Guest Blogger Laura Zinn Fromm writes: A few days ago, one of my students emailed. She had read an essay I’d just published about my father—dead now 19 years but still giving me plenty of juice to write about. The essay was about how volatile my Dad had been, and how loving—a love I rediscovered in letters he’d written to my mother at the end of their marriage. My mother had given me the letters during the pandemic, while she was cleaning out her house. I knew my parents had once loved each other fiercely and unambiguously, but the memory was an ancient one that predated my birth, and by the time I started to pay attention to how they treated each other, it was clear that love had been undone by disappointment and grief. They’d had a stressful marriage, and eventually moved on to other people—my father remarried, adopted…
Tag: Journal Writing
Writing Through a Book’s Mushy Middle
“Advice on Writing Through a Book’s Mushy Middle” By Judy Bolton-Fasman A eulogy I wrote for my father expanded into journal entries and eventually my book, “ASYLUM: A Memoir of Family Secrets.” I long dreamt that those loose collection of journal entries might become a book, but for many years they were arc-less and therefore not coalescing. There was no discernible beginning, middle, and end. But those entries, the impetus to start a writing project—I wouldn’t dare call it a book at the time—formed my literary North Star. As Emily Dickinson wrote: “I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” I searched for myself in every corner of my memory, soul, in every rare photo I had, in every journal entry I wrote, and in notes I jotted down. In that process, I found profound, surprising things about myself and the other protagonists in my life story. One of the…