West Point Ring Melt
I was honored to attend the ceremony of the Ring Melt at West Point on January 19, 2024. I donated my husband’s West Point Class ring, Class of 1966, which I’ve held onto since he was killed in Vietnam in 1969. Now, the gold in his ring will become part of rings given to the Class of 2025 and all future Class rings. As I said after dropping the ring into the cauldron, “the stone in Dave’s ring was lost long ago during a battle in Vietnam, but the ring has now come home.” A video of the Ring Melt ceremony can be viewed here.
“Write Your Story” Conference Comes to Groton, Connecticut!
Is there a connection between writing and wellness? Where do great writers get their stories? Has anyone ever suggested to you that you should write a book? Believe it or not, these questions are related to each other. If you or a member of your family have served in the military, a great opportunity to improve your writing skills and tell your story is coming to Groton, CT on Thursday, September 14, 2023.
The Military Writers Society of America (MWSA is a non-profit organization) will hold a free workshop taught by award-winning authors from 9am to 3pm on 9/14/2023 at the Submarine Force Library & Museum, 1 Crystal Lake Road, Groton, CT. Lunch and snacks are included, compliments of MWSA and The Rolling Tomato.
In the 1980s, psychologists and sociologists started paying attention to the fact that writing is healing and we should write about what keeps us awake at night. Or perhaps you just have a great story you’d like to share. Writing is a powerful tool for self-discovery and healing – physically, emotionally and spiritually. Your story may help others – and it may become a book!
The seed for MWSA was planted in 1998, when Vietnam Veteran and author Bill McDonald built a website presence for his old Army unit (The 128th Assault Helicopter Company) called the “Vietnam War Experience.” That original website began with just poetry and stories, a humble reservoir of war memories that Bill had written during […]
How to Make a Clambake
A New England Clambake
A clambake is literally and figuratively “baking clams” along with other foods that are available in summer months in New England – usually lobsters, corn on the cob, chicken and potatoes. These items are stacked on top of each other – sometimes separated by seaweed – with the order determined by cooking time. The most traditional way to prepare a clambake is to cook it in a hole on a beach.
But – there are simpler ways to have a clambake, too. Here are two methods, starting with the most complicated:
Traditional Clambake – this will serve at least 20 people (maybe more).
50 hard-shell clams (be sure they are scrubbed clean or soaked)
4 dozen ears of corn
5 broiling chickens (optional)
20 potatoes (white or sweet)
20 1 ½- lb. lobsters or about 3 dozen soft-shell crabs (depends on the season)
150 soft-shell clams (optional – usually called steamers)
Start preparations at least four hours before serving time.
Dig a pit in the sand about 1-foot deep and 3 ½ feet across. Line it with smooth round rocks that have not been baked before. Have a wet tarpaulin (canvas) ready – big enough to overlap the pit area by about 1 foot all around. Have some rocks handy to weigh down the edges of the tarp.
Build a fire over the rocks in the hole using a hardwood and keep feeding it for the next 2 ½ to […]
Sparking the Writer’s Imagination
Let’s agree on one thing: the writer’s imagination is impossible to describe. But, for some of us, life without writing is also impossible. Is there a secret behind the sparking of imagination? Except for making ourselves sit down and start writing, it’s difficult to say what makes those words jump onto the page. It helps to believe that our writing matters, especially to us. Anne Lamott described in Bird by Bird that writing matters because of the spirit. “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed our soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
It’s important to write. Storytelling is important – in words or paintings. Expressing the imagination on the page (or on canvas) restores our soul. But, there is also the mystery of why we stop ourselves from self-expression and how to get the process rolling again and pour yourself into the work. If you are in the area of Mystic, CT on September 25 or October 7, 2017, join me at the Mystic Museum of Art for […]
Brothers and Sisters
My brother Sam would be 67 today, November 21, 2016. He died from AIDS while still young and handsome at the age of thirty-nine in 1989. We were very close, in spite of a sibling scrimmage now and then. When we were growing up, I seemed to be the person he preferred to fight with, but also the person he came to whenever he got into difficulty. He was fiercely competitive with me throughout our lives, about everything from my doll collection to Christmas tree decorating to who had the better education. My first memory from childhood was about Sam, a scowling baby sitting in our red flyer wagon. I remember his dying words, too. He said, “I’m trying to dial 1954, but I can’t get through.” Eventually, I had to write my memory of his life in order to approach understanding what he was trying to say.
I was honored to have my essay about our life as brother and sister, Sam’s Way, published in The Gettysburg Review (Spring, 2012), and doubly honored when it was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2013. Writing our story was a way to bring him back into the world – and it worked. Many people who had known him contacted me and I had lots of great conversations about what a funny, courageous, difficult and generous person he was. In honor of Sam, I’ll be making his favorite yellow cake with chocolate icing today and thinking about all the beautiful and talented people who were lost to a horrendous disease. Happy birthday, Sammy. Wish you were here.
