The Contest Winners, and Good Memoir Reads

Thanks to everyone who took part in the contest for free copies of my memoir, The Long Awakening, and the $20 Amazon and Starbucks gift cards. It was fun to read your comments about your favorite books and to connect with you on Twitter and my Facebook page. And the winners are...

The winner of a copy of The Long Awakening is: The Curried Nut.

The winner of a copy of my book and the $20 Amazon gift card is: Lori Raines.

The winner of a copy of the book and the $20 Starbucks gift card is: Kimberley Stone Wade.

Congratulations! Please message me your information to receive your prizes. Thanks to everyone who participated. Be sure to keep an eye out for my next giveaway...coming soon!

If you enjoy reading memoir, here are a couple that I love.

In an Instantby Lee and Bob Woodruff.

In 2006 Bob had just been named co-anchor of ABC's World News Tonight and while embedded with the military in Iraq a nearby explosion caused a traumatic brain injury and nearly killed him. It's not only a fascinating account of this story that made national news, but also of Lee's experience as she dealt with what happened to her husband, because trauma also hits the family of the person traumatized. Eerily, Bob's description of his coma and recovery resonated with my experience, but I love this book because it's a story about courage, and coping, and love.

Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini.

A journalist, action, food, and Italy, all in one memoir. I first got an audio copy of this book, a format I enjoy, but after the first two minutes of listening I went out and bought it because the writing was too beautiful not to savor slowly in print. Paula and her husband, John, were both foreign journalists working overseas when John was hit by a sniper's bullet twenty-three days after their marriage. His recovery was far more than physical and one way their family coped was through food. She shopped daily at a market in Italy and served three meals a day around their table, a ritual that was healing, sustaining. This book has rich, layered themes about healing and struggle, love and food. It's a literary memoir that  I'm going to read again.

Happy reading.

What's a memoir you love?

My memoir is out!

My memoir, The Long Awakening, has hit the shelves! To celebrate, I want to do some giveaways, so keep reading about how to get some great free stuff, but first let me tell you what it's about. You can check out the video below too. This is a true story of waking from a two-month coma after childbirth and struggling to discover what had happened, to love my child, and rediscover who I was.

It's a story of lost and found love, the effort to make sense of life-altering events and the search for self-discovery. An altered life and the long journey afterwards can be painful yet beautiful--a poignant lesson on the ambiguity of meaning, the power of love, and purpose when you know who you are.

To learn what happened to me and my family during my missing two months, I approached it as I do when reporting a narrative about another person. I used my skills as a journalist to report my own story. A surreal experience indeed.

To celebrate the launch of

The Long Awakening

I'm giving away three prizes this week.

The prizes:

• An autographed hardback copy of The Long Awakening.
• A $20 Starbucks card and a hardback copy of The Long Awakening.
• A $20 Amazon gift card and a hardback copy of The Long Awakening.

To enter do both of these:

1. Comment

below about your favorite book, and ...

2. Share

a link to this post on Facebook or Twitter, with the hashtag #LongAwakening.

Do this next thing in addition to the above two and you get two entries.

3. Be sure to "like" my new Facebook page and say hi in the comments.

Enter by Friday, Oct. 4th.

Here's the video:

Struggling to be Authentic in a Social (Media) World

I really want to be me. Which shouldn’t be complicated in the least, except it is. Or rather, the true expression of being myself is a little tricky these days, and I think it’s social media’s fault.

Authenticity, living out and revealing who we really are, requires a combo of vulnerability and a certain degree of restraint. Even thinking that feels at first a little inauthentic. If I’m being authentic, I don’t have to think about it, I’m just me, right? I have A.) the person I am right now, and B.) the possibility of the person I’m becoming as I grow and learn. I want to be introspective enough to get from A to B without being solipsistic. And I have to be just the right amount of transparent, revealing the appropriate amount of myself in the right forum to the right people— soul baring with my husband, transparent with friends, real publicly, but not sharing TMI with people who don’t need or want to know too much.

I’ve grown really comfortable in my skin. It gets easier with age, but it’s also my natural bent. Someone in high school once told me, “You are too transparent.” It shocked me. I thought everyone was like this. I was embarrassed and held back for a bit, but that didn’t stick.

Then society began changing. People gradually shifted to wanting more openness, not less.  Now, a generation later, our society no longer holds the voice of authority as the standard, but has shifted to valuing authenticity.

Author and speaker Brene Brown has created an authenticity movement on her blog Ordinary Courage. She said, “In the song Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen writes, "Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and broken hallelujah." 

