How Poetry Slams Set Me Free as a Writer

A blog post by
Cecelia Allentuck, Publishing Intern

Performing in “New Britain's Got Talent” as a guest poet (c. 2023)

Writing has always been a source of comfort for me, a way for me to work through feelings and share myself with others. Like any person, I have my flaws. My drive to win can sometimes be a great tool for achieving success, but it can consume me in little moments, like when I am playing a board game, or switching lanes on the highway. When I first started competing in poetry slams, I was a bit concerned about the potential downside of injecting competition into the comfort zone of my creative life. I didn’t anticipate how writing for a judge would actually make me more accepting of my competitive spirit.

A poetry slam is a competition with scores based on both writing and performance. Oftentimes, you must prepare three poems (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) and deliver them in under 3 minutes each—with a 10-second grace period. In my experience, the topic of each poem can range from politics to perfume marketing to stubbing your toe. Anything goes!

“Am I good enough? Am I receiving better scores? Will I ever be as good as the other writers are?”

The first time I competed, I was just 15 years old, and I had no idea what I was in for. I had performed at open mics, so as I entered my name into the waiting list of performers, I thought, “What could be so different?” I was excited to perform the same way I always had, only this time there was a monetary prize, plus bragging rights attached to the opportunity.

All of the other poets were professionals. They had done this so many times before, they could do it in their sleep! There I was, on stage, with a printout of my poem that I read off to the crowd. “Mmms” and “ahhs” and “oohs” and finger-snaps clicked their way around the room... and then I was eliminated, first round.

So I worked harder. I watched slam poets perform, studied their movements, listened to the way they twisted words to mean multiple things at once. I wrote and wrote and sang and performed in my kitchen night after night.

Top 3 youth poets (I’m 2nd from left) with host and organizer LyricalFaith (3rd from left), at 2023 Northampton (MA) Academy of Music Regional Youth Poetry Slam, where I won second place

I wanted to win! I wanted to show the world—and myself—that I was the best. My next slam... I was eliminated, first round. The following slam, however, I made it to bout 2. Then bout 3. Finally, it was going to happen! That champion title was going to be mine! And... I got second place.

2024 Academy of Music Regional Youth Poetry Slam, where I won first place

The following year, I returned to the same slam competition. This time, I was not going home without a win. My legs were shaking as I waited for my turn and listened to the other poets. Everyone competing was so talented, and I was sitting there wishing I could write the way he did, or project my voice the way she did. My competitive side was eating away at the part of my brain that loved to write and perform. To my delight, I left that night with the win I had worked for. It felt great. But I also realized that what felt even better were the personal connections, the friendships I had made in a single night.

A year after winning that slam, I entered an even bigger one as part of a team. My team was phenomenal, with poets who continue to inspire me even months later. But even on a team, my competitive side made me question, “Am I good enough? Am I receiving better scores? Will I ever be as good as the other writers are?”

Slowly, I noticed how these thoughts were chipping away at my creativity and contributing to a negative mindset. I began to push against these thoughts to recognize that inspiration from other poets did not diminish my own writing. In fact, it only affirmed that I was creative and talented because I could notice and appreciate other people’s gifts.

At right, with University of St. Andrews Slam Poetry team, competing at UniSlam 2025 in Birmingham, UK. We made it to semi-finals, achieving third place in our bout.

When I fully accepted these truths, my competitive spirit stopped working against me. Instead it began to help me write poems that felt true to me and could impact an audience of judges, with the understanding that not everything I shared would connect with every reader, judge, or audience member. Maybe I’d go home with a trophy or two, but I came to accept that the point of writing, practicing, performing, losing, and trying again was to challenge myself and others. To find inspiration and make lasting connections. To become the best version of myself, even if there was no medal to name me a winner.

And so, I embraced being competitive without being against anyone—whether it be the judges, other poets, or even myself. I learned that when you go on stage and share your truth, you must be ready for someone not to understand it in the way you do. Your truth is your own, and sometimes their truth tells them something different. That is OK—in fact, this may be the whole point of writing in any capacity: to share your thoughts and feelings and memories and ideas, and then let go, allowing those who encounter your words to make their own meaning with the poem you’ve given them.

