Women's Legacy Project

Our Lives Change The World

Writing Online Memoir

Finding My Core

Writing Online Memoir

Core what? Exactly.

I re-found my inner self in 2019.

Writers are odd ducks who often need a push to write. Yes, we love to write, but the discipline to write what you intend to write, need to write, and that also meets a pertinent goal that moves you forward is difficult to achieve and maintain. But we need it. Little tricks help. One of the tricks I have used is the annual A to Z daily blogging challenge that happens in April of every year.

A couple of years ago I chose memory as the theme for the month and got through the first week of daily posting.

Memory and legacy interlace as the how and why of what creates the meaning in and of lives. I suppose we could talk about memory without discussing legacy, but you cannot speak of legacy, any legacy, any meaning of the word, without considering how memory is a component of creating and recalling legacy.

A woman's hand holds a black and white snapshot (of three girls leaning on a fence in front of a well groomed yard of a house) in front of what appears to be the same house at a later time when the yard and fence are overgrown and windswept.
A woman remembers a girl and a place.

I chose this image by Anita Jankovic on Unsplash.com to be the image that visually tied April’s series together. The layers of then and now, of the reality of a moment in a specific time and place turned into an item that tells a story and that is part of a personal legacy are simply but richly conveyed in the image.

Routines, Ruts, and Time Off

At that point I figured out a bunch of stuff I did not already know about writing a series of related posts. I realized I that doing the writing on memory, though it was a topic I wanted to explore, was not really giving myself the time off from producing content that I needed.

I needed a sabbatical. I desperately needed enough space apart from the regular mechanical actions that had become routine over the past five years to get a handle on what I needed to do, and what I wanted to do, for the next five years or so.

Routines, though incredibly important to successful writing, can also create a prison of uninspiring normalcy if inspiration is lacking.

Nancy Hill

If I had been 20 years younger and felt the way I felt a year ago, I might have felt I needed to get a divorce, or do something equally drastic, but age and time tend to develop a perspective that some people call wisdom. I realized that if I was in a marriage that has lasted 30 years, the problems I was experiencing, even if they seem rooted in relationship, probably stem from my relationship with myself.

So last year I opted to do some things to inspire me that I really, really wanted to do. Things that I hoped would free the perceived bonds that chaffed at my soul. Doing things that I had put off.

Doing the Things I Had Put Off

Burn This with Adam Driver at the Hudson on Broadway
  • TRAVEL and FAMILY. I vacationed in New York City with the Hubster while he attended an international meeting in central NYC but we arrived a couple days early, to enjoy the lush digs of a nice hotel and its central location, an to meet up with my step-daughter who fortuitously was sans kids and hubby that week. We got to reconnect with her, as herself, outside of all her other demanding roles.
    • I obtained a NYC Public Library card and hung out doing some research about women at the turn of the 19th to 20th Century. I had always fantasized about getting to hang out in the NYC Public Library.
    • we ate at amazing, inexpensive, holes in the wall – Tibetan restaurant in Queens
    • we ate a leisurely dinner while overlooking the water at a Ukrainian restaurant near Brighton Beach near
    • visited Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
    • saw Burn This starring Adam Driver on Broadway
    • drank lots of drinks at patio bars, balcony bars, cafes in parks
    • ate pizza, bagels, and all that
    • spent the day at The Wing in Dumbo with my step-daughter – what a wonderful co-working space!
  • ORGANIZING. And perhaps, most significantly, I hired an organizer to help me deal with the overwhelming bunch of family stuff I had accumulated
    • she was positive, fully engaged, and got that I had many areas of things I love as a collector.
    • by the end of the month we had worked together for about 20 hours and consolidated, sorted, gave away, and sold the things that were taking up space but providing any thing of value to me.
    • The kitchen, pantry, outdoor utility closet, living room (more like a parlor housing some of our best family kitsch) my office, and our guest room/craft room are logically organized, habitable, and non-stress-inducing.

