Marla Miller has been helping writers “market the muse” for a long time. Now she is sharing her knowledge of the publishing industry via YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Here’s a recent video featuring a memoir called Nadia. Imagine my surprise when I heard her mention 100memoirs.com in the introduction!

Marla manages to offer some pointed critique in a very kind way. That’s not always easy, but writers really benefit from this kind of tough love. What do you think? Any feedback for Marla?

A number of readers asked to see Marla Miller critique more query letters. So here she is again from her Youtube channel. You can also read her critique of another memoir at The Writer magazine online. If you have never browsed The Writer mag, you may want to do that also. It offers great advice to writers and will make you a more informed reader.

The subject matter of the memoir embedded below is a mother’s perspective on father-child incest. Marla treats the subject very sympathetically and offers the possibility that the writer in this case might be able to appeal directly to a publisher and not need to convince an agent first.

Comments welcome, both about the content, the critique, or the idea of going directly to a publisher with your memoir idea.

“Find your own voice,” say the writing experts.

Easy to say. Hard to do.

In another post on voice, I described how helpful it was for me to try to visualize my voice as a farm. Today I am pondering the role of another of the senses–touch. How does one sense inform, enlarge, or restrict, another one?

Here’s a thesis to consider: a writer whose voice touches us usually has been touched profoundly by others. Have they been touched gently, intimately, wisely? Or has the touch been rough, unknowing, uncaring? What places inside us do they reach, and how do they touch us?

I first learned about voice and touch from Max DePree. Max likes to joke that he is a “born leader” because his father owned the company he later led. He eventually became CEO of the progressive, high-quality furniture company Herman Miller Inc., makers of the ubiquitous Aeron Chairs and famous for hiring the team of Charles and Ray Eames, who designed the quintessential modern chair included in the MoMA collection, the Eames Chair. When Max agreed to be my mentor, back in 1998, two years after I became president of Goshen College, I was deeply moved. I love to hear his voice, and his presence in my life has influenced me in ways neither of us can fully comprehend.

Max and me, 2008

Max has written a lot of books about leadership, most famously, Leadership is an Art (1989, 2004) and Leadership Jazz (1992,2008)

But the story that touched me most from Max comes from his experience as a grandfather rather than as a CEO. It comes from a now out-of-print book called Dear Zoe, one of the most beautiful childbirth and childhood stories ever written. Max wrote this book as a series of letters to his granddaughter Zoe, who was born prematurely (24 weeks inside the womb) and weighed 1 pound 7 ounces and was eleven inches tall. Max could slip his wedding ring up Zoe’s arm all the way to the top. When he dies, he wants to give Zoe his ring on a gold chain.

Here is the passage from that book that catches me in the throat every time I read it. It describes Grandpa Max’s encounter with a nurse after Zoe had, to the amazement of all, survived her first few days. Listen, please, to Max in his own voice:

“While we were looking at you, a wonderful nurse named Ruth came over to chat. After a few minutes she turned to me and said, ‘For the next several month, at least, you’re the surrogate father. I want you to come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe, and when you come I would like you to rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you’re caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch.’

I’m sure Ruth’s suggestion is going to be very important in our relationship together. I also have the feeling that she has given me something enormously profound to ponder.”

As I write these words, a little boy is getting ready to be born in New York City. I don’t know his name yet, but I do know that I want to touch him and that I will love his voice. He will make me a grandmother for the first time, and I hope that he will always connect my voice to my touch. His doctor says he could come any day now, and we wait prayerfully for him and his mother as they prepare for the amazing journey toward birth.

Have you learned anything about the connection of voice and touch from your children or grandchildren, if you have them?

What touches you in another person’s voice? You can describe either physical or metaphorical reality. As you read or write, are you aware of times when your voice and your touch connect? What happens?

Jane Friedman "It takes guts to be gentle and kind." (The Smiths)

Jane Friedman has 22,679 Twitter followers, some of whom could more appropriately be called devotees. It’s worth getting a Twitter account just to follow her. You’ll soon see why she has built a rabid tribe. She’s smart, ahead of the rapidly evolving book industry curve, witty–and generous.

One of the things I like most about social media is that it teaches the golden rule better than any priest or parent. Jane herself gives away many of her best ideas, and she offers her readers the present of her presence. She answers questions and encourages others online. When she mentioned me once in a Tweet, I was elated.

One example of Jane’s generosity is her “best tweets for writers” feature which shows up each Sunday on her blog. She explains, “I watch Twitter, so you don’t have to.”

Last week in her roundup of the best tweets, she included a post by literary agent Jessica Papin on writing memoir which you can see here. Papin finds Ira Glass’s explanation about story structure pertinent to memoir writers. Since I am one of those people who will sit in my car for a full 15 minutes after my trip has ended so as not to miss a minute of a This American Life story on NPR, I’ll write more about his take on story in a future post.

Naturally, after reading Jane Friedman’s Best Tweets for Writers post, finding a useful memoir post included (above), and seeing how many RT’s the post got on Twitter, I wondered if my own audience would benefit from timely, focused, content aggregation on memoir only.

One of Jane’s other suggested Tweets takes you to this good post which explains how to aggregate. It’s a little above my experience level, but I might tackle it if the interest were high.

Let me know if you want this service. I probably would do it monthly–but only if you encourage me in the comment section.  In the meantime, here’s one for those of you who have a manuscript of a memoir and want to find an agent. Enjoy agent Rachelle Gardner’s humor about ten things that annoy an agent, and take the implicit advice!

