and truth, and leave you wanting more."

Colleen Whitehorse Krinard, mother of six amazing and now grown life companions, has been writing songs and poetry since 1978. Singer, songwriter, poet, composer, writer, psychotherapist, social worker, energy intuitive, shaman, curandera, she has been called by one of her teacher-mentors, Dr. Arturo Ornelas of CEDEHC, Cuernavaca (Centro de Desarrollo Humano Hacia la Comunidad AC) ‘la bruja blanca que vuela con el viento’. Since being welcomed into this circle south of the border, her awareness of the history and current social-political issues pertaining to immigration and the relations between México and the Estados Unidos continues to grow and develop along with her process of moving towards fluency in Español.

Colleen holds degrees in Anthropology, Music, Social Work, and the School of Life. She has studied esoteric, metaphysical and healing traditions from around the world for over forty years, and utilizes and teaches her eclectic mezcla of this material in her Transformational Energetics sessions and classes. She has spent over twenty years working with people struggling with mental health, medical, and addictions issues in public clinics, offering specialized support in the treatment of trauma.

In the early years her work focused on personal themes; her poetry and songs were her way of coping with her experiences of becoming a single mother, a developing depression, and living with the after-effects of PTSD in her life. Pivotal changes occurred when she was exposed to a more global perspective of human history, economics and suffering through doctoral level coursework in Anthropology at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, Ca where she learned about the creation of poverty and debt in the post-colonial Global South through the enforcement of fiscal structural adjustments and other colonizing economic policies.

Under the guidance of Dr. Wynne DuBray, Lakota Sioux, professor of Cultural Diversity and Mental Health in the MSW program at California State University, Sacramento, Colleen had the opportunity to identify and reconnect with her indigenous roots and values through a guided journaling project. Later, while working at Consolidated Tribal Health Project, a Pomo consortium in Mendocino County, California, between 2002 and 2005 she learned first-hand through the stories of her clients and their families of the traumatizing effects of racism, past and present affecting the People. At this time she also took classes in Native American studies at Sonoma State University, in Cotati, Ca, learning about both the legal-historical perspective of traumatization in a class on California Native American History taught by Raquelle Myers, Pomo, and David Lim, of the National Indian Justice Center in Santa Rosa, Ca, and also experiencing directly the resilience and creativity pouring out through Native American literature and poetry with Duane Big Eagle, Osage, Ok.

During this same timeframe Colleen was privileged to be in conversation with Edwin Lockhart, Sherwood Band Pomo, regarding local social justice issues as well as hearing about his personal shamanic process with fire circles, and how he was learning through dreams and visions, before his early passing.

Finally it was hearing John Trudell and his band, Mad Dog, in Boonville, California in live performance where the torch of passion lit the fire in her heart and planted the seeds for the application of her music and poetry to social justice issues.

Recently returned from five months living in Oaxaca, Mexico, she currently lives in Belen, NM, and works in a medical clinic in nearby Los Lunas, NM.

Colleen shares the following foundational concepts which guide her life and work:
we are not alone …
everything is energy …
everything is inter-connected …
life is a magnificent learning journey …
nature heals and sustains us and we owe a debt…
the full-meal-deal of life includes the light and the dark …
we learn by trying things out, mistakes are a good thing …
our obstacles are often the signposts highlighting our paths along the way …
we have an emergent need to learn ways to live increasingly in constructive and respectful relationship with nature in our modern lives …
why not smile, listen, share, learn, love and laugh as we go on our ways …




Kenneth Salzmann is a poet and writer who lives in Woodstock, New York. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Rattle, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Home Planet News, and many more, and in such anthologies as Beloved on the Earth, Reeds and Rushes, Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, and Child of My Child. He blogs at www.kensalzmann.com.


