The Write Spot: Memories


The Write Spot to Jumpstart Your Writing: Memories

The Write Spot: Memories is a collection of writing from fathers and their adult children, ranging from personal stories to fiction to creative nonfiction. These diverse stories embrace a common thread of love, disappointment, discoveries, and revelations.

When I started The Write Spot Books project, I hoped to produce ten books in five years. So far, I’m on track.

I didn’t expect to produce a book with writing from fathers and their adult children, partly because I wouldn’t be able to participate. I don’t have any writing from my father and I wasn’t very interested in a book that contained father stories.

But to be fair to fathers, I decided I needed to produce a book similar to The Write Spot Connections, this time with writing from fathers and their children. The Write Spot: Memories is the result. I wanted to participate with my writing. I wondered how I could.

After contemplating this dilemma, and after many freewrites about my father, I decided to include a section, “Honoring Our Fathers.” I am especially pleased to honor my father in this section because he didn’t get much recognition in his life, which ended early.

I have written about my father for over twenty years in my freewrites. I reached a breakthrough and had an epiphany, which is in Memories, where I share the story of how I met my father thirty-seven years after his death.

Meeting My Father by Marlene Cullen

(excerpt)

When I was seven years old, I was embarrassed that I knew the meaning of the word sober.
I heard “Is Bill sober?” more times than I care to count. That's all my mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncles asked about my father.
The only holiday I remember celebrating with him was a rainy Christmas Eve. My mother couldn’t talk him out of driving to her mother’s house for our annual party. I was petrified in the back seat as he wove in and out of traffic.
The only time I missed having a father was an occasional Father’s Day, and that was more of an awkward feeling rather than a sense of missing out on something.
I never called him “Dad.”

The Write Spot: Memories is available for $15 at Amazon and Book Passage (Corte Madera) and as an ereader.

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