A question participants in my memoir writing workshops often ask me is: ‘Where should I start my story? At my birth? An important milestone? A momentous occasion? If you are writing a life story you may think you have to start with yourbirth and progress chronologically to the present. But you don’t have to adhere […]
October 7-13 is Mental Health Week, an annual, national event that aims to improve community awareness and interest in mental health and wellbeing. Events honouring the week culminate on World Mental Health Day (10 October). Mental Health Week puts the spotlight on the mental health of older Australians and ways we can enhance their psychological […]
“My mother worked on a highly secret military project during the Second World War, as my father flew Spitfires overhead and headed into battle.” “I’m a descendant of the Duke of Northumberland (‘on the wrong side of the sheets’, as they say), or so I’ve been led to believe.” “My grandmother had a shipbuilding empire […]
In my memoir writing workshops participants often say they struggle with writing in a way that evokes emotion. They worry their writing is flat and uninteresting. One way you can make your writing more compelling is to create vivid scenes full of sensory details. These scenes fuel a reader’s imagination and draw them into the […]
When writing memoirs for my clients I’m sometimes amazed at the clarity of their memories. Last week, I interviewed an 85-year-old grandfather who recalled precise details of the furniture, colour scheme, sounds and smells of his childhood home in Broken Hill. He even remembered the titles of the ‘78’ records his father played on the […]
The queen of soul, Ms Aretha Franklin died a week ago and I feel quite bereft inside as she was one of the musicians on the soundtrack of my life. Since she blasted on to the world music scene in 1967 with Otis Redding’s song ‘Respect’, which became an anthem for women everywhere, Aretha sang […]
I recently read an article from Harvard Medical School about the health benefits of writing your life story or memoir. The article says that as we age we tend to feel less relevant—we retire from jobs that may have given us a strong sense of purpose and we can become isolated from family, friends and […]
A few weeks after receiving a Public Service Medal honouring his contribution to human rights policy and law in Australia during his 26 years at the Human Rights Commission, David Mason resigned. Resigned from an organisation that for a quarter of a century fulfilled his need to secure greater social justice for marginalised groups of […]
I bumped into my former cello teacher, Heather Stratfold, at a Bach concert a few months ago and she told me about her struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome. She eventually gave up on mainstream medicine and decided to heal herself and she is keen to let other people with the condition know it is possible […]
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