How My Memoir Happened
Authors note. As I begin the publishing process to bring my memoir to market (fall 2025), this seemed like an ideal time to share some of the stories about how this occurred.
It was another bright blue, cloud barren summer day in Vegas. The Mojave desert propelling its furnace of hot dry winds across the parched valley. I was on the phone talking with Mom, recounting my most recent and unsuccessful attempt at securing employment. Unemployed for the second time in my life, both instances of redundancy in my fifties.
In the month in which we celebrate a rodent’s meteorological predictions, Black History and a cherub who shoots arrows, my life changed dramatically. It was unpredictably miraculous and predictably mysterious. I fully opened my humbled heart to God. I was born again. Like the blind man that God gave back his sight, I saw the Light.
My faith resurrected, along with my God given gifts I had long buried. Cerebral curiosity, my love of literature and lettering, and my sense of sensitivity. A reignition of faith and reason.
I told my Mom “I’m thinking about writing a book about my faith journey to date.” Believing I would find incredible value in this undertaking and maybe other people would find incremental value in what I would write about. God’s unending mission to reshape all human hearts.
Without hesitation in her voice, her response was immediate, “I would read it.” While I believed my mother’s encouragement, I also considered the source of this enthusiastic eruption. Acutely aware of the beautiful bias of love and admiration she has for her oldest son like she has for all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But I never dismissed her response. My heart awash in God’s love from my faith filled February evening.
In the beginning there was nothing, a blank page. But as I typed, my words and sentences began to breath as I created stories from my dusty memories. Sentences creating paragraphs, pages transfigured into chapters; giving composed life to my deceased past.
As my writing weeks passed, it became challenging to recapture my teenage and young adult years. Causing me to question my newfound path and purpose. Maybe this isn’t the direction God wants me to follow? I was no longer earning my daily bread. Instead, I was using my life savings to build some sort of liturgical field of dreams.
Like the proverbial light bulb, I remembered I had buried in my nightstand journals and papers composed and collected from my early life. For reasons unknown, I held onto these past musings and memories. Having moved these relics of youth countless times between apartments and houses; cities and states over thirty plus years.
As I reacquainted my present with my past, suddenly everything about who I was and who I am became clear. Like wearing my contacts to know a world in focus. If I needed another sign from God that writing this story is exactly what I should be doing with my life, it was conveyed in the blue ink on a yellow pad of paper when I was 22 years old.
I have slept for only an hour, but now I am awake again. Something disturbed my slumber; I was not allowed to rest in peace. It is if I have been called to record these thoughts of mine for reasons unbeknown to me and though I try to ignore them, I cannot so I am awake. I reach for my glasses; I turn on the light and the radio. Then I grab my paper and pen, and I lay myself out across the bed and I begin writing. At times the thoughts flow as easily as ink from this pen, at other times I just stare at the page. This is a phenomenon I cannot explain or understand completely. I must just accept it.
My head exploded. My heart burst. This was beyond surreal, maybe even miraculous.
It would take over thirty years, but I now understand why I felt obligated to write that evening and all previous evenings. Why I had held onto these past parchments. It was for this space and this place, in this time to share my chime.
God loves you. Peace.