Meet Tim Yocum. At a reading given by our mutual friend, Charlene Edge, author of Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International, Tim and I chatted, and he told me about the book he had written.
Lunch in the medieval town of Uzès, north of Nîmes, eating Brittany’s specialty, a…
It’s always a good time to write, but how do you write time?
As with just about everything in writing, it depends. According to the Chicago Manual of Style, the guide most creative writers follow, if you plan to use the words o’clock, then write out the time rather than use a numeral. Use o’clock only…
Thank you to the women who made the sold-out Spiritual Memoir workshop last Saturday, July 15th great. We examined various meanings of the word spiritual, looked at what constitutes memoir, and learned about the type of writing we create when we combine the two.
The stories shared included loving tributes to parents and the privilege of…
The Space Coast Writers Guild, an organization based in Melbourne, Florida, "dedicated to encouraging, instructing and developing writers of all genres," has issued a call for submissions for their latest anthology, Holidays. The group intends to fill this anthology with a "collection of stories filled with fond recollections of holidays past and present" and accepts…
Last week, I received three requests in one day from people asking for help to write their parents' stories. I regularly get these types of unsolicited requests but not usually three in one day, all from people in the Orlando area. I didn't think much more about this pleasant coincidence and reached out to the…
I’ve been immersed in all things nonphysical these last couple of weeks as I prepare for my Spiritual Memoir workshop this Saturday, July 15th. So, anyway, I’m watching a quirky movie the other night, and the main female character says, “I unfriended God a long time ago.”
The way she said it struck me as funny…
More than three years ago, a longtime Florida friend called me to ask a favor: “With my new baby at home, would you take on a few work tasks for me? I’m stretched a little thin.” Since that day back in March 2014, she has added two more babies to her now family of six,…
What do a scientist/animal activist, a boxer, and a rock star have in common? They all wrote spiritual memoirs, and if they did it, so can you. As the wide variety of backgrounds of these authors show, anyone can write spiritual memoir, and spiritual memoir is not necessarily about religion.
World famous scientist and United Nations.…
I met Norma Beasley years ago when she attended a workshop I gave at a community church, and since that first meeting, I have learned so many fascinating things about this wonderful, talented woman.
When I offer a workshop, Norma is usually the first one to sign up and the first one to show up the…
I recently read an article by Thomas Larson titled, “Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir.” In the piece, Larson discusses Tolstoy’s A Confession, a book published in 1882 that chronicles Tolstoy’s “retrospective analysis of the previous five years in which his midlife crisis of faith unbalanced his literary and philosophical bearing. It is…