Connie's Corner

Another good one....

Yesterday I experienced another enjoyable memoir class, and...our number has grown to eleven students. The new lady, Sharon, followed her dream late in life and is now an attorney. She read her story assignment and told how she had been thwarted from this destination by her school guidance counselor. In those days women studied to be teachers or secretaries no matter your aptitude. Since almost all of us share the same birth decade, her story triggered many memories of similar circumstances, one of the points of our class.

Susie, our instructor, distributed some handouts to complete for next time. The first one is titled "The Life of (Me)" and is a timeline with columns for year, age, home address, school/work/environment, and story ideas. There are a lot of pages for me (and most of the rest of the class) since my years go from 1944 to present day.

The second handout addresses "My Early Childhood" and consists of several sentence beginnings such as "I think of my mother as blank, blank, and blank", "When I was sick with blank, I remember wishing that blank", "The name blank was given to me at birth because blank", and many more to be completed by next class. There is a blank area on one of the pages requesting us to draw a floor plan of the house "I lived in from the time I was blank years old until I was blank". One of the rooms or even areas of the yard may perhaps trigger a memory.

The third handout is questions from Susie to help jog memories..."When in life have you felt most alone?", "What songs or games do you remember from childhood?", "Are you still friends with anyone from your childhood? Do you wonder where others are now?", etc. The questions came from an internet site, www.nationaldayoflistening.org.

For our next assignment we are to read Section IV of our manual, "Aids to Writing", and write another story involving the sense of smell. She gave us lots of trigger words, snow, wet dog, gasoline, lilies, wet sneakers, bad breath, rain, baking bread, grandma's house, the ocean, bleach, crayolas, white paste, tobacco, fried chicken, ivory soap, vinegar, Toni permanents, camphor, hot tar, Christmas trees, etc. As many of you on this site have reminded me in my reviews, it is very important to incorporate the senses in my stories .

Since I have sent in my membership dues to W.A.G. (our local writers' group), I will have access to a memoir pod where I can get genre-specific feedback on my stories. I hope one meets during daylight hours since I do not like driving at night.

I thought our class lasted seven weeks but it is only five. It ends on March 6th, but the good news is Memoir Writing II begins immediately after.

Also, Sandy told us about a ten-year journal (optimism required) available on Amazon titled "Journal 10+" (already ordered) . Even though I have kept a journal for many, many years, they consist of small books of different shapes, sizes, and colors...wish I had found this earlier . It is never too early or too late to start journaling because the enjoyment derived from rereading old ones is immeasurable.

until next time...c