DDE The Slammer is an Indianpolis, IN native, but is born in Cancun, Mexico. He has been consistantly performing at opem mics and slams for the past six years. He has performed in several parts of the US as well as Germany. With poems ranging fom Mexican viewpoints (one of these poems had him practically banned from a restaurant in Indianapolis after he performed it) to video games to human trafficing to gas station danishes, his versatility can only be matched by the energy he brings. Self-titled leader of the "Bellyswag" movement, which is a movement that requires little movement, he has a large presence on stage in a figurative and literal stance. His CD entitled Common Sense Shoryuken holds a variety of poems and yes, the cover does have the button combo for a Dragon Punch

Display Comments Add a Comment

We'll meet at Penn today—me and my new flock of young memoirists.  I've chosen, among many other things, to share the first page or two of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  What do these sentences tell us about the memoir form, I'll ask?  What do they free us, as writers, to do?

It's a question I might as well ask you:

I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.  I'd half-awaken.  He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Display Comments Add a Comment

& giveaway contest!

How long could you have faith? Believe in the impossible? Rely on the strength of the smallest person you have ever met? In the memoir The Summer Called Angel, Sola Olu tells of her family’s refusal to accept the possibility that their premature daughter would not defeat the odds.

The Summer Called Angel is a memoir about survival: survival of a premature baby, survival of a brand new family, survival of love, and survival of faith. This memoir is both frightening and inspiring. You’ll find yourself cheering on this family fighting for the life they dreamed of and wondering where they find their strength. This book also includes a few welcome additions such as poems and resources for other families of premature infants.

Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Create Space (November 7, 2012)
ISBN-10: 1460932676
ISBN-13: 978-1460932674
Twitter hashtag: #SummerCalledAngel

The Summer Called Angel: A Story of Hope on the Journey through Prematurity, is available as a print and e-book at Amazon.com, as well as your local independent bookstore.



Book Giveaway Contest: To win a copy of The Summer Called Angel, please enter using the Rafflecopter form at the bottom of this post. The giveaway contest closes this Friday, January 25 at 12:00 AM EST. We will announce the winner the same day in the Rafflecopter widget. Good luck!

About the Author:

Sola Olu was born and raised in Nigeria. As a child, she loved making up stories and as soon as she could write she started putting them down on paper. She holds degrees in English and Information Systems, Sola works in the retail industry and volunteers as a counselor to mothers of premature babies. Her writings include essays, poetry and children's stories. She loves to cook, travel and attend the theater. She lives in Illinois with her husband and two children.

Find out more about the author by visiting her online:

Sola's author website: http://www.solaolu.com/

Sola's blog: http://www.solaolu.com/Blog.html

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheSummerCalledAngel

------Interview by Jodi Webb

WOW: What type of writing had you done before you began work on The Summer Called Angel?

Sola: Just a lot of half projects on my computer, essays, unpublished romance manuscripts, children's stories, and a blog that I abandoned but have this year restarted: http://solamusings.blogspot.com/. The Summer Called Angel took me eight years to write because I was working, had two kids and took time to take care of myself.

WOW: It's good you took time to take care of yourself! It's something all of us need to do. So, do you have any memoir writers you enjoy?

Sola: I like Sue Silverman and enjoyed her guide to memoir writing, Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir, as I edited mine.

WOW: We love Sue William Silverman! She actually did a blog tour with WOW for Fearless Confessions. It's such a great guide, and I'm so glad you used it for your book! 

How did The Summer Called Angel come into being? Did it begin as something written during your experience of dealing with your daughter's premature birth as a personal exercise . . . a journal, letters, a blog? Or was it something you wrote after the fact, looking back on your experiences?

Sola: A little bit of both. It began as a journal. During my daughter's hospital stay, it began as a "mummy was here today . . ." kind of journal entry, just to have something to remember that time; but as her hospital stay became longer, it became more difficult and I actually stopped for a long time until she came home. Of course, with her home and with all then therapies, I again stopped for a while, then wrote from recollection; and then I had my second child, and I'm like now the story takes a different turn. Eventually, I requested her medical notes to ensure that I had the right sequence of events and to add to how I felt as well as validate the medical issues we had to deal with.

WOW: I found your book incredibly emotional, as it brought back some of my own experiences with premature labor. Was it difficult reliving your family's experiences?

