Category: Life Stories

  • A Well-Loved Pet

    Zac followed my partner along the footpath near our home, one afternoon when Mark was walking towards the gym. An Aussie Terrier, starving and weary. These gym sessions were daily events and sacrosanct at the time. This day, instead of continuing on his route, Mark bent down, picked the skinny runt up in his arms…

  • Adriatic Romance … Rijeka to Titograd

    Adriatic Romance … Rijeka to Titograd

    My Travel Journal through Italy and Yugoslavia in 1968 My journey from Paris towards the Ukraine in Russia continues … with entry into our first Communist country, Yugoslavia, and the drive along the spectacular coastline there.  Once again we are delayed by car troubles, this time a forced stopover at Camp Borik, a beautiful lakeside…

  • Memoir Writing

    Memoir Writing

    According to American author Marian Roach Smith’s definition, “Memoirs are selections from your life story, shaped by theme, driven by a few burning questions.  So the question the reader brings is: why these bits of your life? The answer to that question will lead you to your opening.” See her website for more gems about…

  • River Girl: An Early Chapter of my Memoir in Progress

    River Girl: An Early Chapter of my Memoir in Progress

    River Girl I lived at a place called Waterview, a lush, fertile valley, with a river swollen like a pregnant woman coursing through it. Despite the name ‘Waterview’, the Clarence River was hidden from sight at the point where I was brought up, because of the lie of the land. The irony was that there…

  • Brave Novels and Memoirs

    Brave Novels and Memoirs

    I’ve just finished reading a memoir by a writer, Alan Close: Until You Met Me: A Memoir Of One Man’s Troubled Search For Love about his lifetime struggle to have a committed relationship with a woman. It is a redemption story that relates his hard-won victory over his emotional problems linked to this situation.  He…

  • Memoirs I Read 2013

    Memoirs I Read 2013

    Lately I’ve been reading reading reading … especially memoirs, as I come closer to sending one of mine off to a competition at Finch Publishing. I’ve also been attending Beth Yahp’s Memoir Evenings at the Randwick Literary Institute on the last Tuesday of the month. One of the books I’ve enjoyed recently is Marzipan and Magnolias…