Cecelia Allentuck is the summer 2025 publishing intern for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

Put Your Family History in Writing

““Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.””
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

One gravestone, silhouetted in the sunlight between two trees, invites us into the Denlinger Cemetery

In 1999, my maternal grandfather’s brother, Granduncle Paul Ahlers, wrote a family history that provided details about something my cousins and I heard many times while we were growing up—that we are part “Pennsylvania Dutch.” In his book, Paul includes a copy of “The Denlinger Family,” a well-researched and well-documented article written by distant cousin Ralph E. Denlinger that appeared in Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage magazine in July 1980. In it, Ralph tells the story of our common ancestor Michael Denlinger, who left with his family from Ibersheim, Germany in about 1715 and came to East Lampeter Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to begin farming on Pequea Creek.

The Denlingers were Mennonites, a branch of the Anabaptist movement originating in Switzerland in 1525. Persecuted for their beliefs by religious and political authorities, Mennonites left Switzerland for other parts of Europe, including the Palatinate region of southwest Germany. Then, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, “Beginning in 1663, Mennonites emigrated to North America to preserve the faith of their fathers, to seek economic opportunity and adventure, and especially to escape European militarism.”[1] The Denlinger family’s arrival in Pennsylvania in 1715 marked the beginning of a four-decades-long “Great Migration” of Palatine Germans to the state.

In his article, Ralph identifies the land on which the Denlinger family settled, including the names of the present-day roads that run through and around it. He also references the Denlinger Cemetery, which was located on the homestead. According to a footnote in the article, “Michael and his wife, Frances, are believed to be resting here in unmarked graves. Their two sons and several other descendants are buried here. The oldest dated stone in the cemetery is 1776.”[2]

According to Ralph, the first three generations of my ancestors stayed in the East Lampeter Township region. A member of the fourth generation, my 4x great-grandfather, moved west to Blair County, Pennsylvania, and several members of the fifth generation “traveled” or moved to Iowa in the 1850s. Ralph’s account matches Paul’s account (and my subsequent research) of the origin of my 3x great-grandfather Christian Denlinger, who came from Pennsylvania to Iowa in 1854, as did two of his brothers around the same time.

East Lampeter Township in an 1851 map of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Born in Iowa and never having been to East Lampeter Township, I was eager to explore it. For years I pored over old maps and compared them to current satellite images on Google Maps. I dreamed about driving the roads and seeing the land today. I especially wanted to visit the Denlinger Cemetery. Finally in 2025, the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism and the year of my 60th birthday, I knew it was time! And so my wife and I began to plan a trip.

To prepare, I read Real People: Amish and Mennonites in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by A. Martha Denlinger. Martha, a member of the Mennonite church, originally wrote the book in 1975 after years of working at the Mennonite Information Center in Lancaster. In it she answers many of the questions that tourists commonly asked her. I researched her background to figure out how she and I are related, and I hoped to meet her. Sadly, she died in 2024, and I would never get the chance.

I also researched the Denlinger Cemetery, which I intended to make the focal point of our trip, and was helped by an information page posted on the Find A Grave website. It alerted me to several facts:

  • This cemetery is on private property. Before going out to it, stop at the property owner’s house and request permission.

  • There is no public road access, you have to walk about 120 yards along the edge of the field to a stand of trees in the northeast corner of the property.

  • Many of the stones are worn/broken.[3]

The website also included a hand-drawn map of the cemetery made by Ralph Denlinger, featuring the location of stones and the list of names and dates carved into them.

We were ready to go!

The John and Frances Denlinger family Bible at the Mennonite Life Archives and Library in Lancaster

I cannot describe how transformative it was to immerse ourselves in that area for just a couple of days. Everywhere there were lush, green farms with fields of tall corn, yards with lines of clothing drying in the sun, and farmstands loaded with everything from tomatoes to honey. From Martha I had learned, “The Amish today and their less conservative neighbors, the Mennonites, often live and work together in the community. But they worship separately.”[4] The Amish farms had carriages parked in their driveways; the Mennonite farms, pickup trucks.

In the restaurants and shops we visited, Amish and Mennonite workers very kindly and peacefully attended their customers, despite the hot temperatures, crowds, and amusement-park vibe of nearby attractions. If we were lucky, we occasionally caught snippets of their conversation among themselves, spoken in Pennsylvania Dutch, a language related to German that has been kept alive since the late 18th century.

