Jan Marquart's Blog

Hi all,

I wish you all a healthy and good-reading New Year for 2025. I'd love to hear about your favorite memoir. Meanwhile I want to say I've just written my second memoir and my 28th book. Lunch with Mom: A Daughter's Soliloquy was a difficult write and I hope you take the time to check it out.

What's your favorite memoir?

What is it like to be your mother's daughter? This sounds simple to answer, doesn't it? But think again. If your answer involves a discussion about your mother -- you are on the wrong track. The answer lies in what you would say about being the daughter of your mother.

Try it. This exercise is quite revelatory. When I counsel women in conflict with their mothers they are shocked to see their lives as daughters have a line in the sand somewhere in their dreams or expectations that ache for a separate path from their mothers. Yes, daughters and mothers are inexplicably linked but on the quest for daughters to find out who they are separate from their mothers the path forward is not always predetermined.

Try it and see what you come up with.

Keep the pen moving,
Jan

Have you ever written erasure poems? They are quite fun. Take an article or prose piece you have read. Now put a line through all the words you want to remove. Check out the words you left behind and see if they create an imaginative piece where it stands on its own or write the words left in your own piece.
When I feel I have no creative thought to write something on my own, I use this technique. It is fun using these words to see how a piece reads when most of it is gone.
You can also take the words left and rearrange them to your liking. I have come up with some very imaginative images this way.
Jan
author of Still, Haiku

Hello readers and writers,

Are you reading something you enjoy? Is there a character in the story you would like to emulate? Maybe you simply find a character delightful to read about and would like to write your own story about that character. Whatever answers you gave can all be food for thought for something you would like to write. May Sarton describes inspiration as white heat in her book, A Journey of a Solitude. Are you waiting for that white heat before you pursue your desire to write because I am here to tell you that most writers, myself included, don't have the luxury to wait for that white heat. I write everyday starting with the date as if to say, "here page, here I am!"

Pick up your pen, and write about the inspiration you wish you had right now.
Keep the pen moving,
Jan

Prompts are wonderful ways of letting your imagination be free. When writing prompts, don't spend time thinking about what to write -- just write whatever comes to mind. For instance, you might have a prompt: green.
Perhaps you don't think of anything, however a tree comes into your vision, so write about a tree and if a specific sprawling oak in a park comes to mind, veer off in that direction.

So today the prompt is: breakfast.

Go. Keep the pen moving,
Jan

This morning I took a short walk, as most writers like to do to get their inspiration awakened. The sun, gentle as only a morning sun can be. The air sweetened by the new buds of spring. The morning alive with hope and renewal. So, the prompt out of my morning walk is:

Only in Spring!

Keep the pen moving,
Jan

I want to tell you how much fun writing haiku is. It is short, each line a rhythm of syllables, and consists of three lines. The content of haiku has to do with nature and the seasons. A haiku can be philosophical or a simple rich breath.

The creator of haiku was Matsuo Basho. Read how simple the Japanese haiku is. Powerful and worthy of a deep breath.

When I wrote Still/Haiku I was nothing but frustrated. Haiku demands that you stay present in the very second of the writing. It was powerful and I grew to both love and respect the genre. Try it.

Have fun,
Keep the pen moving,
Jan

Every daughter is a daughter. Not all daughters become mothers but that isn’t the part of the dyad I want to discuss here. When I was a little girl I adored my mother. She was creative and beautiful with her red lips and cherry red fingernails that she always tapped on the Formica table while waiting for me to make my move while playing Rummy.

As time went on I often found myself in a chasm of conflict. How could I express my growing will while also being her dutiful daughter? I focused on doing good hoping to win her approval. Sometimes I got it but often I did not. My mother was difficult to please and I know this first hand because, believe me, I tried. I tried for the 34 years of my life she was alive. It got more difficult as time went by and my mother became more controlling. She was threatened by seeing me activate my free will and more threatened when she realized her need for control was failing as I got older and entered adulthood.

