Renowned memoirist coming to speak at Orcas Library

Tuesday, June 11, 6 p.m., Orcas Library @

— from Mary Pugh for Orcas Island Library —

Join author, journalist, and educator Susan Lampe and learn how to use memoir writing to resolve issues of love, conflict, and forgiveness in relationships.

Susan says she wrote Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir to try and understand her relationship with her parents, especially her mother, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2006. During the next eight years, as Susan traveled between her home in the Pacific Northwest and central Illinois to help care for her parents, she began pulling together memories of the adversarial relationship that had always existed between her mother and herself. Those bits and pieces became a collage — family photos, a collection of journal entries, recipes, letters she wrote to her mother but never sent, and personal items such as toys. Then, when closing the family home, she discovered a shoebox of letters written between her parents at the end of World War II. All of these coalesced into her memoir, Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir.

As an educator, Susan Lampe taught writing for over a decade. She will show how to pull pieces of memories, photographs, greeting cards, and items like old toys into a collage that will become your memoir. Susan says even the senses can be used in writing—taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch can become part of your story.

Lampe’s Bio

Susan Lampe began teaching writing to young adults and adults when two of her books were published in the late l990s. She taught creative writing and poetry to young authors in schools in Edmonds, WA and Lake Stevens, WA. She taught an after school class for young authors at College Place Middle School in Edmonds for six years and also at Northlake Middle School in Lake Stevens for several years.

Susan also taught adult classes in memoir at the Dominican Reflection Center in Woodway, WA, l997 to 2001 through their Center for Creativity run by Sister Mary White.

In 2001, Susan and her family moved to Tenino, WA near Olympia, where they learned to be sovereign and self-sufficient on 33 acres of family forest farm, learning to grow and preserve their own food and live without debt. During the next 16 years, Susan continued to teach classes to writers, including a series of memoir classes at Earth Artisan’s Gallery in Tenino.

EDUCATION:

• Master of Arts degree, SUNY Brockport (State University of New York), Brockport NY, l993
• Bachelor of Journalism Degree, BJ, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO l967
• Private and class studies with Jack Remick and Bob Ray of Seattle—fiction techniques
• Private poetry sessions with Nance Van Winckel (Eastern Washington University and Vermont College)
• Assisted with Write on the Sound, young adult poetry contest.
• PNWA Literary Contest finalist, 2009. (Early pieces of Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir)

JOURNALISM CAREER—Susan Lampe worked for over 20 years in journalism, and communications (including some radio and television production). She also worked in fund-raising, editing, and marketing. For ten years she worked in St. Louis for three different hospitals. She established a public relations department for Missouri Baptist Hospital, 1978 to l983, organized a college of nursing alumnae development association, mid l980s. She worked as a free-lance writer in St. Louis and published numerous articles and poems. During that time, she also won a national award for a Quiet campaign she designed for a hospital.

Susan is a member of the following writing organizations: Pacific Northwest Writers Association, where she has served many years as a reader/judge for the Literary Contest and volunteered at the annual Conference.

She belongs to The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and Poets & Writers.

Books by Susan Glenn Lampe

• Parsing the Dragon: A Memoir, SPS Publishing, Montana, 2018
• Tiny Shooting Stars (poetry) Winepress Publishing, 1999
• The Butterfly ChaSu (inspirational) Presently being republished, SPS Publishing
• Butterflies and Other Dimensions (thesis of short stories) 1993
• Also forthcoming; Collage Your Memoir (2020)

Website: www.parsingwithsusan.com Email parsingwithsusan@gmail.com, or lampes@hcc.net