We first made our way to the Mennonite Life Archives and Library, where the staff generously pulled a Denlinger family Bible from the shelves and set it on a table for us to view. John Denlinger, who “was born the 5th of January in the year of our Lord 1827, Constellation the Aquarius,” as the Marriages page states, was not an ancestor of mine, but he was a distant cousin. Calligraphy on the title page claimed the Bible as “The Property of John and Frances Denlinger” and was surrounded by colorful illuminations of birds and flowers. Being in the presence of this book connected me directly with these people and this place across centuries, like a hand extended for me to hold for a moment and express my gratitude.

The gravestones of John and Anna Denlinger in the Denlinger Cemetery

And then it was off to the cemetery. We knocked on the door of one farmhouse but found no one home, so left a note of explanation under the windshield wiper of our car and ventured onto a path at the edge of their cornfield. But soon we hit the edge of another cornfield and had to turn around. Driving to a road on the opposite side of the cemetery, we drove up the driveway of another house and found the owner at home. She pointed us to a patch of woods at the end of her lot but said that we might have trouble finding our way because an older man used to take care of the cemetery but hadn’t done so for years. Walking along the edge of another cornfield, we came to a tiny grove of trees, overgrown with shrubs and vines, and with no obvious entryway. Then my wife spotted a gravestone and headed toward it, shouting out to me that there were several more, everywhere! We climbed around in the sweltering heat for about a half an hour, finding one stone after another, and reading their inscriptions. Again, we found no evidence of my direct ancestors, but we knew we were walking on the family’s hallowed ground, and we were so deeply moved. A pilgrimage completed at last.

To others the Denlinger Cemetery may be just a jumbled mix of broken and still-standing gravestones hidden in a tangle of trees and weeds at the far intersection of four cornfields in rural Pennsylvania, but this place felt sacred to me. And as we stood there, I couldn’t help but think: I wouldn’t have known about any of this if someone hadn’t written it down.

Dear descendants of Michael and Frances Denlinger, thank you for carving names and dates on these stones!

Dear John and Frances Denlinger, thank you for keeping a family Bible!

Dear Ralph Denlinger, thank you for writing your magazine article!

Dear Martha Denlinger, thank you for writing your book!

And especially, dear Granduncle Paul Ahlers, thank you for recording our family history in the first place, the original piece that led me on this journey!

I hope that this reflection inspires every reader to begin recording their genealogy. It must be written down, or it will be lost. It is as simple as that. Some people don’t begin writing because they feel like they haven’t completed their research yet. Let me tell you, it will never be done! Start it now, share what you know already. Give others a foothold to take steps from there. Write it down! Write it down! Write it down!

[1] “Mennonite,” Encyclopædia Britannica (https://www.britannica.com)

[2] Ralph E. Denlinger, “The Denlinger Family,” Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1980), p. 12

[3] “Denlinger Cemetery, East Lampeter Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA,” Find A Grave (https://www.findagrave.com)

[4] A. Martha Denlinger, Real People: Amish and Mennonites in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1993), p. 14

Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

Reflections from Jay K. Musoff

Jay K. Musoff, son of Wallace Musoff, collaborated with his brothers, Scott D. and Adam L. Musoff, to publish A Gentleman Doing His Duty: Wallace Musoff and His Life in the Law with Modern Memoirs in 2020. This collection of the court records of legal cases tried by their father took three and a half months from the day we started it until books arrived on their doorsteps. Modern Memoirs President Megan St. Marie reflected on the project shortly after its completion in 2020 in a blog entitled “On the Important Things in Life.” We recently caught up with Jay Musoff to ask what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his father’s book with others.

1. You created this book as a gift to your father to mark his 90th birthday. It spans his legal career with the U.S. Treasury Department in the 1950s and 1960s, and private practice from the 1970s to the 1990s. What inspired you to create a custom hardcover book of his court records, including family photos, news articles, and a collaborative introduction and epilogue by you and your brothers, as opposed to producing a standard volume of law reports?

Jay Musoff: Our father had a prominent and colorful legal career—involving some notable and notorious figures. Dad always had great stories about his cases, and we wanted to collect those cases, along with some memorable stories, in one place that could be shared with his family, particularly his grandchildren.