The more I let my mother know I loved her the more she seemed to not believe me. It was always a lose/lose situation. Like in the sitcoms on TV I would call my mother and then listen for 20 minutes about how I never call her. But my mother’s ability to be creative, spontaneous, outspoken, and caring lived inside me and she never allowed me to discuss any of this with her because her sadness and pain was the focus of our conversations. It was very difficult. The irony is that I always wanted to get closer to her but the more I tried the more she pushed me away until one day I shortened my calls and visits because I was near a nervous breakdown upon each visit.

I wrote almost daily in my journals about this tormenting relationship. As a psychotherapist I found my client caseload consisting of young women in similar situations with their mothers. The pain I listened to was enough to wrap around the world a zillion times. I started seeing daughters with their mothers and mothers with their daughters. That is how Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters started to form. I realized I was not the only woman in such a painful and frustrating place.

I was so deeply touched by the responses to my two question questionnaire I sent to a hundred women that I published all responses I got back without any editing. After Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters was printed something painfully gripping from deep inside me released. In the writing of the pain, I healed. In the writing of what it was like to be my mother’s daughter I realized my mother was a daughter too and the relationship she had had with her mother was enmeshing having been raised by a single mother. It was through the writing process that facets of this relationship came to me for further processing and understanding.

Echoes From the Womb, a Book for Daughters is part narrative and part journal. From the sales of this book I received dozens of note cards from women who were changed in their relationship with their mothers, not just because they read it, but because they wrote out the incomplete sentences in the back of the book and processed their relationships themselves.

Writing heals. Keep the pen moving,

Jan

Wild writing is the most fun practice of imaginative writing that I know. I'm going to share with you my own example of that.

I chose three random words: balloon, buffoon, and ballroom. Then I began to write whatever came to my without censoring and kept writing until I was able to fit all three words in the same piece. Here is what I wound up writing.

It was our first date and instead of roses he brought me a yellow balloon. It was fun and a little quirky so I rolled with it. Flowers would have been sweeter and I guessed right off the bat that romance wasn't his up-front mood. But since he planned to take me dancing to a ballroom, I figured we'd have a nice romantic dinner, dancing, and maybe a stroll by Lady Bird Lake or Mt. Bonnell since being by water was calming and lent itself to closeness.

We got to the ballroom and I expected to be seated at a quiet table but he only wanted to go there to dance the cha cha to show me what an ex girlfriend taught him because he thought he finally mastered it. I love the cha cha too and surrendered into the evening trying to brush away my deep disappointment. I asked if he were planning dinner because now it was 8 PM and I was hungry. He said he had a big lunch, wasn't hungry, but if I wanted he'd stop so I could buy take out chicken at KFC. I asked him to take me to Whole Foods where I could buy chicken and veggies at their deli section. Begrudgingly, he did, then he was eager to take me to a club because a friend of his wanted him to stop by, regardless of our date, to hear him sing.

After I paid for my meal at Whole Foods, we drove straight to the club. He expected me to eat while he drove so by the time we reached the club we could go right in and he wouldn't have to wait for me. I took my time eating, not wanting to rush for him, my frustration growing. I wasn't quite finished eating and wanted to stay in the car to finish so he left to go into the club explaining where I could meet him when done with my meal. I gave him a look of exasperation and he told me not to worry the best part of the night was yet to come. I finished my meal, still in no hurry to rush eating. I noticed a cab company across the street, walked over and asked if I could get a ride home. Of course, they said and I got in and drove off having left the remains of my meal on the seat of my date's care with a note explaining he didn't have to call me again. I no longer date buffoons.

Try this wild writing idea. I do three most days and I have wound up writing stories I never would have come up with by sitting and trying to force myself into something creative. Just do it. Have fun.

Keep the pen moving,

Jan

Not all writers like to write to prompts. As long as writers write, we are happy, right? But I noticed that writers don't always write even though they intend to. When I speak to writers and ask them why they don't write they answer something to the effect of: I want the inspiration to come from me.

The good thing about prompts is that you start in one place and usually wind up in another. Most times prompts lead you somewhere you never would have gone and often those place you land on winds up being something you wanted to write about on your own but never could have gotten there on your own.

I recommend you write to prompts. If nothing else, they are a great warm up. So here is a prompt: left. Now, write whatever comes to your mind because left can lead you just about anywhere.

Have fun -- or do something else.
Keep the pen moving, Jan