Living My Legacy Now

Brooklyn’s version of Cow Girls. © Nancy Hill, 2019.
  • FAMILY. The grand-twins, age 9, visited from Brooklyn, sans their mom who was still enjoying her freedom for a bit,
    • attended a real western horse camp, not a riding class, for the second year in a row, with the owner and instructor of the Montessori School where their aunt attended pre-school 25 years ago as well as the first horse camp he organized.
    • It was a camp legacy that warms my heart. And since we don’t know when we will be able to travel cross country again, I am glad they had such a wonderful time visiting Arizona.
Great Grandma’s Angel Atop a New Family’s Tree. © Nancy Hill, 2019.
  • AND MORE FAMILY. The Hubster and I also drove to our daughter and son-in-law’s home in California for the first Thanksgiving she hosted. It was wonderful, though the weather was a bit dicey.
    • got to have a cup of coffee with an old friend on the way through Bakersfield
    • enjoyed the views of the distant, snow covered Sierras
    • put a jigsaw puzzle together over the course of a few days, just like we did when she was little
    • decorated their first Christmas tree with the old ornaments passed down through my family I had brought with me for her turn to care for and add to the collection
    • also saw my grand-puppies, Labrador age 13, and Dogue de Bordeaux age 11, it turns out for the last time. They were so happy to see us. They both passed away within a week of each other about a year ago.

Learning New Stuff for Enjoyment

  • I also decided to register for a conference I had wanted to attend for ages, sort of a feminist seminar crossed with a history conference.
    • The conference that took place early this year focused on the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that granted the voted to women which was ratified on August 26th 1920.
    • I learned a bunch about the history of the suffrage movement that goes with the sociocultural changes with which I was already familiar

Essentially, I immersed myself in family and women’s history, I relaxed and enjoyed myself. By the end of the year, that actually ran February to February, I had found that I knew how I wanted to channel my writing so as to form a business around it. I decided to sign up and work through a blogging business course, so as to revamp my website, create products, and focus on sharing what I have learned in the last decade and a half about family legacy, the knowledge I have amassed about women’s culture in the decades since I first studied anthropology, and about gaining the strength to persevere by learning to place myself and my life’s path within the rubric of women’s legacy in a way that I hope helps others along the way.

Take Aways

Do whatever you need to do to find your inspiration to create your story, perhaps via a blog as I talked about not so long ago.

I’ve posted many prompts over the years that also may help to evoke seasonal memories worth writing about or sharing. Just do a search in the search box above for the word “prompts.”

You might even consider creating an A to Z of your life if you are trying to get started on writing a memoir or organizing your experience into a legacy item. It is a technique that has worked well for me.

Share What Is Difficult

Writing Online Memoir

To convey the essence of who we are, what we learned throughout our lives, and what make us unique, we need to share things we do not understand.

We may never understand, or even recognize, the key to our own essence and how to unlock what sets us apart.

What is difficult for us to share may contain the dilemmas we navigated that truly set us apart as individuals.

So, to get at the essential you, re-navigate the turbulent waters you have crossed.

How did you first notice you were different from other people? What were you doing?

For example, I remember finding out about about death. I have a few fleeting memories of my mother’s mother, my grandmother, Pearl Edith Palmer Osborn, Edith, before she passed away. She passed away July 20, 1960 according to official records. I remember going to pick cherries with her. Cherries ripen in June in Indiana.

Photo by Tina Witherspoon on Unsplash

I remember my father lifting me up to look at a body of lady in a box. She looked like no one I knew. I believe this was my first memory of a funeral home and that the person I did not recognize who was in a box was Grandma.

I remember Mom coming to tell me Grandma has died during the night, that Grandma was with Jesus. This made no sense to me. Meeting Jesus would be a happy event, but here Mom was, crying, and the most upset I had ever seen her. Something did not add up.

This is my first memory of experience with cognitive dissonance.

The second time I lost faith in what my parents told me was when I first went to school. The class was singing, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the lyrics were different from what my father had taught me.

I became a skeptic quite early in life.

Twinkle twinkle little star

Up above the trolley car

If the train should jump the track.

Will I get my nickel back?

Donald Eugene Hill

These may seem like small things, but learning that there is a discontinuity between what you are taught and what you see, can be a huge assault on trust. That you are different than others in a way that can bring ridicule down upon you can be intimidating.

I recommend examining and possibly sharing things that caused, and perhaps still cause, discomfort.

Share how you came to be where you are. Do not just share the period at the end of the sentence, share the sentence.

Three Authors on Writing Memoir

Writing Online Memoir

Until I launch my program, Your Legacy, Your Way, in September, I want to recommend a few resources to help you jumpstart writing, or recording, and sharing your story.

Please Do Not Lose Our Stories

Please do not lose our stories.

It is more important now than ever. The Covid-19 Pandemic has taken tens of thousand of stories from us. Our history, our culture, our knowledge is stolen from us when death steals our stories from us.

