Flyer for my memoir
For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on my multicultural memoir based on my personal radio pieces, Mei Mei, A Daughter’s Song, The Journey of Lady Buddha and Secret Asian Woman. The working title is now Lady Buddha and the Temple of Ma and the memoir focuses on the last three years of my mom’s life as I took care of her during her second battle with breast cancer. I flash back on our turbulent cross-cultural relationship and how her tragic childhood impacted my upbringing.
I decided to take this year off from fulltime radio work in order to focus on my writing. It’s been an amazing process of relearning to write after 25 years as a radio journalist and as a playwright. In both radio and theatre, “less is more.” In writing a book, “more is best” especially more visual and emotional description.
In order to help support my work, I applied for and received a small grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. As part of this work, I’ve been attending some writers conferences this year: Fishtrap, a writers gathering, the Willamette Writers Conference and the Hawaii Writers Conference from which I just returned. I’ll be writing about these conferences in the next couple posts and giving some insight on the value of conferences for writers. I’ve also solicited some thoughts from other writers who will be posting soon.
Dmae interviewing Rich Wanshieder, co-founder of Fishtrap
To start off this series of posts, I encourage people to listen to two radio programs I produced recently about the Fishtrap Writers program near Joseph, Oregon, in the beautiful Wallowas Lake and Retreat Center. I interviewed the founders and participants in Part One including the legendary Kim Stafford.
In part two, I talked acclaimed writers Elise Paschen (who started the Poetry in Motion program) and Memoirist Debra Gwartney. They all give insight into the writing process but also about how they support their work spiritually and how they motivate themselves.
Debra Gwartney & Elise Pachen
Let me know what you think and share your experiences with writers conferences. I’ll be posting my thoughts on Willamette Writers and the Hawaii Writers conferences soon.
October 4, 2009 at 7:56 pm
[...] | Leave a Comment Here’s part three of my Summer of Conferences posts. In Part 1 I talk about Fishtrap. Part 2 was about Willamette Writers and the Hawaii Writers [...]