I’m sure you’ve heard this before. But I need to tell it to you again. Book revision and editing are harder and take longer than the actual writing of your book. So be prepared to stay with it for the long haul before you start.

Here’s a true story. After I wrote the first draft of my memoir I hired an editor who helped me prepare it for submittal to interested agents and presses. This took about a year. Then once I had a book contract, my publisher requested an enormous amount of…

90 miles an hour. Cows. And more cows. Family, laughs, love.

http://vmaddesso.tumblr.com

A few thoughts after sending North of Hope into the world:

Memoir is a subcategory of non-fiction, even if creative non-fiction or literary non-fiction. Memoir tells a true story.

Except: if you and I have dinner one week, and recall that dinner the following week, it’s likely we both will recall something different, about the light, the music playing or not, the family at the table across from us, the food. Memory is molded by who we are, the genes we carry, the experiences…

A few weeks ago, my friend and former jogging partner Ellen Sweet sent me this snapshot that she had just discovered while scanning old photographs into her computer. I remembered the picture, and I may even have a copy of it somewhere, but it was something of a shock to see it illuminated on my…

The Rangers and the Bruins played hockey this afternoon. I watched the game at my brother’s apartment, on his giant TV. He and his wife have a very cute apartment and such a comfortable sofa, and it’s a great place to sprawl and relax. I’m not a sports fan, but it was rainy and chilly out and I felt like spending some time over there. But, last night, their neighbor was murdered. The man who lived next door to them at their garden apartment complex, the man who shared the…

Today's introduction to poet, memoirist, playwright, nonfiction writer, and musician Joy Harjo includes a video of her performance of her famous 'Eagle Song':

http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2013/05/monday-muse-joy-harjo-performs-eagle.html

"I used to think my relationship with my mother ended with her death...As I change, so does my perception of my mother. As time passes, the memories that keep her alive are washed in a new light. Our relationship is ongoing. It is a wellspring."

This is from our collaborative memoir, Still Here Thinking of You ~ A Second Chance With Our Mothers by Susan Hodara, Joan Potter, Lori Toppel, & me.

My mother died 16 years ago. But this day, and…

as Mother's Day approaches, I perused the display of books about/for mothers at a local bookstore...

http://vmaddesso.tumblr.com

if my son wrote a book about me, I wonder what the title would be?

Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd provide the Thought for the Day:

http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2013/05/thought-for-day.html

http://vmaddesso.tumblr.com/post/49521473668/the-four-of-us-at-the-bedford-library-ny-our

sharing personal stories...

why?

My mother grew up in a charming, solid, Craftsman style home [1], a style influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement as well as by Oriental wooden architecture, made popular from 1905- 1920.  This style would have suited her father, a serious Scottish student of architecture, and a draftsman, a man who was at ease with the rigidity of straight lines and angles. Upon immigrating to Canada, Grandfather William, would work with the City of Vancouver,…

     Weekends were eagerly anticipated! Dad would be free of work responsibilities and home for the weekend.  We would celebrate Saturdays at home with dad!  At 8 o’clock, every Saturday morning, the smell from the kitchen would waft through the hallway, greeting my sister and me, as we slowly woke up.  In the kitchen, the frying pan would be quietly spitting and sizzling on the stove top. My sister and I would be lured from our beds.  Tousled hair and housecoats fastened, we would scoot…

There was a period when we were working on our book (Still Here Thinking of You ~ A Second Chance With Our Mothers) that we recorded conversations about different aspects of our experience together. We called them “Thursday Mornings at Ten.” Here’s one titled “Missing Our Mothers.” 



Lori: I’ve found that when something’s going wrong, when something feels very dramatic in my life, or if I’m sad, I want to call my mother.…

I and my co-authors invite you to join us in celebrating Mother's Day by adding your photograph to our "Moments of Being" slideshow at http://www.stillherethinkingofyou.com/moments-of-being.html - Peace, Vicki Addesso

On the last day of the quarter, I often ask students in my memoir class to write down on an anonymous slip of paper a question about writing.  When I did this recently, I received a number of questions about the legal implications of writing about others, how one finds an agent, how to decide on the structure of a book...all good questions.  But then there was one question that stood out from the bunch.  On a torn piece of lined notepaper, the writer asked simply, "Am I good?"…

I was writing about a night when my mother was drinking heavily. She was telling me a story I had never heard before, a secret about her own mother. I sat at my computer and typed, but I wondered: why am I writing this? I felt ashamed, guilty, not because of what my mother was saying and doing in this piece, but because I was writing it.



What belongs to me? What am I allowed to reveal?



I feel safer with fiction. There I can disguise, exaggerate, maneuver…

I finally finished editing my memoir manuscript yesterday. I now have a more or less complete first draft, but I know there's still a lot of work to do. I sent out a few chapters to my immediate family members for feedback and I'm hoping that I'll eventually be able to get feedback on the entire manuscript! A lot of work! In the meantime I've decided to focus on developing more depth to my memoir using my …

March is Women's History Month and I wanted to let you know that I will be interviewed on an internet radio show this Thursday nite (6:30pm PDT, 9:30pm EDT) talking about my historical memoir, THE WOMAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH. The internet is a great place to open up discussions. It's Authors Corner at …

A recent book review in the New York Times began with this: “No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood.”

That review reminds me that writing about mothering is just like mothering itself – fraught with judgement, whether it’s from family or neighbors or the media. It’s right up there with education as media’s go-to when we’re not in the midst of an election or scandal or disaster or tragedy.

And so, at the Associated Writing Program’s annual…