Mini-Memoirs: How to tell your story in fewer than 1000 words, Guest Post by David Berner

Welcome David Berner, author of There's a Hamster in the Dashboard: A Life in Pets.

Mini-memoirs: 

How to tell your story in fewer than 1000 words.

by David W. Berner

Short is sweet. Concise is nice. Brevity is the soul of wit. There are many reasons to keep your story short, and even if your narrative encompasses years of a life, there are merits to writing the short-form personal essay either as a stand alone entity, or as a piece of the bigger puzzle of a full-blown memoir.

Many years ago, a mentor of mine gave me a great bit of advice. I was overwhelmed with the organizational nightmare of writing a 50,000-word memoir about the time I had spent teaching in a troubled Chicago-area school district. At the time it was the biggest project I had ever attempted.

“Write it piece-by-piece, one moment at a time,” he said.

We remember in moments. So, the idea is to write that way—moment by moment. A memory is a single scene in the larger film of our life, so when writing memoir or a personal essay focus on just that one, singular scene. Approach it with honesty, authenticity, and do not try to say everything you always wanted to say in that short experience. Stay in the moment. For many writers, this might be a 5000-word scene or one of 3000 words. But shaving that story down to 1000 words or fewer will help laser in on the scene’s true meaning and, maybe most importantly, force you to choose the perfect words, construct precise descriptions, and hone in on only what is essential. This doesn’t mean you have to forego the reflective moment in the narrative—that deeper truth—because you are trying to keep the story brief. It simply means the reflection might have to come in one well-crafted sentence instead of four or five paragraphs or an entire page. Think of the reflection as what one writing coach called it—an instant of insight.

This genre is sometimes called “flash memoir” and it is becoming quite popular in literary journals and at online memoir publications. The short form is much more digestible for the reader and editors are embracing it. Brevitymag.com is the king of these publications. It calls itself a “journal of literary nonfiction” and asks for submissions of 750 words or less. That’s really shrinking the narrative. But there also have been entire memoirs written in this form, small memories coming in individual chapters gathered together into a larger manuscript. The author Abigail Thomas has written several memoirs in this form—What Comes Next and How to Like It and Safekeeping, to name two of them. There’s also a wonderful memoir entitled Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston. Each chapter is a tiny, small moment in time. The opening chapter is fewer than 200 words.

Many times the beauty of a story is in its simplicity. When it is told in its purest, rawest form it can resonate more freely. Super-short memoir allows for this and permits the writer and the reader to think only of that particular moment in time, just that one human experience and what it means in the larger story of a life.

Thank you David Berner for sharing this informative post on the fine art of short and sweet!
Also, thank you to WOW - Women on Writing for providing this stop on David's blog tour!

About the Author: 

David W. Berner is a journalist, broadcaster, teacher, and author of two award-winning books: Accidental Lessons, which earned the Royal Dragonfly Grand Prize for Literature, and Any Road Will Take You There, which was a Grand Prize Finalist for the 2015 Hoffer Award for Books. Berner’s stories have been published in a number of literary magazines and journals, and his broadcast reporting and audio documentaries have aired on the CBS Radio Network and dozens of public radio stations across America. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

 Book Summary:

A book of essays by award-winning author and journalist David W. Berner is the next best thing to storytelling around a bonfire. In There’s a Hamster in the Dashboard, Berner shares stories of “a life in pets”—from a collie that herds Berner home when the author goes “streaking” through the neighborhood as a two-year-old, to a father crying in front of his son for the only time in his life while burying the family dog on the Fourth of July. And from the ant farm that seems like a great learning experience (until the ants learn how to escape), to the hamster that sets out on its own road trip (but only gets as far as the dashboard). Along the way, Berner shows that pets not only connect us with the animal world, but also with each other and with ourselves. The result is a collection of essays that is insightful and humorous, entertaining and touching.

  

Buy links:

Print or Ebook: Amazon

Print copy only: Dream of Things

Paperback: 138 Pages

Genre: Memoir, Pets, Essays
Publisher: Dream of Things (April 23, 2015)
ISBN-10: 0990840719

Twitter hashtag: # HamsterDash

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For more information about blog blog hostess, Audry Fryer,

please visit www.audryfryer.com

The Allure and Redemptive Nature of Road Trips

Welcome David Berner, author of Any Road Will Take You There: A Journey of Fathers and Sons. So, who's up for a road trip??? After reading David's guest post, I certainly am! Check it out:

                  

 

The Allure and Redemptive Nature of Road Trips

By David W. Berner

It was an early Sunday morning in June. Dad shook me out of my sleep just as the sun was coming up. He didn’t know that I had been up half the night waiting for this day and he most likely didn’t notice the book hidden in the tangles of my bed covers. It was an illustrated paperback about the strange sea creatures that lived deep in the ocean. I had taken it to bed with me, reading off and on in the dark with a small flashlight. If Dad had noticed the book, he likely would have laughed. Sea creatures? Not exactly what we expected to catch in the waters of Western Pennsylvania’s Sandy Lake.

It was my first fishing trip. I was about eight years old. It would take about an hour to get there by car, an hour that would feel like all morning.