Sola: Oh sorry to hear about that. It was difficult. And it's funny you bring that up because I had a family member tell me to "move on." For a long time I was very emotional, even though she was fine; I would remember some painful episodes and tear up, but writing helped me through. I guess that was why there were so many stops—you have to be ready to write about what you went through, and then the healing comes with that. Ultimately, the story ends well. I decided to put everything out there because when I was going through those emotions of dealing with a sick child, I wondered if those feelings were valid or maybe I was just weak. But in speaking to other parents through the volunteer program I joined after my daughter came home, I realized other parents have those feelings too; and by putting it out there, I'm saying, "It's OK to cry. It's OK to heal in your own way."

And I also say I am in no way diminishing the fact that there are so many stories out there that don't have a happy ending and I can't imagine how people cope when they have to deal with that.

WOW: What made you decide to publish your experiences as a book?

Sola: It's funny—I have always dreamt of being an author. I wrote two young adult romance novels when I was a teenager. When my premature birth happened, I didn't think, Oh here's a book . . ., even though I started journaling. The first time I thought about it becoming a book was when we were coming home from hospital one day and I told my husband that we had missed summer—we didn't have a summer—and he replied that yes we did, we had a summer called Angel. My inner writer had flipped up and I thought, Hmmm that sounds like the title of a book, but at that time I didn't know what the ending would be.

So my dream of becoming an author came through with my memoir, and that has now given me the inspiration to dig up my old manuscripts and revamp.

WOW: That's a great story about your title. Can you tell us a bit about your path to publication? Did you look for an agent or traditional publisher or did you feel that self-publishing was the best choice for you?

Sola: I went for a writers conference in 2010 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It was my first, and I plan to go again this year. While there, I learned so many things about the publishing industry and writing in general. Even though I "pitched" to agents and they seemed interested, I guess I felt overwhelmed by the whole traditional publishing route, and just came back, looked around, and selected self-publishing. I just felt I had written for 6 years at that point and I was ready. It would take another 2 years from that point though—to eventually revise, edit, and get the memoir published.

Would I choose that route again? I'm not sure—I hope not. I hope I'm able to find a publisher for my next work.

WOW: From your experience, what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of self-publishing?

Sola: The advantages of self-publishing are that you're in control of your own pace, you set your time frame and commit to it; you have editorial control of what goes in your publication; and if you have a more flexible contract, you can publish almost anywhere, especially the e-book format.

The disadvantages—especially if you're a novice like me—are that you sometimes don't have a clue what you're getting into. I learned the hard lesson that salesmen are all the same, and will sell to you to make a commission, so choose your packages very carefully. Almost every correction I made, I had to pay a fee, and it took 7-10 business days.

You also do all your own marketing. Most book stores will not carry print on demand, so you ultimately have to get your own ISBN if you want your book in stores.

WOW: What are you working on now?

Sola: A children's book for now and then back to my young adult manuscripts. I am very excited. Thank you.

WOW: Thank you, Sola, for chatting with us today! I admire you for putting yourself out there with The Summer Called Angel, and I look forward to your future projects.

----------Blog Tour Dates

Monday, January 21 @ The Muffin
Stop by for an interview and book giveaway!
http://muffin.wow-womenonwriting.com/

Tuesday, January 22 @ The Book Cast
Have you ever wondered what determination sounds like? Listen to an audio interview with Sola Olu, author of The Summer Called Angel and you'll hear it in her voice.
http://www.thebookcast.com

Wednesday, January 23 @ Thoughts in Progress
Sola Olu, author of The Summer Called Angel, stops by today with some thoughts about premature birth.
http://www.masoncanyon.blogspot.com

Thursday, January 24 @ CMash Loves to Read
Stop by for an introduction to Sola Olu, memoirist, about her family's struggle and triumph over prematurity.
http://www.cmashlovestoread.com

Monday, January 28 @ Read These Books and Use Them!
New mom Margo reviews The Summer Called Angel, a memoir about the challenges a new mom faced.
http://margodill.com/blog