2. What was your father’s reaction when you presented him with the book?

Jay Musoff: Dad’s 90th birthday was in April 2020, and Mom had planned a big birthday celebration. COVID-19 ruined those plans. Instead, we had to celebrate Dad’s 90th birthday by Zoom. We had shipped the book to my parents’ house, and we had Dad open the box during the Zoom celebration. Dad was literally speechless. He said that the book was “breathtaking” and the best present he ever received.

“Each year since my dad has been gone, I reread the book on his birthday.”

3. What feedback have you gotten from other family members?

Jay Musoff: Dad inscribed copies of the book to all his children and grandchildren, plus some friends who are mentioned in the book. The grandchildren particularly loved some of the stories and the pictures we included in the book of their grandfather “back in the day.”

4. The cover of the book features a custom-designed image of the badge of a special agent with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Why did you choose that emblem to represent the whole?

Jay Musoff: Dad was enormously proud of his service to our country, and the special agent badge represented that pride.

5. Your father passed away in 2023, three years after you published his book. What did it mean to you to complete it in time for his milestone birthday in 2020? How have you reflected further on the project since his passing?

Jay Musoff: We could think of no better way to mark Dad’s 90th birthday than this book that both commemorated and celebrated our father. Dad loved the book and kept copies in his office, and on the coffee tables in the living room and den room of his home. Each year since my dad has been gone, I reread the book on his birthday.

Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

Reflections from Stanley R. Clemens

Stanley R. Clemens published his book entitled An Unexpected Life: Professor, Author, Fundraiser, Entrepreneur with Modern Memoirs in 2010. This Commissioned Memoir took 3-1/2 years from the day he first contacted us to the day books arrived on his doorstep. We asked Clemens to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book with others.

1. Whom did you intend your readers to be, and what were your goals in creating the book for them?

Stanley Clemens: I wrote the book for the benefit of my children and grandchildren and any later descendants who might gain access. Although a relatively small audience, it allowed me to share family stories and personal reflections that I might have been hesitant to include if I had planned to share the publication more broadly.

2. Your project was a Commissioned Memoir, or “as-told-to” narrative, which means that we conducted a series of in-person interviews with you and then created the narrative from the transcripts, maintaining your voice. How did the project benefit from this approach, as opposed to you writing the text yourself?

Here’s a story that suggests I was successful. About 10 years after completing my memoir, one of my sons said […], “I reread your memoir last night, and I’d like to hear more about…”

Stanley Clemens: Prior to writing this memoir I had written numerous books professionally, but they were mathematics textbooks. I feared that my writing style might mask important emotions and decided that an “as-told-to” approach would encourage more open sharing with my family. I describe myself as an introvert, but I think these tendencies were not a problem in the end. Talking to Ali de Groot, the interviewer, was like talking to a close friend. Her genuine interest in hearing my story made the process easy and exciting.

Here’s a story that suggests I was successful. About 10 years after completing my memoir, one of my sons said, “When are you going to take me to visit your boyhood landmarks?” About 10 minutes into the 10-hour drive to see those boyhood sights, my son said, “I reread your memoir last night, and I’d like to hear more about that conflict you had with your high school basketball coach. The way you reacted was so out of character for you.”

3. How would you describe the interview process, what it was like to do your own editing after receiving the initial text, and then have our editors work closely with you to polish and complete it? How did this collaborative approach help to shape the final piece?

Stanley Clemens: I began the writing process by writing an outline for the book. I used this outline as I orally told my story to Ali. The interviews involved about 8 day-long sessions which were recorded. It was a very comfortable process. Ali was supportive and respectful throughout. She helped pull out details from me.

When I received the transcripts back, I took the lead over the next months and did the revising that I felt was needed. I reorganized, rearranged, changed wording, and inserted photographs. It was revision work, not editing work. It became my book. As we got close to the end of the process, Modern Memoirs did what I would call formal editing and helped shape a few of the more difficult spots. Throughout it was a very cooperative process.

4. You said that you “found it very difficult to reach back to childhood, to understand who I was then, and to claim that person as myself.” In the end, what helped you access that period of your life and include it in your story?

Stanley Clemens: I think there was a disconnect between who I became as an adult and who I was as a child. As I think about it now, I would point out that among my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other adults important in my life as a child, there was no one who was a role model for whom I became as an adult. Once I realized that to be the case, I found the disconnect easier to accept and I found the case for writing my memoir more compelling.

