Memoirs are some of my most interesting writing and editing projects. My client always has a unique and intriguing story to tell about her or his entire life or some significant part of it.
We work closely together so I can understand the story in detail and what aspects the client wants to emphasize. This can typically be done by phone and e-mail, but face-to-face visits can be arranged if necessary.
In consultation with the client, I then use my expertise to structure the memoir into chapters. Finally, I put the happenings and any themes into the most powerful and descriptive words I can, often communicating with the client as the writing proceeds. When the memoir is complete, I can also assist the client in seeking a publisher if so desired.
Please visit this link to view excerpts from a memoir I did major work on from start to finish. It was a great pleasure to help my client tell her fascinating story.
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Here are several excerpts from my own memoir of my years in Rochester, NY
Rochester Journal
Monday, November 27, 2000
I went out tonight bundled up against the cold – buff coat over leather jacket, stocking cap, gloves — but found it warm, in the 40s, when I got outside. A light drizzle was falling though, and I was glad for the cap.
I walked down Alexander, stopped for a coffee at the corner, and drank it as I continued up Monroe then west toward the river. At the new footbridge over 390, a flight of broad wings, black and sharp, sailed low overhead — crows, evidently seeking a safe perch to hunker down for the night. I felt a splat high on my back, stopped, removed my coat, and used a piece of paper to wipe away the dab of shit.
Near Mt. Hope, hundreds more of the birds had already gathered among the top branches of half a dozen nearly barren trees, the noiseless mass of creatures apparently oblivious to me as I walked by.
At the river, the fence enclosing construction for the new embankment blocked me from getting as close to the water as I would have liked. Still, I managed to soak up some of the rhythm of the city lights reflected on the river. After a while I followed the fence for a hundred yards upstream and stopped to watch the light from a lamppost that stands along the old embankment as it shone on a leafless tree, the yellow wash lying close along smooth grey limbs, both emphasizing and easing their starkness by putting them into bright, warm relief.
Having drunk from the lights of the river, I started back, but had gone only a few steps when I heard an explosion as of a big firecracker and saw, in the distance, the crows lift in waves from the trees I had passed and from others to the north. Soon, a thousand or more birds stretched in a wide wheeling line across the overcast sky like shreds of black paper caught in a swirling wind, For several minutes they traced complex patterns as they sought, in elegant confusion, to fly through their fears, then they began settling — again in waves but more ragged now — back into the trees
As I walked past, the birds seemed more skittish than before, groups of them lifting up and out of a tree if I came too close. I felt the others eyeing the dark form passing below, perhaps no longer able, given their newly wracked nerves, to distinguish me from some dangerous shadowed animal, as primitive as they and on the prowl.
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
Overcast again today. As I walked to the bank this afternoon, just outside the Sibley Building on East Main I saw a dozen high school-age boys, all black except for one white, celebrating the coming winter season with a spirited rap. One of them seemed to have the main line, while others kept a tight voice beat. I didn’t quite catch the words, but I did catch the motivatin’ rhythm.
So good to be alive.
It started me thinking how words, so apparently ephemeral, have a better chance of lasting for ages than most of our constructions. A thousand years from now someone (whether human or some being evolved from us) may read these very words.
If so, I hope you will attend, my distant friend: For they were there today, those young men, those rappin’ boys. On East Main. Outside the Sibley Building. Gone now some hundreds of years. But mark you they were real, for the sky, a steely grey, picked out on some of those faces a look of true joy.
Wednesday, January 17, 2001
I woke this morning listening to the pulse in my neck and wondering whether my left carotid artery was still clear. Where would they cut, I asked myself, if it ever needed to be scraped out again, as it had to be a year and a half ago. Would the surgeon slice right through the long, hardened welt that now slants down the left side of my neck? Or would he cut beside it, into virgin flesh less resistant to the scalpel? Then I’d have a double scar. How would I explain that? Two knife fights?
Not that anyone ever asks. I’ve never even seen anyone staring – not even glancing – at it . Maybe no one notices. I doubt that, though, as it’s rather blatant. I think people are just good at not showing they notice.
Not that it matters much. It’s there now, part of my body, and I assume it will always be there. To some it may be ugly, to others not. To me it’s mostly a badge of victory.
What I do care about is what’s below the scar – the artery and its continued health. I’m not ready to die and won’t be for a long time, if ever.
I thought about that, too, this morning as I lay there dozing, thought about dying and what would be lost if I were to die now. For one thing, someone would come into this apartment and take down my pictures. No longer would anyone stand in the living room and touch the man carrying a load of straw (or is it hay?) in the Van Gogh reproduction and feel himself there, immersed in the brown and green fields, with the high rolling hills behind and the blue whirlpool skies like water above. And no one in the bathroom would stop for a moment to look in on the woman in the red room, the Matisse woman at her red table arranging fruit in a bowl, or to look out her window to see the trees and flowers of her rich green garden.
It was some compensation to remember that many reproductions of both paintings, as well as the originals, will still exist when I’m gone. They’ll be seen and appreciated by many and by some more fully, perhaps, than I. But no one will see in them just what I do, nor see them in the same contexts. It’s those paintings, those parts of the world – and many others – that will be lost when I die.
Of course I’m no more special than anyone else in that way. Each person’ss construction of the world is unique, and when the person dies, so does the construction. But that means – because much of reality consists of those constructions – that part of the world dies.
Still, what is once created always abides. All the beauty, all the ugliness, every aspect of every piece of reality constructed by each of us while alive lives on in the timeless world. And in that sense, at least, we too live on forever.
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