Artist, poet, essayist, and memoirist, living in Northern California. Retired firefighter and E.R. nursing Paramedic. I've published essays and poetry, this memoir is my first full-length book.

Writing memoir is different from any kind of writing I've done before. Memoir is life-challenging and life-changing. The remembering is just the beginning of it, the easier part. Writing it down is much more powerful and soul-shaking. With remembering, your thoughts can shift and dart away elsewhere whenever things get ugly or painful or dangerous. But when you make the commitment to tell the truth and write it down, you have to GO THERE. You have to BE there again, and experience it again. Sometimes it's even more painful now, because you can see more now than you were able to see then. You can't not-see, and you can't run away. When you write it, you are really in it.

Inchworms: Poems, sketches and Stories (Celebrating the small joys, wonders, and perplexities of life.)
More About This: Metaphysical Thoughts and Questions Of The Heart (Essays)
A Space Between Rains, Love Poems About Endings and Beginnings (Poetry)
Anthologies: Berkeley Poets’ Cooperative Quarterly Review, poem:The First of June
Milvia Street Journal, poem: Keego Harbor
Poetry Life & Times: eight poems and interview by Sara Russell, 2007. (All material from that period has been displaced by a new editor, but the interview can be read at: http://w2w.victoriachames.com/interview.html )

I'm currently working on a book-length more-than-a-memoir nonfiction narrative titled: Victory Is My Name, A Memoir, about unlearning the untruths we're taught as children that hold us hostage for life, unless we find our own way to the truth.
Book One: The Burning Barrel is published and available globally. Book Two: the West Bank is in progress.

Technical writing: Disaster First Aid-What To Do When 911 Can't Come
(a course for citizens/volunteers with handbook, Instructor-Kit of teaching materials, and 80-slide teaching presentation.)

Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi)
Writer-Coach Connection (Young-writer mentoring for Berkeley and Oakland California middle schools and high schools.)

Retired from previous careers in graphic art, Fire Service, and Hospital Emergency Room Paramedic caregiver.

North Berkeley Writers (Berkeley Ca.)
Writer To Writer (Oakland Ca.)
She Writes (Internet)
Berkeley City College (Berkeley Ca.)
Mendocino Coast Writers Conference (Mendocino Ca.)
Left Margin Lit (Berkeley)