Life Writing

I remember exactly, in my small town childhood library, the shelf of biographies written for young readers. I became hooked on life stories.

Between my time working as a professor and then later in economic policy, and while raising a young son, I took a bit of a detour to follow the life writing path.

I discovered an Austin group founded solely to promote the writing of women’s lives. It hired me to co-direct a grant-funded project to document the memories of women as they aged. In the role, I created the materials used in workshops to help prompt these stories and conducted sessions myself.

At the project’s conclusion, the University of Texas Press published a collection of the memoirs, which I titled With Courage and Common Sense. (I knew how that title would appeal to its audience, and it did.) I co-edited the book, reviewing and smoothing hundreds of fascinating life stories, organized the book’s structure and selected its content, wrote its introduction and ghost-wrote its foreword for legendary Texan Liz Carpenter.

During that time I also wrote a number of profiles for an Austin-based magazine. My favorite must be of Professor Charles Hartshorne, an eminent philosopher of religion at the University of Texas when he was 101 (yes, 101) years old and still with insight to share. Some of my other writing for the magazine profiled Emma Long, Austin’s first female city councilperson, and Professor Elspeth Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs also at the University of Texas, whose long memory included her association (and her husband’s) with the Lyndon Johnson administration.

For the magazine I also wrote features and (at the editor’s request because I was a triathlete) a monthly column on the culture (yes, really) of fitness.

I’m finally pulling together my pandemic notes, and hope others also will. (The really very pleasant Merit coffee house across the street gave me a kickstart.) These last couple of years (obviously) have been historically significant, and personal accounts…life writing…of them should be preserved.