Maybe what will be lost is your story, or maybe your family’s story, or the details of your community. You do not have to write a book for publication by some New York Publishing House. Just tell your story in whatever way is easiest for you. Don’t make it hard. It does not have to be difficult.

The Best Article on Writing Memoir

The first resource I want to share with you is a 2006 essay from American Scholar by William Zinsser. How to Write a Memoir. The essence of what he imparts comes through when he speaks of his father’s writing of his memoir.

When my father finished writing his histories he had them typed, mimeographed, and bound in a plastic cover. He gave a copy, personally inscribed, to each of his three daughters, to their husbands, to me, to my wife, and to his 15 grandchildren, some of whom couldn’t yet read. 

William Zinsser. How to Write a Memoir – The American Scholar. (2015). The American Scholar. Retrieved 14 May 2020, from https://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.Xr15lRPYrykWi

This is just a snippet and there are far more precise guidance given in the article, but it is Zinsser, the master writer, author of On Writing Well. He talks to the reader. Learn from him.

Disengage, Breathe Calmly, and Jot a Few Things Down

It is imperative that people, women in particular, preserve human stories, human voices so we do not lose our analog thoughts to massive files of data compiled by our digital competitors.

So much has changed in the recent past, the pace and amount of information accumulation and creation boggles the mind with its explosive acceleration.

If You Can Only Read One How to Write Memoir Book

I listen to sections of the audiobook version of Rachel Herron’s book, Fast Draft Your Memoir, over-and-over, for inspiration.

Rachel Herron stresses a that memoir is a narrative framing of one aspect of your story. She entertains us with story of one of her memoirs that chronicles her life through the sweaters she knitted as she did other things. The focal point of narration is revealed to be an essential connector as you unfold your unique view of a subject. Herron captures how breaking off crumbs to savor can give you a better sense of the whole loaf than cutting it up into slices.

Learning About Memoir through Social Media

I am amazed by all I have learned by following one editor and publisher of memoir’s Facebook page. I heard Brooke Warner speak at the Tucson Festival of Books and spent some time at her booth there too a few years ago and was impressed by her enthusiasm and knowledge. So I started reading her posts on her Facebook page at Warner Coaching.

Find Your Inspiration and Write

Through short, well-crafted posts, she gets me thinking about the process of wring about personal history. Sometimes she asks a question. Sometimes she posts encouragement, or answers a common question asked of her, or shares quotes. I find her short posts inspiring and thought-provoking.

These three bit of how-to writing I have listed are intended to prompt you to find a motivating nudge from someone who has been where you are, at the beginning of a great story.

So take your pen and paper or laptop and just begin. Then take a moment to mark the Autumnal Equinox, Tuesday, September 22, 2020, on your calendar to check back here for the launch of my program to help you put it all together.

When Inspiration Goes “POOF”

Writing Online Memoir

For the last several years April has meant participating in the #AtoZchallenge. A to Z is an annual writing challenge that encourages writers and bloggers to create 26 thematically related posts over the course of a month.

Why would anyone want to do this?

Writers are odd ducks who often need a push to write. Yes, we love to write, but the discipline to write what you intend to write, need to write, and also meets a pertinent goal that moves you forward is difficult to achieve and maintain. But we need it. Little tricks help.

So last year I chose topics related to memory and got through the first week of daily posting.

Memory and legacy interlace as the how and why of what creates the meaning in and of lives. I suppose we could talk about memory without discussing legacy, but you cannot speak of legacy, any legacy, any meaning of the word, without considering how memory is a component of creating and recalling legacy.

A woman's hand holds a black and white snapshot (of three girls leaning on a fence in front of a well groomed yard of a house) in front of what appears to be the same house at a later time when the yard and fence are overgrown and windswept.
Once a girl, a woman remembers that girl and place.

I chose this image by Anita Jankovic on Unsplash.com to be the image that visually tied last April’s series together. The layers of then and now, of the reality of a moment in a specific time and place turned into an item that tells a story and that is part of a personal legacy are simply but richly conveyed in the image.

Routines, Ruts, and Time Off

At that point I figured out a bunch of stuff I did not already know about writing a series of related posts. Then I realized I that by doing the writing on memory, though it was a topic I wanted to explore, was not really giving myself the time off from producing content that was the sabbatical I needed. I desperately needed enough space from regularly doing what I had done for around the past five years to get a handle on what I needed to do, and what I wanted to do, for the next five years or so. Routines, though incredibly important to successful writing, can also create a prison of uninspiring normalcy if inspiration is lacking.