Also, here’s a good place for me to shout out to three other memoir blog sites. I used to have a blogroll on my home page, before my site was hacked and my son kindly migrated all my content to WordPress. Until I find a permanent place on my home page for these links, let me recommend Women’s Memoirs, National Association of Memoir Writers, and Memory Writers Network, and Narrative. They are all terrific!!

Today’s question: are there enough good memoir blog posts to do a regular online roundup of them, and how important would such a service be to you? By what criteria would one select the “best”?

Susan Shapiro teaches writing. She also gives advice. Since her advice in the online version of The Writer magazine  underscores the premise of this blog–that to be a good memoir writer it helps to read 100 great memoirs–I offer this link to the ten things not to do as a memoir writer.

Enjoy! If you are on Facebook, join The Writer’s fan page, and you will get sweet little tidbits like this one without having to come here to find them.

Beginnings matter. Writers and English professors love to exchange their favorite first lines: “Call me Ishmael,” or “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

A well-crafted first line in an essay or book not only intrigues or “hooks” the reader, it also points to the theme. I had a colleague who loved to trace the structure of the whole book by dissecting the structure of the first paragraph.

Recently, a Facebook friend, Richard Kauffman, challenged his readers with this message: “find a more provocative opening line from a memoir than this: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’–Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. Or just post your favorite opening line/s from a memoir.”

If you are an author or hoping to become one, you are entering a field in great flux. Maybe chaotic is not too strong a word to describe the world of publishing right now. In such a time, a good guide makes all the difference.  Seth Godin, who has written ten bestsellers, using totally new marketing methods such as sending Purple Cow milk cartons in the mail and giving away e-books for free, understands the new rules extraordinarily well.  He’s making them up as he goes.

It’s hard enough to be a writer, you may say.  Do I really need to be a blogger and marketer also?? Well, no, if you are Anne Lamott or Kathleen Norris or Mary Karr.  But if you are not already established, you may benefit enormously by understanding some of Seth Godin’s principles. By embedding the video he republished on his blog, I hope to help memoir readers and writers benefit. And I am giving him permission, a concept he coined, to continue marketing creative publishing ideas.

What do you think? Will you try any of these ideas? Did you get inspired?

My first post to this blog took place August 9, 2008. It was a birthday present from my son Anthony, who has his own blog. Since then, there have been 118 other posts and 398 comments. Thank you, dear readers!

I especially want to thank several other bloggers, GutsyWriter, Babsland, OKChelsea,  for commenting frequently, both on the blog itself and on FaceBook. A few months ago a former student joined the blogging world and can now be found at workinginmypajamas.

MemoryWritersNetwork blogger Jerry Waxler found this blog early on and added it to the blog roll. I eventually became a member of the National Association of Memoir Writers and discovered the founder Linda Joy Myers, whose books I have reviewed here. Through the search function of Twitter I am beginning to assemble a group of new writers to follow who are interested in themes that interest me: memoir, love, forgiveness, and compassion.

Special thanks to Paul Harvey at the amazing and amusing USreligion.blogspot.com for using some of my posts about Mennonite memories and pop culture in one of his own.

This year’s birthday present from Anthony was an hour of consultation with one of his favorite social media experts, Britt Bravo, whose website, podcasts, and blog can be found here. If you are looking for someone to help you get started or someone to suggest improvements to your fabulous professional blog, I highly recommend her.

I leave you with one line I got from Britt: “Half of blogging is listening.” As I look ahead to a year from now, I hope I can say that I not only was able to keep up the pace of blogging at least twice a week but that I also made many new blogger friends, commented on their posts, and offered them encouragement, support, ideas and great content they can use.

Isn’t it great that the internet rewards altruism?

All you bloggers out there, what have you learned about “listening” online? What do you do to help other bloggers? Are you on twitter? Facebook? What tips can you offer? Posts you want to share?

Remember how to get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice?

Blogging gives those of us who are spending the majority of our time doing something else the chance to write, get feedback, write, get feedback, and get better!

But Godin and Peters say it so powerfully in this video link that you will want to hear it straight from them.

Sharing writing tips is one of the goals of this blog. So today I pass along a few tips from the National Association of Memoir Writers. I recently joined this organization out of interest in finding other memoir writers and locating expertise in the genre. I look forward to exploring the blog, CD’s, teleseminars, newsletters and other benefits.  In addition, I am reading the memoir sent by the founder of NAMW, Linda Joy Myers, called Don’t Call Me Mother. 

Myers is a psycho-therapist and writer whose book Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story was reviewed here. She approaches writing as a form of therapy and helps prospective writers develop the courage and the skills to tell the truth as they remember it.

Another item that came with my membership is a list of Myers’ 23 memoir writing tips.  I don’t think she will mind if I share her first three:

1. Write frequent vignette–small, do-able pieces

2. Use the timeline to organize your memories and stories.

3. Find the dark and light in each story as well as identify stories that are primarily dark or light.

This list confirmed the approach I have taken here (mostly from intuition and trial-and-error) to start small. A blog is a perfect place to explore and share memories, even if they still need editing and shaping before they may be ready for other forms of publication.

Do you have a place to store and record your own mini-memoirs? What other tips have you discovered about writing? Have you ever created a timeline of your stories?