Articles & Essays

On writing fiction

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Of Softball, Vacation, and East Carolina University

My brother also liked to play sports. He played on the school softball team.

At the outset of summer when the school year ended, his enthusiasm for playing softball extended to the desire to attend a camp at East Carolina State University. The camp lasted two weeks and several boys from his baseball team would be going.

On telling my mother he wanted to go,

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Of My Brother, Old Williamsburg, and “TV Guides” …

The day my brother died was a hot July 3rd in 1976, approximately one month shy of the year and a half that had passed since when my father had died of a heart attack.

It would be our first and only trip as what remained of our family, me, my brother and our mother. We had never taken a trip with our father. It is hard as a farmer to go away. Land, crops and livestock need continuous tending.

My mother, brother and I

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Of Narrative, Scenes of a Life, and Brimming With Fear …

In that a memoir, and the structure of any narrative, consists of scenes, I must write various scenes of my life, those that most depict my suffering for which I offer forgiveness and hold compassion for my mother.

This is hard. Not simply because I am writing of my mother, and about myself. The challenge lies in my lack of certainty, the ambiguity of my mother’s actions, and thus my ambivalence.

Perhaps what

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Of Ambivalence, Epiphanies, and Sonnets of Compassion …

Despite all that I endured with my mother under her care, or lack of it, I was never ambivalent about my ability to love.

Even in the worst of times during my childhood, and while undergoing the nightmare of relationship with my mother, it has always seemed the easiest thing to love, the hardest to mistreat and push away, speak harshly to.

I cannot imagine being to my children as my

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"mémoires de rue (memoirs of the streets)" by patrice ouellet--8697118440_2cf7f11aef_o

Of Memoir, Ambivalence, and Love …

It is said that an autobiography comprise the story of a life and that memoir consists of a story from a life. A life can hold, and a person can write, many memoirs. But we have only one telling of the factual events constituting our life.

As a story from a life, a memoir consists of scenes from that life, or more importantly, moments from the aspect, area, or slice of our life that one is focusing upon.

The dimension of life

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