If I had been 20 years younger and felt the way I felt a year ago, I might have felt I needed to get a divorce, or do something equally drastic, but age and time tend to develop a perspective that some people call wisdom. I realized that if I was in a marriage that has lasted 30 years, the problems I was experiencing, even if they seem rooted in relationship, probably stem from my relationship with myself.

So last year I opted to do some things to inspire me that I really, really wanted to do. Things that I hoped would free the perceived bonds that chaffed at my soul.

Doing the Things You Have Put Off

Burn This with Adam Driver at the Hudson on Broadway
  • TRAVEL and FAMILY. I vacationed in New York City with the Hubster while he attended an international meeting in central NYC but we arrived a couple days early, to enjoy the lush digs of a nice hotel and its central location, an to meet up with my step-daughter who fortuitously was sans kids and hubby that week. We got to reconnect with her, as herself, outside of all her other demanding roles.
    • I obtained a NYC Public Library card and hung out doing some research about women at the turn of the 19th to 20th Century. I had always fantasized about getting to hang out in the NYC Public Library.
    • we ate at amazing, inexpensive, holes in the wall – Tibetan restaurant in Queens
    • we ate a leisurely dinner while overlooking the water at a Ukrainian restaurant near Brighton Beach near
    • visited Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
    • saw Burn This starring Adam Driver on Broadway
    • drank lots of drinks at patio bars, balcony bars, cafes in parks
    • ate pizza, bagels, and all that
    • spent the day at The Wing in Dumbo with my step-daughter – what a wonderful co-working space!
  • ORGANIZING. And perhaps, most significantly, I hired an organizer to help me deal with the overwhelming bunch of family stuff I had accumulated
    • she was positive, fully engaged, and got that I had many areas of things I love as a collector.
    • by the end of the month we had worked together for about 20 hours and consolidated, sorted, gave away, and sold the things that were taking up space but providing any thing of value to me.
    • The kitchen, pantry, outdoor utility closet, living room (more like a parlor housing some of our best family kitsch) my office, and our guest room/craft room are logically organized, habitable, and non-stress-inducing.

Living My Legacy Now

Brooklyn’s version of Cow Girls
  • FAMILY. The grand-twins, age 9, visited from Brooklyn, sans their mom who was still enjoying her freedom for a bit,
    • attended a real western horse camp, not a riding class, for the second year in a row, with the owner and instructor of the Montessori School where their aunt attended pre-school 25 years ago as well as the first horse camp he organized.
    • It was a camp legacy that warms my heart. And since we don’t know when we will be able to travel cross country again, I am glad they had such a wonderful time visiting Arizona.
Great Grandma’s Angel Atop a New Family’s Tree
  • AND MORE FAMILY. The Hubster and I also drove to our daughter and son-in-law’s home in California for the first Thanksgiving she hosted. It was wonderful, though the weather was a bit dicey.
    • got to have a cup of coffee with an old friend on the way through Bakersfield
    • enjoyed the views of the distant, snow covered Sierras
    • put a jigsaw puzzle together over the course of a few days, just like we did when she was little
    • decorated their first Christmas tree with the old ornaments passed down through my family I had brought with me for her turn to care for and add to the collection
    • also saw my grand-puppies, Labrador age 13, and Dogue de Bordeaux age 11, it turns out for the last time. They were so happy to see us. They both passed away within a week of each other about a month ago.

Learning New Stuff for Enjoyment

  • I also decided to register for a conference I had wanted to attend for ages, sort of a feminist seminar crossed with a history conference.
    • The conference that took place early this year focused on the 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that granted the voted to women which was ratified on August 26th 1920.
    • I learned a bunch about the history of the suffrage movement that goes with the sociocultural changes with which I was already familiar

Essentially, I immersed myself in family and women’s history, I relaxed and enjoyed myself. By the end of the year, that actually ran February to February, I had found that I knew how I wanted to channel my writing so as to form a business around it. I decided to sign up and work through a blogging business course, so as to revamp my website, create products, and focus on sharing what I have learned in the last decade and a half about family legacy, the knowledge I have amassed about women’s culture in the decades since I first studied anthropology, and about gaining the strength to persevere by learning to place myself and my life’s path within the rubric of women’s legacy in a way that I hope helps others along the way.

