Congratulations to Kimberley Hirschi who has been selected as the SDMWA Member of the Month for July, 2022.
Kimberley Hiraschi on SDMWA:
I’d like to share some ways SDMWA has helped me with my writing. I met Marni Freedman (SDMWA’s founder) in January 2018 when she was teaching a class on writing a memoir at the public library. Her suggestions greatly improved my book, particularly the idea of rising tension and building to a central climax. My memoir was about my husband’s parents and his aunt and uncle. It included stories about surviving the horrors of World War II, learning to forgive and work with the Nazis, emigrating from Switzerland to America, overcoming religious persecution, raising a disabled child, and a high school romance with Marilyn Monroe.
The book is called “Hirschi’s Kisses,” and I published it on Amazon KDP two years ago. For most members of SDMWA, I think professionally publishing your memoir should be the goal to aim for. Still, there are a few for whom self-publishing could be a good option. Because my book impacted people positively, I felt its value was priceless.
I think the promotion of memoir writing that SDMWA is doing offers a tremendous benefit to society. When writers record the life experiences of themselves and their families, future generations benefit from the life lessons provided. The value of love, connections, overcoming challenges, and living with integrity become encoded in the readers’ hearts in a powerful way.
I was recently given the assignment of writing another book, and this one has also been influenced by Marni’s “7 Essential Writing Tools: That Will Absolutely Make Your Writing Better (And Enliven Your Soul).” My church congregation in Clairemont, formed in 1962, was just dissolved and reconfigured. I wrote the story of everything that had happened to the church over sixty years, telling it as though the congregation was going through a character arc and emerging triumphant against the forces that threatened to destroy it. The title may be: “The Amazing Clairemont Ward: Its History and Its People,” and I expect to publish it in two months.
The main memoir I have talked about finishing for years centers on when I was a homeless, mentally ill, fifteen-year-old victim of child abuse. A foster family took me in, and when I experienced what it was like to have another person love and care for me, my whole existence was completely transformed. If I can complete it, I hope it can be a ray of hope to show abuse victims that there is a way out of even the most desperate situations.