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Father’s Day, 2016
Approaching Father’s Day, I scan the years that I shared with my father, remembering the handkerchiefs, the ties, the cuff links, the homemade cards, the terrible black walnut cake I proudly presented him with when I was ten, but the same unanswered questions bubble up when I think about my dad. I have no doubt of his goodness, however I still wonder about the inner life of this person I knew for the first thirty-five years of my life. He died young by today’s standards, only sixty-one, as a result of falling from a roof he was shingling. He took risks, one of them being his intolerance for safety harnesses when working on the top of a three-story building. He often commented about the birds he had seen and heard while working high above the ground: sea gulls, mourning doves, mocking birds – even an owl at dusk. Perhaps he began to identify with creatures who could fly and that reduced his need to be safe with a tether. My appreciation for mountain tops may have come from my father’s unabashed fearlessness of high places, but I never went to a mountain with him during his life. I remember only watching him from the ground as he strolled across a building truss, using his arms for balance, looking like a visitor from Ringling Brothers circus rather than the father of four children.
Jess Maghan, in his book Forty Sons and Daughters: Finding Father Within, eloquently expresses through vignettes of forty sons and daughters describing their fathers, the contemplations we can have about […]
The Noah Bean to David Bowie Transformation
In the world of show business, there are many fables about how actors and musicians succeed. My son, Noah Bean, who has been a professional actor for almost twenty years, says that it takes at least ten years to become an overnight success – and even then you may have to start over the morning after. Noah graduated from Boston University with a BFA in Acting and attended the Royal Shakespeare Academy along the way, as well as the London Academy of Music and Drama. In other words, he was prepared, but his continued success – while sometimes resembling a roller-coaster ride – has been the result of staying in the ring in spite of long layoffs and tough choices. His recent portrayal of David Bowie is a tribute to Noah’s grace and humanity, and his desire to be generous towards others in a world that is highly competitive and ruthless. His generosity towards me is huge. Without his help I would never have achieved the writing of my memoir about my first husband who was killed in Vietnam. He encouraged me, read draft after draft, and created and narrated the book trailer. There are great humans in this world, and I’m proud that my son is one of them. I look forward to watching his career unfold, over and over, with more and more overnight success stories.
Remembrance and Reunion
Join me at the Veteran’s Summit at Lyndon State College in VT on March 14, 2015, for a presentation on remembrance and reunion after war.
What is Memoir?
Beginning a memoir project is like being an explorer of unexcavated territory, except that territory is within you. You are an anthropologist, a psychologist and a sky diver all at once without leaving your writing table. You take risks on the journey as you delve deeper and deeper into the ravines of memory, but the journey itself is your challenge, a way to stretch yourself and grow as a writer.
A memoir is a story that is true. It can consist of looking back at a single summer, or the span of a lifetime. It is some aspect of life, some theme about which you want to reflect so it becomes a process of unearthing memories and then turning them over and over like a stone embedded with fossils. The more we look the more we see.
There are two basic ingredients in a strong memoir. The first is honesty. The memoirist makes a commitment to tell the emotional truth. Sometimes when the writing is not coming easily, it is often because we’re avoiding what needs to be written. It’s not about baring secrets – it’s simply telling the emotional truth about what you’ve chosen to write about.
Russell Baker told the story of writing a complete manuscript – 450 pages – of a well-researched and documented family story. He included a slew of facts about his family’s genealogy and history. But in the end he realized that, although he was accurate in the reporting of facts about his family, he had been dishonest about his portrayal of his mother. He said, “I had been unwilling to write honestly… and that dishonesty left a […]
A Grandmother’s Memory of 9/11
Most of us associate the month of September with the tragedy that occurred on 9/11/01. We don’t think of Grandparent’s day which traditionally arrives on the first Sunday after Labor Day. Seldom do we consider these two events side-by-side in relationship with each other. For my friend Paula Clifford Scott, September 11, 2011, was especially cruel and poignant because, not only was it Grandparent’s Day, by chance, but it marked the 10th anniversary of the death of her only daughter and granddaughter.
On 9/11/01, Juliana Valentine McCourt, age four, and her mother, Ruth Clifford McCourt, departed from Boston on American Airlines flight 11 headed for a vacation in California. Ruth’s best friend, Paige Farrelly Hackel (Godmother to Juliana) was on the second plane, United flight 175. The dream trip for mother, daughter and Godmother included the Deepak Chopra Center for Well-being and Disneyland. Before departing for the airport, Juliana explained to Grandma Paula how she had decided which of her favorite stuffed animals would accompany her on the plane. “Bunny Rabbit can stay with you, Gramma,” she said, “he’ll take care of you while I’m gone.”
Eight children between the ages of two and eleven died in the three planes lost on 9/11. How do grandparents survive with just the memory of the tiny hands and fresh faces of their grandchildren and the knowledge that they themselves are still here, alive? Knowing that the unspoken order of life and death – who should depart this earth before the other – has been so tragically turned upside down. […]
