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. (more…)
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. 
August was our vacation month for some time. We took off for most or all of the month and traveled, usually out of the country. Then we spent the rest of the year swimming in memories of where we had visited, anticipating our next trip. 
From the window seat in our master bedroom, looking through the French doors into my study, I can see the white bookcases, lining one wall. They remind me of honeycombs we kept on the farm, books now the honey that my bees/mind goes after. They also are why I write, so I may add my own work to that collection. 
My 
$900 on contest fees. I’ve been shortlisted in a memoir magazine contest and been declared a finalist for another book award. In one case I won a Bronze Medal in the Female Memoir division, and in another, I was named a runner up in the Memoir category. None of these “honors” paid me any money. The announcement of my “win” is most often followed by a bombardment of emails encouraging me to pay more for editorial or marketing advice or for a bronze medal on a colored ribbon or to enter more contests or book festivals. I’ve won no mention at all in six contests, and five have yet to report.
Martha Anne Toll’s debut novel, THREE MUSES, published by Regal House Publishing in September 2022, was shortlisted for the 
Joe Safdie has been lurking in and around the poetry world for 50 years; his first chapbook, Wake Up the Panthers, was published in 1974, while he was still an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. His ninth book, published last year by Spuyten Duyvil, is 
Kathleen McClung is the author of four poetry collections: A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. Winner of the Morton Marr, Maria W. Faust, and Rita Dove national poetry prizes, her work appears in a variety of journals and anthologies. From 2021-23 she has served as guest editor for The MacGuffin, a print literary journal based in Michigan. She also served as associate director of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition and judged the contest’s sonnet category. In 2018-2019 she was a writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Kathleen teaches literature and writing classes at Skyline College in San Bruno and directed the Women on Writing conference there for ten years. She also teaches privately and at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in San Francisco. Visit her website at 
Marjorie Hudson bio
Guest author Steven Mayfield, a fellow Regal House Author, graciously answers my questions about his evolution as an author. Read on!
Michael Barrington, an international author from Manchester, England, spent his teen age years at a boarding school in the Lake District. After joining a French Order of Catholic Missionary priests, he spent ten years in West Africa, several of them during a civil war when he was stood up to be shot. He lived for a year as a hermit in Northern Ireland. After teaching in Madrid, Spain, he spent four years in Puerto Rico as Director of an international student program for Latin America. He now lives near San Francisco, is completely fluent in several languages, is an avid golfer, and academically considers himself to be over-engineered with three Masters’ Degrees and a Ph.D. On his bucket list is to pilot a helicopter, become fluent in Arabic, and spend a week’s retreat at Tamanrasset in the Sahara-desert. 
Michal C. Keith, is associate professor emeritus at Boston College. Known for his work in radio studies, he received several awards, among them the Lifetime Achievement Award in Scholarship from the Broadcast Education Association and the Frank Stanton Fellowship from the International Radio Television Association. Prior to entering academe he was a radio broadcaster. He has received critical praise for his memoir, The Next Better Place (Algonquin Books), and for his short story fiction. His work has been translated into many languages. 
Marlene Cheng is a Maincrest Media and a Book Excellence award-winning author of women’s fiction. Her books are about the relationships that define women’s lives—romance, friendship, family. Marlene is a keen observer of how people think and feel, and she writes lyrical, uplifting, and emotionally rich stories.