Writing Hard Stories

 

Fascinating read about what an author feels when writing about their most traumatic events in their lives and how a memoir becomes a life of it's own.

Melanie Brooks is a writer and a teacher.

Her father died of AIDs - In the mid 1980s, Canada’s worst public health disaster was unfolding. Catastrophic mismanagement of the country’s blood supply allowed contaminated blood to be knowingly distributed nationwide, infecting close to two thousand Canadians with HIV. Among them was Melanie Brooks’s surgeon father who, after receiving a blood transfusion during open-heart surgery in 1985, learned he was HIV positive.

Out of

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Karen Blixen Museum outside Nairobi, Kenya.  She was a champion, writer, and pioneer in her own right. Her story moved something inside of me. She walked with her grief; still caring, wirting, and serving others.

"I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy."

–Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) in an interview with Bent Mohn

in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957), later quoted by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958).

Isak Dinesen's opening line in her novel "Out of Africa" has stayed with "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills."

We watched the movie Out of Africa last week that was inspired from her memoir published in 1937. Robert Redford and Meryl Streep characters were beautiful.

#opportunity #writer #kenya #africa #learning #travel #inspiration

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Karen Blixen