Recently turning again to the beginning of my memoir, the part called "Providence," I felt a compulsion to return for a few days to the place I was born and grew up. It felt necessary once more to walk the city's old streets and to see its historic buildings. I had to be a girl reporter again, and gather more details about the place of my girlhood, in my desire to delve deeper and deeper into the past.

When I worked for The Providence Journal after college, the small New England city was struggling to get on its feet. Now there is a new vibrancy as department stores have become artists' lofts, and a bank building has turned into an art library and a dormitory for artists-to-be studying at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Much is different, but the essence of Providence is the same. As I worked at the Providence Public Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society--located in the old library where I fell in love with children's books--I did discover more and remember much more.

Now that I've returned home, I'm ready to settle down and write.  Read More 

Any manuscript goes through a number of revisions until it is done, when a writer has a sixth sense that it is finally finished, jelled, and that adding even another word or two to a paragraph would be perilous.

Until that moment, a writer goes through many patient steps--preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration--which are circular and overlapping, not linear at all, another writer has pointed out.

When I was a schoolgirl and the goldenrod began to bloom in August, it was always a startling reminder that the ease of summer vacation was almost over, and another school year was about to start.

The goldenrod is blossoming again in early September, and I am beginning another draft of my memoir. Most of the story is down on paper, so it's time to circle back to elaborate with more curlicues and explanation points (metaphorically speaking).

I feel as if I were a schoolgirl again, creating an intriguing challenge for myself.  Read More 

One of the ways I shake words loose is to go for a walk. By myself. With a pen and pad in my pocket. Along a country road taking me under trees, around bends, beside brooks, up and down hills, and alongside green fields.

The rhythm of putting one foot in front of another has a way of loosening thoughts from the depths of the mind. It's a matter of slowing the mind down to the pace of footsteps and distracting it from a to-do list.

Now in high summer the white Queen Anne's lace and blue Bachelor buttons are abundantly blooming in patches of sun along the roads, but every month in New England brings different blossoms and foliage.

Walking and thinking is an ancient practice. It was originally noted by a Greek philosopher, then written down in Latin as solivitur ambulando,meaning "it will be solved by walking." Many American writers have walked and written about its benefits, notably Henry David Thoreau in Walking (1861).

I almost always return from a walk feeling a little lighter, mentally as well as bodily, and with a pocket full of scrawled notes.  Read More 

The Georgia O'Keeffe retrospective in London makes me reflect about my long interest in this artist's images and words. It was in 1970--forty-six years ago--when I first saw her paintings in another large show in New York. New to Manhattan, I was a young journalist trying to find my own form of self-expression.

O'Keeffe's astonishing images impressed me that afternoon. They made me want to find words she had written about how she was able to create them. I began searching for her words, and even words written about her, but there were few to be found.

A few years later, many of her images were published in a volume titled Georgia O'Keeffe, along with a few of her words describing her early experiences as an artist. The book was soon followed by another with intimate photographs taken of her by Alfred Stieglitz, along with her words in the same straightforward and evocative voice about their relationship.

Intrigued, I found more of her words in letters and exhibition catalogs in archives and museum libraries, and realized I had enough to begin to write a biography about her. Portrait of An Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe was published a few years later.

Her words have guided and inspired me to discover my own delicate, difficult, ever changing balance of intimacy and independence in my own life, and how to find a way to write about it.

Then five years ago, hundreds of O'Keeffe's letters were published in My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz , reminding me of my excitement at her exhibit so long ago. So this week it is deeply gratifying to see the videos and read the rave reviews of her largest exhibition outside the United States.  Read More 

The big purple bearded iris have started their annual blooming in my backyard, the ones my mother gave me from her garden, and the same ones she dug from her own mother's garden. Their genesis reminds me of Virginia Woolf's words in A Room of One's Own about thinking back through our mothers if we are women.

My mother, Adeline, was disinclined to give advice, and I got little or none from my three Rhode Island grandmothers, Helen and Persis, and my step-grandmother, Caroline. What did my mother's mother, Persis, learn from her New Hampshire mother? I looked up in a family history the given name of this great-grandmother, whom I had only seen in old black-and-white photographs, and was reminded it was Mary Emelina.

