Dani Shapiro’s best-selling memoir “Slow Motion” was published by Random House in 1998. I have not read the book (yet!), but it appears to be a woman’s awakening after a terrible car crash. The book was reviewed by the New York Times during the same year in an article titled “Wake-up Call.” Two years later … Continue reading
My mother, who had a Ph.D. in English linguistics, used to say that she listened to a linguist on the radio pre-World War II. The host of the show would have callers recite a list of words and guess their U.S. geographic origin based on dialect. Apparently, the man was quite accurate and the show … Continue reading
Great opinion piece by author Ken Budd in the November 30, 2013 NY Times called “When Writers Expose the Dead.” How do we handle the painful truth in our memoirs? Budd answers.
I recently attended a presentation hosted by the Stratford Historical Society by Keith Miller, who spoke of the roughly 1000 men who served in the Civil War from Fairfield County, Connecticut. There were probably about 50 people in the audience and it was clear that many of them wanted to discuss Civil War topics with … Continue reading
For three and a half years, Kenneth Stroud of the RAF was a Japanese POW during World War II, having been captured when Japan conquered Singapore and imprisoned on an Indonesian island. Ever since then, he’s lived with the memories of hunger, illness, and the brutality of a particularly cruel enemy. Amazingly, he harbors no … Continue reading
A few months ago, I wrote about seeing the “Memphis Belle” in California (my post), which is maintained by the Liberty Foundation non-profit. A friend had commented that I needed more details about the B-17 in my book in the parts where I was writing about my father’s stories from World War II. He was … Continue reading
I’ve been cleaning out my mother’s papers since she passed away in February 2012. She had four file cabinets plus several bookcases that were dedicated to her interests and correspondence. She wrote letters for political causes at the national, state, and local level, collected news articles of interest, and compiled vast research in a number … Continue reading
I posted a story in April about my father witnessing Igor Sikorsky’s first helicopter flight. https://kelleytjansson.com/2013/04/18/non-fiction-writing-getting-the-details-right/ My father was only a kid when he witnessed the historic flight. The problem was that he did not remember the date correctly. Fortunately, history recorded the event and I was able to confirm the date via normal research. … Continue reading
Engineering majors don’t get a lot of choice in college electives. We take what we’re told and are lucky to graduate in 5-years. On the one occasion that I remember actually having an elective without restrictions, I chose to take a class in World Literature. “We’ve never had an engineering major take an elective in … Continue reading
Do you have memoirs on your bookshelves? A friend (thanks Bobbi!) handed me three memoirs from her collection a few weeks ago. Two of them had “national bestseller” scrawled across the top. The other looked like a lesser-known volume, titled Me, Melvin ‘N Andy by Andy Anderson. My friend had picked the book up during … Continue reading
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