The 1970s are seeing a major revival in the 2020s. New series inspired by the era, like Amazon’s Daisy Jones & the Six adapted from the novel of the same name, have become hits among younger generations — catapulting many other ‘70s elements back into the zeitgeist. Fashion is also…

Share your emotional truth. — We all know the phrase, as writers, “Show, not tell.” The same can be true of writing a memoir. Before I took my writing to the next level, I confused writing an essay with a memoir. The fact is lots of memoirs are collections of essays. But good memoirs, even…

Develop a writing plan. The first time I published anything, it was a short story in a literary journal. This was back in the 1990s when they had journals primarily in print. …

Deciding to stop trying is a hard choice. — One of the biggest challenges in life is knowing when to let go and when to keep trying, no matter how impossible the challenges appear to be. After thirteen years of infertility, after the death of my first daughter from SIDS, I was pretty much ready to be done with…

Parenting keeps me mentally stable. — If you told me 30 years ago that parenting would help keep me mentally stable, I would not have understood. To me, caring for anyone else would be impossible when I couldn’t even care for myself. I remember laying in bed, miserable, unable to get up for my college classes…

Our healthcare system has major problems with end-of-life care. — The lack of recognition and emphasis on extending life at all costs reflects a broken system. “It’s time to put him in hospice,” said the geriatric case manager we had hired, after months of long-term care debacles and trying to navigate the Medicare/Medicaid system by ourselves. She recognized the dying…

Grief in Zero and Ones. — I found out the hard way that technology can immortalize trauma. Texts, voicemails, or photos can all be haunting fragments from the past, capturing fleeting moments we might otherwise have lost. “Daddy had a stroke. Call me.” I saw these fragile moments in the texts back and forth with my…

Short answer: yes it is. — In our increasingly digitized world, concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) “reading people’s” minds have emerged. Social media users have reported experiences where their thoughts seemingly manifest in personalized advertisements on their smartphones, leading to questions about the extent of AI’s understanding of our innermost thoughts. Let’s delve into the concept…

Or should I just self-publish on Medium? — I’ve been taking writing classes through the Stanford Continuing Education program. This time it’s a memoir class that culminates in one chapter and the beginnings of a longer manuscript. I submitted an excerpt of this chapter-in-process to various journals and have been rejected or haven’t heard back. …