5. What advice would you share with others who are considering working with Modern Memoirs on a Commissioned Memoir?

Stanley Clemens: Go for it. I think you will enjoy the experience. The reason it took several years to complete my memoir was on me, not them. The staff was very professional and helpful.

Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

The Last I Love You: How Memoir Writing Guides Us Through Grief

A blog post by
Cecelia Allentuck, Publishing Intern

There are no guides to grief. No Grief for Dummies book, no owner’s manual to the bereaved heart. You have to just...feel grief…until it fades to a low simmer in your gut. That feeling can be overwhelming, with grief inside your heart and somehow outside of yourself, too, threatening to devour whatever lies before it. How do you stop it? I wish I had an answer that fit every mold, that could be placed in the hand of every grieving person consumed by their own feelings. But I don’t.

As an 11-year-old, I found my way through grief by walking alongside it, exploring all the caverns of my heart that a loved one left behind, and writing every step of the way. That year, I lost my Uncle John to cancer. I held tight to the hand of my mother, the strongest woman I know, as she lost her brother, who was also one of her best friends. A few months later, while my family and I were still reeling from the loss, my sixth-grade teacher assigned our class a short narrative piece that was supposed to teach us how to show “explosive moments in our writing.”

I find myself turning to writing as soon as I feel grief creeping up on me.

Uncle John’s death was explosive—a shock that left me with a growing feeling that I couldn’t shake away. That feeling was grief. I was so young, using a locker for the first time, switching classrooms every block, smiling at my friends in the hallway. Everything might have seemed normal, on-track, but grief was dancing along the folds of my brain, beating in the blood from my heart, and weighing my shoulders down to a sag.

I decided to write about it.

The writing was a short memoir-like piece, titled, “The Last I Love You.” In it I described the day I visited Uncle John to say my final goodbyes. I wrote about the anxiety of anticipation, waiting for an end I never wanted to arrive, and how strange it felt to both know something bad was about to happen and still be unprepared for it. I wrote about the love I had for his dogs, and my worries for their future without him. Uncle John was a person I’d known my whole life, and then he was gone, the stranger that was grief entering in his place. I wrote about the discomfort I felt at his loss, wearing grief like wet jeans, itchy and tight and heavy, as I navigated the unfamiliarity of the world without him. I wrote about how the last “I Love You” I spoke, even though faintly, even if it went unheard, had helped carry me through the months after his death. And as I wrote, my bottled-up grief came pouring out all at once.

I read my piece out loud in front of my class, something I am not sure I could do today, sharing my feelings with old friends, new friends, and students I wouldn’t interact with after that year. With shaky hands but a loud voice, that experience taught me that writing is a superpower, giving us courage and strength by putting words to feelings and making them less overwhelming.

When I wrote this assignment, I never expected that doing so would change how I work through my emotions. Although writing cannot fill the space left by the loss of a loved one, I discovered that it allows me to sift through the messy feelings, extract the good and bad, and create beauty from pain. Years later, I find myself turning to writing as soon as I feel grief creeping up on me. Not only does writing hold my hand through the bad moments, but it reminds me to look at grief from love’s perspective. There is no grief without love, after all. Love gives us something to grieve. Love creates space for grief to settle in. Love transforms grief into a friend who keeps those we’ve lost present in our hearts. Love makes the last “I love you” I shared with my Uncle John not a final goodbye, but a promise to remember him always.

The first part of the short memoir piece that the author wrote about her Uncle John when she was 11 years old, published in the AFAM Point of View newspaper, January 1, 2018

The author’s Uncle John with one of his three dogs, Mojo

Gianna Allentuck (the author’s mother) and Uncle John

Cecelia Allentuck is publishing intern for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

Writing as Gardening

I understand that there are people in the world who don’t like writing. People who would cringe at the sight of a blank piece of paper and pen, or a blank document on the screen. To me, it is the ultimate freedom—I can write whatever I want? Travel to all manner of places in my imagination and memory? Words flowing out onto the page faster than my pen can write or hands can type? Easy! Natural!

But if you give me a gardening project, even transferring a small basil seedling into a clay pot, I will run. Yes, I love fresh veggies and herbs. Flowers are pretty. But I don’t like the feel of dirt in my fingers or toes, and I don’t like the sweat and anger that I immediately exude when holding a scythe or clippers or rake or hoe.