I remember the trip so vividly for a few reasons. Fishing seemed like an amazing, grown-up adventure and although I wouldn’t be catching an octopus or some other ocean monster, it was close enough. And although Dad and I had spent a lot of time together lately–he helped coach my T-ball team–it was the first time we had gone on a trip together, just the two of us. One hour in the car together; Dad and me.

We took the green, 1961 Chevy Impala. The vinyl seats stuck to the bare legs hanging from my khaki shorts. I remember the low morning sun streaming through the windshield, stinging my eyes. I can still see Dad’s cap, the white cotton golf hat he wore each day when I was young, the one with the blue and green band around its brim. And I can see his hands on the steering wheel, thick, big-man hands, the calloused digits of a man who worked with wood and repaired his own cars. I don’t remember much about the fishing, can’t even recall if we pulled anything out of the lake. But I remember the drive like it was yesterday, that special early morning road trip.

I didn’t know it then, but now I see the impact of that short journey. I believe it subtlety solidified my budding adulation of my father, a respect I would disregard when I reached my teenage years, an admiration I would misplace when I graduated from college and was struggling to make my own way, and would only come into focus again when my first son was born and I took him on his first fishing trip. It was the 60-minutes in the car with my dad that mattered that late spring day, the moments of silence, the shared smiles, the sparse but pointed talk about baseball, what we’d eat for lunch, and what is was going to be like to twist a nightcrawler onto a steel hook.

I never became much of a fisherman, neither did my son, but it doesn’t matter. The road trips to those clean, cool waters are what have outlasted any anticipation or excitement of snagging a lake trout.  

The power of a road trip, whether it’s by car, train, horseback, or raft is embedded in American life. It’s in our make-up. Look at our literature: Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Kerouac’s On the Road. Then there are the movies: Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, Little Miss Sunshine. The list is long and varied. But the theme is essentially the same: the journey is the thing, the travel is what fascinates us and in the end, somehow changes us, awakens our lives.

Any Road Will Take You There: A Journey of Fathers and Sons (Dream of Things, 2014) started out as a single, 3000 word essay initialized entitled “Francis is on the Patio”–referring to a almost encounter with Francis Ford Coppola. It was about a 5000-mile road trip I took with my sons at a time when my life required a new direction and I was searching for a boost of the soul. But after a long-held family secret was revealed to me, the piece developed into the thread of a full-length memoir about fatherhood, a story discovered through each mile of that cross-country trip. It was the journey that fueled the reflection. It was the road trip itself that became the medicine of redemption and helped to restore the spirit.  

Yes, the book is my personal story. But I believe it resonates with so many others, not only because of the inevitable and shared connections between fathers and sons, parents and children, but also because we all love the American road trip. We fondly recall the ones of our past and we eagerly anticipate the ones in our future. Road trips are forever alluring for what they help us discover, a bit of ourselves.

Thank you David Berner for an entertaining guest post! Also, thank you to WOW -Women on Writing for providing this stop on David's tour. For more information and more blog stops, please check out: http://muffin.wow-womenonwriting.com/

Any Road Will Take You There: A Journey of Fathers and Sons is a heartwarming and heartbreaking story told with humor and grace, revealing the generational struggles and triumphs of being a dad, and the beautiful but imperfect ties that connect all of us.

Recipient of a Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association, Any Road Will Take You There is honest, unflinching, and tender. 

In the tradition of the Great American Memoir, a middle-age father takes the reader on a five-thousand-mile road trip -- the one he always wished he'd taken as a young man. Recently divorced and uncertain of the future, he rereads the iconic road story -- Jack Kerouac's On the Road -- and along with his two sons and his best friend, heads for the highway to rekindle his spirit. 

However, a family secret turns the cross-country journey into an unexpected examination of his role as a father, and compels him to look to the past and the fathers who came before him to find contentment and clarity, and celebrate the struggles and triumphs of being a dad.

Paperback: 300 Pages

Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Dream of Things (September 23, 2014)
ASIN: B00NVBMDZ0

ISBN-10: 0988439096

ISBN-13: 978-0988439092

Twitter hashtag: # AnyRoadBook

Any Road Will Take You There: A Journey of Fathers and Sons  is available as an e-book and paperback at Amazon 

About the Author: David W. Berner-the award winning author of ACCIDENTAL LESSONS and ANY ROAD WILL TAKE YOU THERE-was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he began his work as a broadcast journalist and writer. He moved to Chicago to work as a radio reporter and news anchor for CBS Radio and later pursue a career as a writer and educator. His book ACCIDENTAL LESSONS is about his year teaching in one of the Chicago area's most troubled school districts. The book won the Golden Dragonfly Grand Prize for Literature and has been called a "beautiful, elegantly written book" by award-winning author Thomas E. Kennedy, and "a terrific memoir" by Rick Kogan (Chicago Tribune and WGN Radio). ANY ROAD WILL TAKE YOU THERE is the author's story of a 5000-mile road trip with his sons and the revelations of fatherhood. The memoir has been called "heartwarming and heartbreaking" and "a five-star wonderful read."

David can be found online at:

Website: www.davidwberner.com

Twitter:  @davidwberner

Twitter:  @anyroadbook

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/pages/David-W-Berner-Writer/190345939480

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/david.w.berner