Writing Memoir

Love´s Last Gift by Bebhinn Ramsay, dedicated to Alastair Ramsay.

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:34:23 +0100

Writing was a childhood passion of mine. At the age of nine or ten, I used to write poetry and would lose myself in the experience. As I grew older, this passion was pushed aside as I started my career in international development, and writing became limited to bullet-point funding proposals and monitoring reports. For friends´ hen-parties and birthdays, I would still spend hours writing fun limericks for them and in times of difficulty, I would write endlessly in...

Using Your Senses To Evoke Memoires

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:02:27 +0100

When I reflected on one item of food, such as Tayto crisps, I thought of when I would have had the pleasure of an entire packet to myself; a house party over the Christmas period or in my grandma’s house. Suddenly I saw myself standing in our old kitchen, shaking malt vinegar into a packet of Cheese & Onion crisps to create my own unique flavour and devouring the soggy snacks in minutes. I had not thought of this delicacy of mine in three decades and there it was, titillating me...

The Truth is in the Telling: Do or Die

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:20:29 +0100

I was opening up my life to the public domain. This was not a fictional story that I was going to be writing about. I was going to write about a horrific part of my life and I was going to have to relive and remember the horrid things that I had gone through while doing so. I had made a conscious decision before I submitted my proposal to the publisher, a decision that I was going to complete this book in the hope that it may also help someone else. Once I had done that there was no turni...

Getting Personal with Emma Hannigan

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:42:11 +0100

When I began writing my memoir Talk to the Headscarf I had to change gear so to speak. I still consider myself a ‘newbie’ and every day I learn about the craft of writing. Before writing Talk to the Headscarf any knowledge I’d scraped together related to fiction.

Nonfiction, although a different genre, turned out to be a natural progression for me.

With my first two novels I wrote about things I’ve experienced. Designer Genes mirrored my discovery of being gene positive for Brc...