When I was a child, the popular books for kids included the Nancy Drew mysteries, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Hardy Boys. I loved burying myself in these stories that involved other youth who were trying to find their place in the world. But I also had a passion for fairy tales. I found them at the center of each fat red volume of The Book of Knowledge that my parents had bought from a traveling book salesman. (more…)
Many of my poems reflect a continuing interest in perception and how we try to capture fleeting moments with language. The art that comes closest to what I’m trying to do in poetry is photography, the exploration of things in the world (and in ourselves) from various angles. The attempt to penetrate surfaces by using the very surfaces themselves. 
As a young woman in the 50s growing up in Canada, I was intrigued by hockey and football. Baseball didn’t exist for me then. It hadn’t entered Canadian consciousness, and it would take some years before it did. I didn’t feel deprived. Hockey and football had much to offer at that time, including handsome, vigorous guys. 
Jane Friedman
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (
Since 2015, I’ve published four novels, one memoir, and two poetry collections. I tell you this, dear readers and writers, because for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been blasted by emails that are clearly AI generated. Individuals (or maybe robots) want to sell me their marketing services. Some offer access to major nationwide book clubs whose readers will gobble up my narratives. Others offer reviewers that will read and review my work in exchange for a “tip.” I’ve also had one who offered a complete marketing plan for generating more readers. 
Writing has become such a part of my day that if I don’t get to it, I’m constantly distracted, as if I have a lover I’m thinking about. It’s like a siren’s call, pulling me away. My husband notices it. He comments on me seeming drifty. He’s right. I’m not fully there. As happened tonight. 
I’m thinking today of timing—how important it is to success. Timing and perseverance: the two go together. I’m also noticing the seasonal aspect of creativity, how cyclic it is. That too is hard to grasp. I want it 
There were many standout messages in a webinar I attended this week by bestselling author Janet Fitch, hosted by Memoir Nation (www.memoirnation.com/about-memoir-nation).
This is one of my favorites.
Fitch spoke about stimulating memory to recreate time and place. How to do that?
A clue: Stimulating memory stimulates something inside you as well. It is, as Fitch calls it, “a gateway to memory.”
In my memoir, which publishes in fall 2026, I needed to recreate time and place as far back as 1964, when I was four years old. Important events in the arc of my narrative occurred at that time. Fortunately, I have vivid glimpses of memory to draw from. Still, to build context I needed to write a fuller scene. I had to drop down and find sensory details to go beyond the facts I knew. Depending on facts alone would have resulted in a narrative telling about instead of a recreation of to take readers there with me.
That is where stimulating the gateway to memory comes in. The key to the gateway is sense impression.
To get sense impressions, you have to go “back there” and open to the information your senses have for you. This is particularly helpful if memory is absent for the time you’re writing about.
You may have heard of method acting. Method acting is an emotion-oriented technique in acting used instead of action-based acting. With method acting, an actor aspires to encourage sincere and emotionally expressive performances by fully inhabiting the role of the character.
Here, we have “method writing.” You need to fully inhabit the role of the character you’re writing about (yourself in an earlier time). If, for example, you’re writing a scene that takes place in a car on a hot day in an era before air-conditioning was common in cars, go take a ride in yours with the air-conditioning turned off to get a sense of being in that car you drove in. Roll down the window and get a feeling for that, get some language for it. This is a felt sense of the experience, or method writing.
In my memoir there is a scene in 1964 that takes place in a forest. There is a second scene in a forest in 1974, also important in the story. To recreate time and place for both, I went to a forest when I was writing the book—nearly 50 and 60 years later—to get details for the scenes and stimulate memory of the times I was writing about. Sure, I know what a forest is, but what does morning light do inside of one? What scents come up on a summer breeze? How does pine duff sound underfoot?
Go to the gateway to memory as often as you need by visiting a similar scene in current time. And remember: the key to get in is the senses.
About Suzanne
I’m dedicated to helping writers put their good words into the world.
– Suzanne Sherman
Writing Coach & Book Consultant
Memoir Workshops
Years ago, when I was first foraying into finding an agent, I was involved for several months with a small Canadian literary agency with one principal, a former practicing contract attorney (I’ll call her Virginia, though that isn’t her real name), and her associate Sandra, a woman who claimed to have years of experience in the New York publishing scene as an agent and editor. Before email became ubiquitous, ours was largely a relationship by mail—post cards, letters, faxes, and, occasionally, phone. 
When I sit in my classroom, I ask students to join me in putting their thoughts on the page. This is old stuff to me. I do it constantly, dribbling out lines that seem to come magically from the pen. They form themselves on the page into what we call sentences, made up of words, phonemes, syllables, letters. And the letters themselves were once ideograms—images, as in Chinese writing—that depicted the thing itself. Now we need a more elaborate process to discover the meaning in the letters. We must attend schools for years where teachers encourage us to spill out our minds and give the contents structure on the page. It’s not unlike what a brain surgeon does when s/he cleans up the mess after a head-on collision. 
It occurred to me today, during a tine when many people are taking vacations, that preparing for a trip—all the many months of planning and making reservations and thinking that the departure day will never arrive—resembles what happens when our death day arrives. Okay, I realize this may sound gloomy and will probably chase away a few readers, but the parallels are there. 
I woke in the night thinking about fairy tales and an email I’d received years ago from Stephen Fraser, a literary agent with the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency in New York. I’d sent him my novel 
A wildly comic romp on mothers, daughters, art, travel and death, the book should appeal to a broad range of readers. While the main characters are middle-aged and older, their zest for life would draw readers of all ages, male or female, attracting the youthful adventurer in most people.
It began innocently enough, my relationship with ChatGpt (CGPT). I didn’t intend for it to get intimate. I didn’t expect anything at all. I just was curious about what might happen if I submitted some text and asked for a response. 
I’ve just finished reading Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady again and have mixed feelings about the era and the characters. It’s difficult to read about Victorian morés from a 21st Century perspective. Not only do I need lenses that will give me a bi-cultural perspective, but I also feel squashed between a culture clash. Just after I finished with Portrait, I read a review of A. M. Homes’ latest book May We Be Forgiven in The New York Review of Books. One of her main characters says, 
For many years I’ve been recording my dreams each morning and trying to grasp the messages they bring me from the depths. I subscribe to Jung’s view that dreams are messengers from the unconscious, both personal and collective. To ignore them is like refusing to open and read letters from beloved friends that come in the mail. Not spam. Not advertisements. But serious, heartfelt missives