I’ve been tagged in the My Writing Process Blog Tour by Kim Brown, editor of the wonderful Minerva Rising literary journal. Check out what Kim’s been up to at http://www.the-confident-writer.net.

This blog is a relay that involves answering four specific questions and then naming the authors who will follow. So here we go:

What am I working on??

I am working on the first draft of my second memoir. (My first, Her Beautiful Brain, will be published this September by She Writes Press.) The working title for this book is The Observant Doubter. It’s about my own checkered history of faith and doubt.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Memoir is a slippery, shape-shifting sort of a genre, so this is a difficult question to answer. For me, memoir is not autobiography but more like extended essay writing, a way to explore what have become (like it or not) the enduring themes of my life. And I do mean “explore.” What I love about writing memoir are the new insights that come as you write about events in your life that you might have thought you already understood in every possible way. The memoir writers I admire include Anne Lamott, Elizabeth McCracken and Michael Klein. What I love about their work is that it asks questions. It meanders. It doesn’t follow a straight chronological line.

Why do I write what I do?

My first book was driven by a need to honor my mother’s life and to articulate the uniquely cruel fate that is Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that is still widely misunderstood and feared even though it is poised to become the public health nightmare of the aging Boomers. My second book is driven by a desire to give voice to those of us who are neither devout, rock-solid believers or atheists. I believe there are a lot of us. I believe we are no less serious about our search for meaning than those at the outer ends of the religious spectrum. I also believe there are many of us who, like me, have had periods of more fervent faith and still feel a lot of confusion about it.

Both Her Beautiful Brain and The Observant Doubter weave personal and universal themes, which I love to do as a writer. I get a lot of practice every week writing The Restless Nest radio commentary and blog.

How does your writing process work?

I get up early not to write, but to read for an hour and to scribble a few pages in my journal. This sets me up for the day, which could mean sitting right down to write but more often means doing my day job (making short films for nonprofits) and slipping in an hour or two of writing when I can. I am lucky that I can do this. I work from home. I save tons of time by not having to commute. Every day is different, and I like the variety. If I have a long shooting day or a pressing deadline, that won’t be a writing day. I try to set aside longer chunks of time on the weekend. But I’m a restless person, so a long chunk for me would be three or four hours.

Sometimes, the words flow, but more often, writing feels like hard work, like I’m building sentences, one word at a time, with primitive, handmade tools. I have to pep-talk myself constantly, with inane phrases like, “a page a day can become a book in a year!” or: “finish this paragraph and you can go make coffee. And have one of those Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups.”

Here’s who’s up next on the My Writing Process Blog Tour:

Allison Green is the author of a novel, Half-Moon Scar (St. Martin’s). Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in publications such as ZYZZYVA, Calyx, Bellingham Review, Willow Springs, Raven Chronicles, and Yes! Magazine. She lives and teaches writing in Seattle.

Allison blogs at http://allisongreen.org

Isla McKetta is the author of Polska, 1994 due out from Editions Checkpointed May 22, 2014 and co-author of Clear Out the Static in Your Attic: A Writer’s Guide for Transforming Artifacts into Art. She writes book reviews for writers at A Geography of Reading and serves on the board of Hugo House.

Isla blogs at http://islamcketta.com

In May, I’ll be posting an interview with Isla about her new novel on The Restless Nest.

Seattle readers: On Thursday, May 1 at 7pm at Ravenna/3rd Place Books, I will be reading with fellow authors from the new anthology,  Into the Storm: Journeys with Alzheimer’s. 

 

Radio/podcast lovers: This week on KBCS I rebroadcast a piece called Trilliums from April 2012.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.