Just after my 11th birthday, in the summer of 1950, I moved from Washington, D.C., then a small, segregated Southern town, to the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation where I would live without my parents off and on for two years. When I left Warm Springs precipitously following a disastrous accident in which my young and secret love, Joey Buckley, and I had raced downhill in our wheelchairs and flipped, I was almost 13. I was the perpetrator of that adventure that much I’ve always known or at least suspected but what went on with me at Warm Springs before I was expelled, who that young girl, restless and rebellious, growing up in the sunny banality of 1952 had been, was the impetus for writing Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven.

After I left the hospital with my father who had been dispatched to collect me pronto, as he told me, I never looked back until now. I never asked my parents what had happened and they never told me not why I was considered enough of a danger to the other children to be kicked out, not what had happened to Joey Buckley nor reprimanded me, nor inquired as to how I got myself in so much trouble. The questions I would ask them now I had no interest in asking in my 20s and 30s before they died. I had infantile paralysis when I was a year-old toddler living in Toledo, Ohio, so the fact of polio never changed life as I knew it. I walked with a brace and not particularly well, and so as a child, normal was my destination which I imagined as slipping seamlessly into the school group picture exactly like every other girl in penny loafers. Arriving in Warm Springs, after a fifth-grade year of remarkable failure in academics and deportment, I was thrilled to move to a place where crippled children were considered ordinary, only to discover that I was not crippled enough to qualify. As a novelist, I have been suspicious of memoir (although I love to read the memoirs of others), preferring the process of invention to retelling my own story, happier offstage behind the scenes. So I came to this book through the back door. We were sitting one night my husband and I at a bistro in one of those banquette seats beside a couple whose conversation was more compelling than our own and so we found ourselves included by proximity, when the husband asked us to join them. They were scientific researchers at the National Institutes of Health examining the very particular relationship between the AIDS and polio viruses. What struck me was the surprising similarity in social context between AIDS and polio, both viewed as a kind of moral stain. In the case of AIDS, the shame was sexual, with polio it was social a false conclusion that the virus struck only the filthy houses of the urban poor. Shame was the operative word for me, the catalyst which set me on a course.

And so began a circuitous journey back to the years I had lived at Warm Springs. I read about the history of polio and FDR’s impressive contribution to Warm Springs and the eradication of polio. I read about the silent generation of the 1950s and thought about the shame of illness, the character-defining frustration of a child locked in a paralyzed body, the dilemma of the sick child who feels responsible for changing the family’s daily life. A book was beginning to take shape, one in which my own story was the center of a larger subject. But I couldn’t find the center of my own story. Then one night as I was describing to my husband what had happened to me with Joey Buckley, I could feel in myself the fear and danger of telling truth and knew with a kind of crazy relief and excitement that the race I had instigated with Joey Buckley was the screen around which the rest of my memories of those two years could assemble.

And I began to think of what it had meant to me to live in a village of cripples, to travel the distance between childhood and adulthood for that short time by myself discovering the lure of religion and romantic movies and the danger of sexuality lurking in the embryo of adolescence.

The author of 13 novels, Susan Richards Shreve is a professor of English at George Mason University and the former co-chair and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Not long ago, I asked a high school creative writing class, How many of you want to be writers when you grow up? Perhaps half of the kids put up their hands and then, as if any movement of an adolescent limb automatically triggers more, they began flailing around, giggling and smacking each other.

"Settle down," the teacher said severely. "You should be taking notes for our discussion of Ms. Braestrup’s visit." Dutifully, the kids picked up their pencils and gazed at me expectantly.

"There are two things you need to know about being a writer," I said.

"The first is that writers write. Writers are so compelled to write that they’ll keep scribbling away about nothing at all, just to watch the words line up across the page. It has nothing to do with talent. There are bad writers and good writers, but writing itself could probably be called a mental health issue. Eventually there will be a cure, but in the meantime, if you’re a writer, you’ll know it because you can’t not write."

" The second thing is that, generally speaking, when we first start out, most writers don’t have a whole lot to write about. That doesn’t stop us, mind you. We write poems about the guy we have a crush on, his snow-white teeth, his sky-blue eyes . . . there are writers in their 40s and 50s who still write this way, but I don’t want you to be that kind of writer. So my advice is: Get a real job. You’ll need the money, since writing doesn’t pay well, and you’ll need to be useful. I recommend plumbing." The kids’ faces went blank. "Plumbing?" squeaked the teacher.

"Plumbing," I said, and the kids wrote the word in their notebooks.

"Plumbing pays pretty well, and it’s virtually recession-proof." I pointed out. "If someone’s toilet is broken, getting it repaired is not a luxury. And the job can’t be outsourced to some guy in Bangladesh, either, so the plumber’s job is about as secure as any job in the 21st century can be. Plus, a plumber spends time in people’s kitchens and bathrooms. There are stories ripening in those areas of your average house, stories in the manifold objects a good writer and plumber might pull out of the flush."

"What kind of objects?" a boy asked, while his teacher ahem-ed nervously and glanced at her watch.

"Just become a plumber," I said. "Trust me. I am not a plumber. I’m a law enforcement chaplain. It is my vocation, my work in life, a job I love. As a chaplain, I respond to immediate need, the terrible human suffering of the abruptly, unexpectedly bereaved. I am called to be present in love, to hold the body of the new widow, the sudden orphan, the father whose son drove away from the house in a teenaged rage and now will never come home."

So when people ask, "what do you do?" I don’t answer, "I am a writer." Never mind that writing is, at this point, my primary source of income; never mind that I will happily spend hours scribbling nonsense down on paper just for the joy of watching the words form. Writing is fun, like eating creme brule or knitting with cashmere. It is as chaplain to the Maine Warden Service that I give useful service; this is the tangible task to which I have been called. On the other hand, I thought, as I drove home from the high school creative writing class, my job has also given me stories. A book’s worth of stories, in fact, set in the wild, raw beauty of Maine and populated by characters as wonderful and diverse as any writer could ask for.

