Category Archives: Memoir

Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith

Posted on July 25, 2016 by

Monica A. Coleman’s memoir touches on a lot of significant themes: faith, grief, trauma, rape, depression, prayer, race, family, friendship, and history among them. She begins with the story of her great-grandfather who died, it was said, “of grief,” hanging … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, Religion | 8 Comments

Greetings from Utopia Park

Posted on June 7, 2016 by

Claire Hoffman received her first mantra when she was just 3 years old. Her mother practiced Transcendental Meditation and brought up Claire and her brother, Stacey, to do the same. Periods of meditation, often during quiet play, were part of Claire’s life … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction | 6 Comments

H Is for Hawk

Posted on May 28, 2016 by

I sometimes struggle to define and describe good writing at the sentence and word level. I can work out what makes a plot click along well or what strong characterization looks like. But with excellent word-smithery, the best I can do is … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction | 12 Comments

Crazy Brave

Posted on May 9, 2016 by

Joy Harjo is a Native American (Creek) poet and musician. I’ve encountered her poetry in a couple of different contexts, and it’s always tough and interesting, so I wasn’t surprised when her 2012 memoir, Crazy Brave, was not your usual … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction | 2 Comments

This House of Sky

Posted on February 4, 2016 by

Ivan Doig’s memoir about his childhood and adolescence in rural Montana, This House of Sky, is an interestingly angular book, all joints and rough skin and knobby knees. This comes from the two driving forces of the book smashing together: … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction | 9 Comments

The Force of Spirit

Posted on February 2, 2016 by

A few years ago, I read Staying Put, a collection of personal essays by Scott Russell Sanders. That collection had a sense of coherence around the same theme: what does it mean, to a geological place, and also to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, Short Stories/Essays | 4 Comments

Mountains of the Mind

Posted on January 7, 2016 by

For years, I’ve been a lover of the literature of exploration. I’ve read many books in which men (and some women, but mostly men) hurl themselves at intemperate climates and impossible peaks. In Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane goes … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration | Leave a comment

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

Posted on November 6, 2015 by

This book by poet Christian Wiman is not easy to describe. It’s not exactly a memoir, although it contains elements of memoir, and it’s not exactly an essay collection, although each chapter dances around a particular theme or idea. His … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, Religion, Short Stories/Essays | 8 Comments

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

Posted on October 1, 2015 by

This book, perhaps Isabella Bird’s most famous, is actually her fourth. By the time she wrote it in 1879, she had already travelled from her native England to Australia, to Hawaii, 800 miles on horseback through the Colorado Rockies, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration | 14 Comments

March: Books 1 and 2

Posted on September 28, 2015 by

Growing up in the South in the 1970s and 80s, I learned about the 1960s Civil Rights movement in bits and pieces. It was recent enough to be in a lot of people’s memories, and too recent to be covered … Continue reading →

Posted in Graphic Novels / Comics, History, Memoir, Nonfiction | 6 Comments