Freshly Inspired and Ready to Go

Follow along with me as I embark on a more focused set of writings about living your legacy now so that those who come after you, and me, might have a more coherent, integrated understanding of society and culture, and how men and women have created the place where they find themselves, and how to work together to progress toward a better future.

You have knowledge that should be shared. We all do.

Take Aways

Do whatever you need to do to find your inspiration to create your story, perhaps via a blog as I talked about not so long ago.

I’ve posted many prompts over the years that also may help to evoke seasonal memories worth writing about or sharing. Just do a search in the search box above for the word “prompts.”

You might even consider creating an A to Z of your life if you are trying to get started on writing a memoir or organizing your experience into a legacy item. It is a technique that has worked well for me.

Blog as Memoir

Writing Online Memoir

If you write about yourself,

is it memoir?

Yes. I say, “If it talks from your perspective, about you, then it is memoir.”

Memoir snobs, and in this current decade memoir is big, so authoritative opinions about what is, and is not memoir are everywhere. I suggest ignoring them.

Unless you think that your life is best-seller material, I say, “Don’t worry about it!”

It Is All Personal History

Yes, memoir differs from autobiography which differs from auto-ethnography, and all of these differ from journaling in that there is some sort of publication involved. Yes, blogging is a type of publication.

I think most of us who write about our personal history and life are memoirists. Memoir is not telling your life story story sequentially. That can be pretty ho-hum unless you are a truly gifted writer. Memoir has a unifying element, a theme.

Finding Your Niche, Theme, or Category

I did not realize until I began my memoir (still unpublished) about being an adult survivor of what was then called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy that I really only wrote variations on a theme about five or so thematic elements when I told my own stories:

  • Family problems in the generations above me.
  • How all I missed while being isolated as a child set me up for distinct problems in each life stage beyond childhood.
  • How Gaia mothered me more than Mom did.
  • How all of my brothers ( I was the youngest of five and the only girl) suffered their own hardships from growing up in a less than perfect family.
  • How material items and family heritage behind them became socially and culturally significant forces in my life.

As you notice the patterns of things you write about after you have several posts, you can can then group them as categories. These categories might evolve to be chapters or separate books.

Your focus area can be large or small, serious or comedic. If I was starting all my writing anew I would probably have one theme or category centered on Discarded Careers that, for me, might include:

  • How living on an island with 500 monkeys taught me I did not want to be Jane Goodall
  • Wankers in the Stacks and the downside of library work
  • Never offer to create a website for someone
  • At the Steroidal Gym with Small-balled Coworkers

See what people respond to, and find to be fascinating; then write more along the same line. You will discover themes to which you return time and again and that people enjoy. If you put these factors together you may find your own, well-received niche.

Turn what you write into a book – later. Just write your stories down now! Record your thoughts, reflections, and memories.

Turn a WordPress Blog into a Book

If you write your stories as posts in a blog that uses the WordPress platform (WordPress.org) on a self-hosted server, there are then several ways you can turn that blog into a manuscript you can work with, edit, and publish. I think there is an export function in free WordPress sites or sites actually hosted by WordPress.com.

  • Export your blog through EXPORT under the TOOLS section of your WP dashboard. Or use a plugin like WP EXPORT by Soflyy to save your blog contents as CSV or XML file.
  • Convert the file into a readable and editable format such as text, rich text, or pdf with a converter. One of many sites that converts files from XML is Free File Converter.
  • Then import your text into a program like Scrivener , that is fairly inexpensive, that allows you to edit, convert into chapters, as well as do tons of other things, and then convert your edited document into a format accepted by publishers like CreateSpace.com.

So, if in doubt, DO IT. Write your memoir, or your autobiography, or your auto-ethnography, and use the blog format as a way to record and organize the different stories and types of memories you want to share. I will have more on autobiography and auto-ethnography in future posts.

Blogging Doesn’t Have to Cost a Bunch

It need not cost a fortune. There are free blogging options by Google and WordPress. This is actually a good choice for bloggers who want to have a blog that may well hang around after they are no longer around to pay the hosting company their monthly or annual fees. These particular hosts reserve the right to place ads which they profit from on your site in exchange for giving you the site for free. Your family can then access the site after you have departed this life for at least a while and maybe much longer.

There are many ways to use a blog as the platform for your memoir. If you have questions, just ask!