Thursday, January 31 @ Joanna Celeste
Check out a review of a heartwarming memoir: The Summer Called Angel.
http://www.joannaceleste.com

Monday, February 4@ GEO Librarian
Stop by for a visit with Sola Olu, author of the memoir The Summer Called Angel.
http://geolibrarian.blogspot.com

Wednesday, February 6 @ Words by Webb
Don't miss a review of a touching memoir of the survival of a brand new family: The Summer Called Angel.
http://jodiwebb.com

Friday, February 8 @ Capability Mom
Don't miss a guest post by Sola Olu on the healing power of writing.
http://capabilitymom.com

Monday, February 11 @ Tiffany Talks Books
Have you been thinking about love lately? Learn what true love is when you read the review of The Summer Called Angel by Sola Olu. Last chance to win a copy on the tour!
http://tiffanytalksbooks.com

Thursday, February 14 @ Read it Here First
Don't miss today's interview with Sola Olu, the author of the memoir The Summer Called Angel.
http://fromtheauthors.wordpress.com 

To view all our touring authors, check out our Events Calendar. Keep up with blog stops and giveaways in real time by following us on Twitter @WOWBlogTour.

Get Involved!
If you have a website or blog and would like to host one of our touring authors or schedule a tour of your own, please email us at blogtour@wow-womenonwriting.com.

Book Giveaway Contest: Enter to win a copy of The Summer Called Angel! Just fill out the Rafflecopter form below. We will announce the winner in the Rafflecopter widget this Friday, December 14.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Good luck!

Display Comments Add a Comment

So you've had a couple weeks to firm up your 2013 writing goals. You have a handle on what you hope to accomplish, and if you’re the really industrious type, you've hit the page running. It’s all good, as my kids are fond of saying.

But I've noticed that whenever my kids say, “Calm down, Mom. It’s all good,” it’s invariably not all good. They've forgotten something (something that’s usually terribly important). And so I thought I’d ask: Have you remembered your writing budget?

Your writing budget is just as important as your writing goals, especially if your goals tend towards the general rather than the specific. For example, let’s say that your 2013 goal is to focus on children’s writing, and to that end, you've decided to write every day, and read more in the children’s genres you’re targeting. That’s terrific, and you will be a better writer by the end of the year.

But if you have a writing budget, you can rev up your goal. With less than a hundred dollars, you can join a professional organization like SCBWI and reap the benefits of membership. With less than two hundred dollars, you can take a class in the children’s writing field you enjoy. Or you can attend a conference, and connect with other writers in your area. You can skip the expensive coffee a couple times a month and use that money to enter a few children’s writing contests. Contests are wonderful motivators, particularly later in the year when your writing get-up-and-go is threatening to get up and leave.

So it doesn't take an accountant to see that a writing budget will pay dividends down the road in your writing career.

But maybe you’re not a fiction writer. Maybe you’re a freelancer, or a poet, or working on your memoir, and you can’t see any benefits in joining a professional organization or attending a conference. But you still want to take your writing to the next level. Yep, you’re going to need a budget.

For less than a hundred dollars, you can set up your own website and jumpstart your online presence. If you can find two hundred dollars, you can take classes on freelance writing, memoir writing, even poetry writing. You might want to join a freelance job opportunities site; these sites can range from free to forty dollars a month. You could research mentorship, wherein writers set their own fees for what will help you the most.

So before your 2013 resolve fades, get out the calculator and work those numbers. Figure out your writing budget and stick to it. Then you can tell me, “It’s all good, Cathy.” And I just might believe you.

~Cathy C. Hall

Display Comments Add a Comment

Not just sweet SCBWI writers experience resistance to putting their protagonists in true peril. At last Sunday's CWC Blockbuster Plots Intensive, writers of adult fiction and memoirs balked in an effort to prevent loss and trauma, disappointment and rejection, hurt and betrayal from befalling their beloved protagonists. Then today, I heard from a writer of a very successful memoir, wail about the same feelings about her character, too.