I’m not without a tinge of guilt about this. For 30 years, I’ve lived in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, a fertile, lush valley on the banks of the Connecticut River, especially famous for asparagus, tobacco, and corn. When I moved into my house, which we bought from my husband’s parents and where they had lived for a few years, I inherited a half-acre backyard with a full vegetable garden, including asparagus and raspberries. I had high hopes of carrying on the family garden.

Up until then, I’d only lived in coastal Atlantic or Pacific cities. But we had two babies and another on the way, and living in the city just wasn’t affordable, even in 1994. If it weren’t for the fact that there are 5 universities within 10 miles of this town, which means a lot of cafes, 59 to be exact, I don’t think I would’ve moved to the so-called Happy Valley. It is beautiful, mind you! But you really need to like northeastern hills (not really mountains), dark woods, murky ponds, mucky swamps, old farms, old barns, bats and mosquitos, and at the very least, gardening. It’s really country.

“I had high hopes of carrying on the family garden.”

And so we moved into my in-laws’ former house with the big backyard garden. How could I not take advantage of a beautifully tilled area that would magically give way to fresh vegetables? It seemed easy enough.

I wisely waited til spring. Never having gardened in my life, and based on my past luck with indoor plants, I naturally assumed that nothing would grow. So instead of starting with a few plants, I bought 20 tomato seedlings, 15 basil, 10 each of lettuce, corn, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and 5 pumpkin plants. I also bought innumerable starter packs of herbs. We ground up the earth with the rototiller that had been left here and somehow got all of those plants into the ground in April? May? June? No idea.

A bit of context: By then, we had three children under the age of four. In my mind, I pictured nursing the baby in a chaise longue out in the grass in the sun while the toddlers ran around happily. I saw us gleefully plucking herbs and vegetables every night for our dinners.

This is not what occurred. First of all, despite my prediction, almost everything we planted grew like crazy. But I also discovered that gardening absolutely involves weeding, or all-out combat against nature. By the time I caught on, weeding was out of the question. It looked like a jungle back there. The toddlers hated the prickers, spiders, mosquitoes, gnats, everything that nature offers. I, reduced to a toddler state, completely agreed with the kids. So we just ignored the backyard for a month or two.

Everything continued to grow with abandon. While I was reading Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to my kids, it was happening out back. During this time, I was nursing, trying to get frozen fish sticks or pasta or omelettes on the table, and enforcing naps as well as the 1,001 rules of childrearing. Outside, beyond my long-faded control, there were hundreds of peppers, zucchini, and lettuce, and thousands of tomatoes and cucumbers, trapped by leafy herbs which I now couldn’t distinguish from weeds. The corn was the outlier that didn’t make it.

It was thus that the only thing my offspring learned about gardening was how to write the word “FREE”—free tomatoes, free zucchini, free peppers, etc.—as we placed the daily catch on a table in the front yard for passersby. If they’d been a little older, the kids could’ve sat at the table and perhaps sold the vegetables, becoming productive little businesswomen, but that was out of the question for toddlers who couldn’t dress or tie their shoes. I was sequestered inside, nursing the baby every three hours, and couldn’t let them out of my sight.

I give myself a lot of credit for the effort in that first year of living in the country—the result being that I have never gardened since.

Do not despair, O gardeners. I admit to having a teeny tiny plot (4’ x 4’) with perennials that friends have planted for me: iris, columbine, phlox, and omnipresent violets. This year, against all better judgment, I’m venturing into creating a pollinator garden with local plants, where the hedges of raspberries used to be. Though native, these plants have foreign names to me, like Hoary Vervain, Hairy Beardtongue, Ninebark, Boneset—good names for modern alternative bands. As of this writing, the wistful plants are still in their plastic starter trays, but I have high hopes…

Meanwhile, I suppose I can garden through writing. I plant a seed, a concept. I nurture the seedling—words, phrases, sentences. I weed through the undesired parts. Finally, I watch this creation grow before my eyes. If I don’t like what comes out, I’ll erase or delete it and try again, fresh, another day.

* * *

My miniature garden, planted by friends and family, stones added by me to deter weeds

Ali de Groot is director of publishing for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

MODERN MEMOIRS, INC.

417 West Street, Suite 104, Amherst, MA 01002

413-253-2353