Memory as Resurrection: A Writing Activity

Cathy and I have had an odd feeling after selling her family home. She still tears up from time to time when she realizes our attachment to our native land has just become a bit less firm. For the past nine years, she’s been in that home four days out of each month, as she…

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Memoir by Canned Goods

Showboat Pork and Beans, Chef Boyardee Ravioli, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, SpaghettiOs, Dinty Moore Beef Stew. When I was a teenager in the seventies, all I needed was one of these, a can opener, a stove, and I had myself a meal. In those days, my mother worked. She worked in the laundry or on the…

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Interrogating Memory

From 1963 through 1969, my parents and I lived in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. We’d come there from our farm in southeastern Illinois so my mother could teach the third grade in the Arbor Park School District, #145. As many of you who have read my memoirs know, my mother had…

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Daydreaming Your Memoir

I saw a photograph once, but now it only exists in my memory. It was an 8 x 10 glossy of the congregation of the Berryville Church of Christ, the church I attended with my mother when I was a small child on our family farm. The church itself was a one-room affair with a…

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