Searching for the names of female ancestors tells me how few of their words of wisdom are passed down from generation to generation. Although we are stamped with genetic memory, it is silent memory.

While working on a memoir, I still use the dictionary that Persis gave me at the age of ten. I re-read the few letters from Adeline and Helen that I managed to save, searching between the lines to learn what they knew. When we try to think back through our mothers, it is often a halting journey, but the blooming of the dark purple iris reminds me to try.  Read More 

Four Tenths of an Acre is a book I wrote out of, well, guilt. After moving from the city to the country, I spent many afternoons gardening in the yard behind my house instead of working on the biography I was supposed to be writing.

This gardening memoir grew, ironically, out of all those afternoons of not writing.

It was a time when I saw everything through a gardener's green glasses. As I taught myself how to grow perennials, I took detailed notes in one garden notebook after another about planting, weeding, deadheading, watering, and all the rest. Before long I had filled many notebooks, and I realized I had the makings of a book.

I am gratified that more than 700 readers tossed their hats into the ring for a chance to win a copy of the book during the recent Goodreads Giveaway, and I've been busy during the past few weeks sending books out to the two dozen winners.  Read More 

 
Driving home yesterday from a class reunion at the girls' boarding school I described in Westover: Giving Girls A Place of Their Own, I felt a sense of gratitude. It was where, as a teenager, I was able to daydream about the life I wanted to live, and by graduation I wanted it to be a writing life.

I had taken an inspiring elective called Creative Writing during my junior year, and before long what I was writing--mostly descriptive nonfiction--was being published in the school's literary magazine, named The Lantern for the light of learning, and I was seeing my first bylines.

The heart of the school is still a large lofty room decorated in crimson called Red Hall. It looks out into a courtyard, which is enclosed by a beautiful old quadrangle, and where apple trees are hung with lanterns decorated with ribbons in the spring. Read More 

The history of writers who garden is long because writing and gardening, well, have a way of fertilizing each other.

The list of gardening writers and writing gardeners is long: Nathanial Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and others too numerous to name.

After getting dirty digging a hole or bloody from pruning a rose, I find that it's a relief to spend the next morning writing in my office. And after hours of mental intensity while working on my memoir, it's an exhilarating release to get into the garden.

When a morning of motionlessness overworking my brain is balanced by an afternoon of mental ease and bodily motion, I feel nourished and happily exhausted.

Gardening keeps me writing, and writing keeps me gardening.  Read More 

Carol Ascher, my friend and neighbor in Sharon, Connecticut, has written in the genres of fiction and memoir, and she answers my questions about the differences between them.

You've written a memoir about your father and two novels with a father figure? Why did you use non-fiction and fiction when writing about this topic?

My father was so important to who I am as an intellectual, aesthetic, and political individual, and since our relationship ended in a violent break shortly before he died, I've written about him three times.

The first time was in The Flood, about a ten-year-old girl in a refugee family in Kansas in 1951, an "autobiographical novel,"  Read More 

As my memory drives me deeper into the past, my mind circles around and into it, making discoveries and bringing insights and ideas back to the pages of my manuscript, and I experience little epiphanies. My memory seems like a bottomless well, as I again and again pull up fragments of feelings, and then the events that evoked them. Memory seems like a muscle that strengths with practice.

"The past is inside us in flickering and mysterious ways that can never be fully acknowledged nor easily represented," editors Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow have written in the introduction to The Feminist Memoir Project. Reading the fascinating anthology aroused many of my own memories from living in New York during the early years of the Women's Liberation Movement.

It was then when I began to write Portrait of an Artist, my biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. I was in my thirties and had more questions than answers about how to live, and I learned a lot from examining her life.

Despite the demands of almost daily writing, I find in my seventies that my efforts to write an evocative memoir are more meaningful than writing another biography. As I go through my journals, the writing forces me to face the meaning of events that eluded me earlier. And if it's unsettling at times, I believe that writing a late life memoir is more rewarding.  Read More