Nearly every single one of the 21 writers who opted to pay extra for a 15 minute private plot consultation with me during the retreat weekend showed the same weakness when probed about the Crisis scene. Thanks for the luxury of time spent together, I was able to reinforce the need for a powerful crisis, especially in character-driven stories, along with providing a variety of examples of a crisis in novels, memoirs, screenplays. On the final day, writers confessed to nightmares where the perfect crisis was revealed, while others wore bragging rights to ideas that came when pushed to dig deeper.

One-by-one writers shared an added angle or focus they'd come up with for their stories' crisis. One writer in front, shed tears as she described a dramatic loss her protagonist suffers. The writer next to her followed by exclaiming she was going to throw-up. Worried she'd picked up the flu that was going around, she surprised me instead by crying out: "the pig has to die!"

 Wedged between the retreat and the all-day plot intensive was the release party for The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing. Thanks to the request at the retreat for an example of a prompt, I integrated reading Writing Prompts into the Plot Tips I shared at the bookstore.

At last Saturday's plot workshop, I found that after explaining the nuances of the Energetic Markers, reading the prompts for each turning point gave concrete direction where the writers might find their Crisis and how to develop the scene with more intensity. An added bonus to writing the book to help writers write a story with a plot from beginning to end is in finding how helpful and useful the prompts are as a teaching tool, too.

Knowing what to write where in a story with a plot allows for a more loving relationship with your writing. Whether writing a first draft or revising, if you falter wondering what comes next in a story with a plot, follow the prompts in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing.

Today, I write.

To familiarize yourself with the basic plot terms used here and in the PW Book of Prompts:
1) Watch the plot playlists on the Plot Whisperer Youtube channel.
2) Read The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
3) Fill out the exercises in The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories
4) Visit:
Blockbuster Plots for Writers
Plot Whisperer on Facebook
Plot Whisperer on Twitter

Add a Comment

by Joyce Carol Thomas, illustrated by Floyd Cooper. Amistad, 2012. (review copy/F&G) I received an "F & G" from the publisher for this book. What that means is it is not the final bound version but just the printed and gathered pages. The illustrations are so beautiful in this book I think I am going to have to frame some of them, so having the pages unbound makes that easier! :) In 1948 Joyce

Display Comments Add a Comment

Beginning with Prompt 6 in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing, you're asked to plot the scenes you write above or below the line on a Plot Planner for your own individual novel, memoir, screenplay.

In an attempt to write purely from the Writing Prompts and without relying on the visual aide for as long as I could hold out, I kept delaying plotting out my scenes on a Plot Planner. The very rough and messy Plot Planner I'd sketched out when deciding to undertake the challenge to write a novel from beginning to end using the PW Book of Prompts no longer served me -- rather than keeping my mind organized, the rough plot planner confused and cluttered my imagination.

Finally, unable to calm the chaos, I took out time to create a plot planner using the smallest post-it notes to plot out the scenes I'd written from the prompts and added the vague ideas I had for each of the 4 Energetic Markers.

One color for the front story, a different color for the backstory wound, another for the romance plot, one for theme introductions, the Plot Planner quickly turned into a fluttering display of vibrant colors, gave me a sense of order and control, for now.

Today, I write.

Knowing what to write where in a story with a plot allows for a more loving relationship with your writing. Whether writing a first draft or revising, if you falter wondering what comes next in a story with a plot, follow the prompts in The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts: Easy Exercises to Get You Writing.

To familiarize yourself with the basic plot terms used here and in the PW Book of Prompts:
1) Watch the plot playlists on the Plot Whisperer Youtube channel.
2) Read The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master
3) Fill out the exercises in The Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories
4) Visit:
Blockbuster Plots for Writers
Plot Whisperer on Facebook
Plot Whisperer on Twitter

Add a Comment

by Michele Norris. Pantheon, 2010. (nook ebook) I am posting about a book for grown ups today. Known as one of the hosts of NPR's All Things Considered, Michele Norris is a journalist who has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. She set out to write about her family after learning, almost by accident, that her father had been shot in the leg by police

Display Comments Add a Comment