Category: Madison Wisconsin
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How Boys Become Men – or – Can Memoirs Stop the Violence?
aggression, anger, assertiveness, Boys, development, essay, gender, idealism, Islam, males, Memoirs, men, Muslims, rebellion, thumosEven though Husain’s ideology was light-years away from mine, our hearts followed similar paths. Both of us believed that our political beliefs were righteous and important. Both of us felt responsible to take any action necessary to change the world to conform to our beliefs. This sense of righteous urgency caused both of us to…
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Link isolated anecdotes into a story with the power of your beliefs
A memoir starts with a single anecdote. Then another, and another. In our imagination, we know these events formed our life. But other people can’t read our imagination. They can only read what’s on the page. We must transform the anecdotes into a compelling story. The memoir writer’s job is to discover the binding that…
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Awakening bad memories helps shape your new life
The intern at the hospital who was accustomed to treating survivors of barroom brawls had no idea how violated I felt. Not wanting to order tests, he brushed off my headache. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “You were kicked in the head.”
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Good hair in the melting pot
My dark brown hair grew longer, and curled into a tangle that looked vaguely like an Afro. Home from the University of Wisconsin that first summer of 1966, my great-uncle Ben, with whom I had always got along, said “I didn’t know we had anything like that in the family.” We never spoke civilly to…
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Beatles and other loaded words in your memoir
So how could I unpack the meaning of the word Beatles and turn it into a unique image in my own life? I can see myself standing at the record store in Madison, Wisconsin, where I stopped on my way home every day from class, to stare at the rack of new releases. My mind…
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