“Love is a form of vulnerability and if you replace the word love with vulnerability in that line, it's just as true. If we always expect to feel victorious after being vulnerable, we will be disappointed.” As Brene says, it takes courage to be vulnerable.

So we call on our courage to be real, show our authentic selves, and reveal our soft spots, holding back TMI while embracing the cultural acceptance and desire for authenticity, even in moments when we’re scared to death of doing so.

Offer content. Be useful. Consider your tribe. Find your voice. Withhold oversharing. Be transparent. Being "me" has never been so hard.

But in the end, who else can we be? Neither social media nor cultural changes nor non-victorious vulnerability can change the real me. Broken hallelujah and all.

The World Needs You

One day I received a card in the mail from one of my best friends. A blue haired, purple clad lady on the front pointed her finger at me saying,”You better get well. There aren’t that many people I like.” She added a note. “Praying for you friend. Highly motivated. Get well soon.” And here’s the part that made me reel. “The world needs you and so do I.”

Her words stirred me, creating a longing, unspecified, and an argument in my head.

The world needs you.

Not me, I say. I have just a little to give, I say. I’m insignificant in the vastness of humanity’s six billion people. I think of the countless people solving world problems, giving and giving and giving in ways I don’t, can’t, ignore or don’t think of.

I am just me. But I stew.

The world needs you.

Often I’m mystified by how the things that move one person don’t move another and how the worldwide variety of what we care about and choose to pour our lives into meshes to meet needs like a staggeringly beautiful jigsaw puzzle circling the globe.

Some of us are lit up by social justice, others by one-on-one investments in others, or cooking or nonprofits or ministry or movements, business and education, worldwide clean water and the list goes on.

And yes, writing and radio and true stories for the world. Not all 6 billion, just those who catch what we throw out.

I  have something to give. You have something to give.

Go do what you do. Do what you care about.

The world needs you.

"Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it."

—Martin Luther King

 

 

My new memoir cover!

My new memoir, The Long Awakening, has been a long time coming, and it launches on October 1st! Here's my new cover.

As soon as I saw this final design I grabbed the phone and called my publisher, smiling, my heart beating a little faster, to tell them I loved it. They captured the feel, and the metaphor, of my story with an image.

Seeing the art that will wrap around the words that are shaped into story, makes it real—an idea is about to become tangible. I can finally picture my words in readers hands as a physical thing, a story that has lived in me and I've wrestled out of me for ten years (yes, TEN years, but that's another story).

I just thought I'd share what this book is finally going to look like.

A Sound Story: Worst Haircut Ever

Big sister gives little sister the "Worst Haircut Ever," as this public radio reporter discovers. The girls in question are his five and three-year-old daughters, and he does what any good reporter does. He gets the story. Listen and try not to smile.

Change or Die

I’ve been on a spectacular journey of the mind and career lately. I’m a writer and media girl trained in old media in a dizzying new media world speeding forward like a bullet train. Some days the mass of new things I’m learning makes my brain explode. I want to take a couple of digital natives, and it would only take a couple, and syphon some of the agility and speed and knowledge and ease of navigating the technological leaps right out of their head, click control/C, and shove it into my brain.

When I walked into a theater to see the Academy Award winning movie The Artist, I had no idea what to expect. It’s about a dapper fellow who was at the top of his game as a star in silent films in the day when talkies had yet to be invented. Technology changed and with it the nature of work and his success in his art. He tries a new thing and fails, then despairs. Finally, he tries yet another approach in his changing genre alongside someone who believes in him and helps him leave his comfort zone, adapt to the changes and do a new thing with his innate gifts.

When I walked out of the theater I pitched my popcorn bag and said to my friends, “Here are three words about the meaning of that movie. Change or die.”

It’s easier, far easier, infinitely easier, to keep doing what's comfortable, but I don’t want to be one of “those” kind of people who pine for the golden past while skidding my feet to stay in the present. I don’t want to be stuck in a silent film, lamenting the obsolete.

Change or die.

Which is no choice at all, just a realization.

I’m pushing myself to learn and adapt and here’s the thing. I am totally fascinated. My career is changing and my mind is growing, which of course is the best part.

I pine only occasionally now, like when the number of new things I’m trying to learn at once edges me toward brain explosion, so I take an adaptation break and stick with the known for a while, but not too long. I find I love taking my hard-earned experience, body of knowledge and skills, my passion and ways of doing things, and mashing it in with the new. What a fascinating time to live. What a spectacular journey.