Time to Say Goodbye

From our sofa in Athens, Ruby and I watched Grandad’s funeral mass, live-streamed from the near-empty Cathedral of the Assumption in Thurles. Grandad was well known and much loved, hundreds would have come… only 10 were allowed.

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Make a Scene

The fundamental elements for creating great scenes in memoir. Think of the first paragraph of your memoir as the opening scene of a movie or TV series. Every story, every movie, every book starts with a scene and after the first scene follows another, and another. Scene after scene after scene makes a chapter.

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Hope

It’s re-write time and from the muddy pool of shitty drafts, a small jewel appears – at least I think it’s a jewel. I rinse it, I dry it and polished it down to the bone.

What’s left is a mere smidgen of a vignette, but it gives me hope. – A different kind of hope from what I had back then, – I hope. . .

He woke me in the middle of the night. β€œYou have to help me now Vigdis,” I remember his stuttered whisper. His silhouette looked pitiful in the arched opening he’d cut – between my two basement rooms – years earlier. His figure crooked and unstable against the light falling in behind him.

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