Today I want to make a case for conflict. Nobody likes it, of course, except maybe drama queens, adrenaline junkies, or lawyers.
I personally try to avoid conflict as much as possible. Heck, the subtitle of my memoir is ‘How I Found Peace in Betrayal and Divorce.’ Sometimes, during not so peaceful times, I look at that and feel like an imposter. Or I might repeat the words I found peace, I found peace as if I can make it so.
Several weeks ago, on my way to my yoga class, I noticed an elderly man pulling weeds in his front yard. He was kneeling on a paper bag, working his way slowly through what looked to me like an impossible task.
Because the yard was nothing but weeds. And the house itself, in my ungenerous opinion, was a sort of weed, with sad, faded blue paint, a sagging front porch, and a sidewalk that was crumbling and cracked.
So now that I’m in my 50s, I’m proclaiming it the official “I don’t give a damn” decade.
I made this proclamation after dropping my teenage daughter off for three weeks of summer camp. Though she was handling this milestone in a calm, mature way, I found myself remembering the kinds of thoughts I had at her age when I went to camp…(read more)
In the sixties, there was a TV show called Dragnet with a detective named Joe Friday who insisted on gathering “just the facts.”
If you’re old enough to remember that show, you’ve been around long enough to have lived an interesting life. Even if you’re younger, you’ve most likely faced some challenge worth writing about.
So let’s say you want to write a memoir. Where do you start?
Since the publication of my memoir last fall, I’ve been reunited with my first love—fiction—and it feels so…..good. Mostly.
It also feels daunting and overwhelming and fills me with uncertainty and doubt.
But I believe ideas have their own timeline, and that, when we pay attention, we see tiny sprouts of magic when the time comes to begin the novel, or return to the memoir, or noodle over a poem.
I’m from Holland, Michigan, and when I was a kid, my grandma taught me a children’s rhyme in Dutch. She didn’t speak Dutch fluently, but her parents had and this little ditty was one of the things she remembered.
She wasn’t completely sure of the meaning, just that it was something about a cart before a horse.
It was a brand new, emerald green Schwinn 10-speed bike. I was thirteen years old, and I’d never owned something so beautiful. The paint sparkled magically in the sunlight and when I rode that bike through the neighborhood, I sparkled too. I rolled easily through a landscape peppered with unhappy parents, mean girls, first crushes, and bad skin with my hands up, nothing to hold on to and, in those moments at least, nothing holding me back.
Years ago, when I was still shell-shocked from learning of my husband’s infidelity and angry that I had become a divorced woman, I went out to dinner with two friends. Both were divorced, so we had that in common. But one was talking easily about co-hosting her son’s graduation party with her Ex and his new wife—the woman he’d left her for.
She barely even rolled her eyes when she said his name!
How’s this for a conundrum? I spent eight years writing a book about divorce, then when I finally reached those two magic words I’d been certain would never materialize on the page—the end—I discovered that I was expected to talk about it. A lot.
In my mind, once I put the story on paper, I’d never again have to relate this difficult time in my life. If someone had a question about my past, I could point them toward the nearest bookstore and say “Read the book.” I could move on to writing happier, made-up stories.
If you know me at all, you know that I like a good dose of woo-woo in my world.
I believe in following my intuition, prioritizing my spiritual practices, and recognizing divine messages. This is the lens through which I find inspiration and make decisions. It’s also, to me, a way of having fun.
I’ll admit, it’s an odd form of fun that can show up in strange ways.
👉 Enjoy dedicated writing space just steps from Lake Michigan
👉 Benefit from one-on-one developmental editing sessions
