Lisa Ohlen Harris's Blog, page 2

Jill Kandel, author of So Many Africas

I "met" Jill Kandel in 2006 when she submitted a wonderful essay to Relief Journal, where I was the editor for creative nonfiction. We published that essay, and over the next few years I was not surprised to see Jill publish work in impressive journals, including The Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, Image, Pinch, and Brevity. The road from writing essays to crafting a memoir is a

Oregon Book Award Finalist

I'm pleased to share that I'm a 2015 Oregon Book Award finalist for The Fifth Season! Winners in each category will be announced in April 2015. 

Advanced Memoir & Personal Essay Class

It's not too late to register for my ten-week Advanced Memoir & Personal Essay class, offered online via Creative Nonfiction Foundation. The course begins January 12 and is quickly filling, so don't wait to register!

Crash

You’d think I’d have
learned my lesson. The last time it happened, I had “a feeling” a few hours
beforehand and backed everything up to a thumb drive—except my photos. I lost four
years of my girls’ childhood. Not many months later, I woke early with the same
feeling and hopped out of bed to grab a thumb drive and hurry downstairs. Too
late, that second time. I lost all the remaining digital

Mornings Unplugged

For
the long Thanksgiving weekend, my family and I drove to the Oregon Coast and
stayed at a cozy beach house with no Internet. The first time I stayed
there, about five years ago, I was truly shocked to arrive and find there was
no Internet connection, and I was mildly stressed during my entire stay. I now retreat
to the beach house at least once a year, prepared to unplug and relax. It’s

NaNoWriMo: Day 22

50,381 words, but far from done. Now to actually do some shaping and purging and augmenting! 

NaNoWriMo: Day 16

Quite
frankly, I’m ready to be done with this NaNoWriMo business. I have 48,000
words, but so what? I spend from 20 minutes to two hours a day writing (the
two-hour days are rare). The excitement of meeting the challenge doesn’t appeal to me at
all anymore, but I know that without this push and the public exposure of this blog,
I would have given up by now. If I’d given up, I wouldn’t have

NaNoWriMo: Day 10

On the morning of Day 7, I
received news that my dear writing mentor, Judith Kitchen, had died. That day,
I had to teach a software training session—no way I could cancel. I had an
afternoon appointment with a student writer, and I couldn’t cancel that either.
Shouldn’t life stand still when we need to grieve?



But I know better. I don’t
expect life to stand still, and I also don’t

NaNoWriMo: Day 5

A word of advice



The NaNoWriMo website gets jammed in the evening when everyone
is posting a word count. I tend to write in the morning, and I go ahead and
enter my word count as I go, even if I plan to write more later in the day. You
can update your word count as many times a day as you’d like. If I do write in
the evening, I enter that word count the next day.







What I’m learning

NaNoWriMo: Day 2

Yesterday:
Day 1



The
throat tickle I’ve had all week dripped and scratched itself deep yesterday.
Full-on cold symptoms. Awesome. But I figured if I didn’t get started on
November 1, I wouldn’t get started.



So
I sat down at my desk, opened my computer, and started cutting and pasting. I
started with blog posts from the time period I have in mind to write about. The
blog posts