laura k bray

  Last year, when I decided to turn my creative attention to writing memoir, I knew I had to read it as well as write it . Looking at my reading journal, it looks like I read over twelve memoirs, each bringing me a different view on not only life, but also how to write one's personal story.  This year, I'm turning my attention to food memoir. If you have spent any time reading my old blog , you know that I love to cook and I've played with the idea of writing a cookbook or a food memoir for a long time so I thought it might be fun to read food memoirs and cookbooks this year to get inspired and learn how authors share their lives through food. Looking at my shelves, I realize that this interest isn't new to me. There's Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, who single-handedly ruined going out to eat for me. Isabelle Allende's Aphrodite is one of the most sensual books about food I've ever read. MFK Fischer's description of eating an orange that sa...

I was going to throw this photo away. I've been on a mission to cull my personal photo collection and this one was a candidate for the trash bin. One of the criteria for keeping a photograph is whether it will have any meaning to future generations and the cropped head of my mother in this photo would make it impossible for anyone else to identify the subject. But as I looked at the photo, mulling over it's fate, I began to notice that it contained multitudes of information about my childhood and sparked memories that I would one day want to write about. The trick was to sit with the photo long enough and focus not only on the person in the photo, but also the location. Once I began this process, I found I couldn't wait to get to my writing prompt notebook and start writing. Of course, this my childhood photo and, as a writer who is focusing on the memoir genre, it is loaded with topics for future essays but even a fiction writer could find inspiration through this process ...

Hello! Here we are in 2022. How were your holidays? Ours were quiet. A decision was made to go slow this year. To not overbook ourselves, to stay cocooned. It was a decision born of both the news of the spread of Omicron and a need to simplify.  We scaled back on our holiday traditions, keeping only the ones that were most important to each of us. Which meant some disappeared ( turns out my daughter and I no longer need the Advent Activities Calendar to happen EVERY day ) which left room for us to expand the time spent on some of the things we loved.  Over the past two years, I've made an effort to send out holiday cards, along with a letter. ( Yes! The infamous Christmas Letter-equally loved or hated. ). I enjoy settling in, writing the letter, choosing the right holiday cards, handwriting addresses. But what we loved even more is that we got responses from people for weeks afterwards. We didn't just get holiday cards but also letters and long emails. It's so nice to conn...