New column: Two new hips and a second chance

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. ~Kenji Miyazawa I was in my early forties when I was diagnosed with degenerative osteoarthritis in both hips. Unable to walk without assistive devices for more than a year, I had a glimpse of what it’s like to be disabled….Read the rest of […]

From memory to memoir

To kick off its three-part Spring Writing Series, the Royal Oak Public Library is featuring my workshop, From Memory to Memoir: How to Write and Publish Your Life Stories on Monday, March 24 at 7:00 p.m.  Focusing on personal essays as well as book-length memoirs, we’ll discuss how to avoid the common pitfalls of this popular […]

Fragile Season

This Lenten essay, written during my first year of empty nesting, was originally published in the anthology, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (2005; Seal Press).  Spring is just a few weeks away, yet the barren landscape outside my office window looks more like the moon than southeast Michigan. Mounds of brittle, gray snow flank […]

A cookbook memoir

Sometimes I suggest family recipes as points of entry for writing a memoir. Does your Italian grandmother’s pasta sauce stir up memories of holiday gatherings? Do you recall your kid brother’s grin every time you bake the oatmeal cookies he loved? Using this approach, some writers end up compiling cookbooks laced with treasured family stories […]

Just the two of us

Retirement? One of my friends calls it “the R word,” claiming she can’t imagine what she and her husband will do when they’re “stuck at home together.” Doug and I are semi-retired, but we’re both busier than ever and enjoying this stage of life. Still, it took a while to adjust to the changes in […]

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