There is another question, one I haven’t answered completely for myself. Might I someday be able to think of writing as a calling, a way of being loving and present? Might the pleasure I take in the work be a sign not that writing is self-indulgent, but that it is, in fact, real life too? Maybe next time I talk to teenage writers, I shall ask them this: How might writing the act itself, your words dancing so seductively across the page be a response to human suffering, to need, to injustice? Might your obsession with words be your calling, urgent and holy?

Kate Braestrup has written for Mademoiselle, Ms. and TV’s "Law and Order." Her latest book, Here If You Need Me, is about losing her first husband, a state trooper who was killed in a car accident; becoming a minister and the people she’s met as a chaplain. She lives in Maine.

When we describe the premise of Identical Strangers, most people assume it’s a work of fiction. Separated twins reunited after 35 years? For sure, the story is the stuff of fairy tales. But in our case, fairy tales really do come true.

We met for the first time three-and-a-half years ago after discovering we were identical twins. Each of us had been adopted and raised by separate families who were never told we had a twin sister.

Immediately after our reunion, we began to jot down notes about our unusual situation and to compile endless lists of questions. What is it that makes each of us unique? Do we owe our personality traits largely to nature or nurture? Why were we separated? Would we be the same people we are today if we had been raised together? At the time, we didn’t realize that these initial scribblings would be the impetus behind Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. What started out as an idea to write a personal essay about our reunion became a common project that would unite us for the next two years.

Spurred on by our curiosity, we teamed up and became twin Nancy Drews. As we investigated our biological family and explored the reasons for our separation, we unearthed some unpleasant facts about the adoption agency that placed us. We were troubled to discover that as infants, for a time, we were part of a secret research study involving separated twins. Not only did we have a personal story to tell, but now we had a mystery to solve. It was clear a book was emerging.

Our friends and family were amazed at how quickly after meeting we began to work on the book and we had our own doubts. At first, we feared that writing together would put too much stress on our new relationship. We barely knew each other and suddenly, we would be forced to bare our souls and commit ourselves to working with each other on a regular basis. Meeting to share ideas at cafes and in each other’s homes, we got to know each other over brainstorming sessions. We eventually found that creating a shared narrative allowed us to bridge the wide chasm that separated us as strangers.

Since our individual stories were so different, when it came time to determine the structure of the book, we knew that we couldn’t write in one unified voice. It seemed only natural that we would each write from our own perspective. We had no idea how our sections would piece together or if they would fit at all. We began by mapping out key events we would cover, then set off to write on our own. Exchanging chapters, we were often astounded that we chose the same words to describe things. Other times, we were surprised that we viewed the same situations quite differently. Still, without much editing, our individual sections effortlessly complemented each other.

When we drew up the initial chapter outline, there was no way of predicting how the story would end. Would we confront the psychiatrist responsible for the study? Would we track down our birth mother? Because we wrote the book as the events were unfolding, our emotions were still incredibly raw. Overwhelmed by the pressure to compensate for so many lost years, during one particularly grueling writing session at a local coffee shop, we broke down in tears. Later we joked that writing together was saving us thousands of dollars on therapy. In truth, working within the constraints of a narrative forced us to put into words the puzzling emotions we were experiencing. By writing in the present tense, we also hoped to convey a sense of immediacy. We would thrust the reader into our absurd situation and force them to imagine what it would be like to encounter the double they never knew they had. Still, we were wary that chronicling the experience while it was happening might alter the course of events. We came to realize that writing a memoir requires some distance and we began to see ourselves as characters. Vowing to remain faithful to our characters, we didn’t want to do or say anything simply for the sake of a good story. We recognized that ultimately, our priority was the truth of the story of our lives. Elyse Schein is a writer and filmmaker whose work has been shown at film festivals in Telluride and Long Island. Paula Bernstein is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Redbook and Variety. Both sisters live in Brooklyn. Identical Strangers is their first book.

About a girl: Among troubled young women, a standout It all started with an e-mail.

I’d just come home from my second shift as a volunteer at a homeless shelter for teenagers, a shelter where I myself had spent a few months at the age of 15. Now 34 and (relatively) stable, I wanted to give something back to the place that had helped save my life; I wanted to find a young woman like the one I’d been, and make a positive difference in her life.

So far, what I’d found was blowing my mind and breaking my heart.

Cheryl is nineteen and pregnant. She has a two-year-old daughter who’s currently in foster care. She also has a criminal record. Cheryl owns one sweatshirt, one pair of pants, and no bra . . . I poured it all out in an e-mail to three of my best girlfriends, told them everything I’d seen, thought and felt over the course of my four-hour shift. I just couldn’t keep it to myself, what these girls were dealing with every night while we blithely made dinner, watched TV, surfed the web. I hit “send,” and my friends’ responses were rapid: Oh, wow. So sorry to hear it. And, tell us more.

Thus began a series of e-mails I called the “Volunteer Notes.” Every week, I updated my friends on the rotating cast of characters I met at the shelter: Mandy, the meth addict with the beautiful singing voice; Marisol, the gangbanger who wanted out. After a few months, one young woman emerged as the star of the “Volunteer Notes,” and one of the stars of my life: Samantha.

Samantha had been on the streets since she was 12. Her abusive, drug-addicted parents had prostituted her since she was a kid; finally, she escaped them and made her own way through the slums of the U.S., dealing drugs and turning tricks. Now 19, she’d come to the shelter to get sober and clean up her life. I was instantly drawn to Sam for her tremendous charisma, her vast intelligence and her great writing talent, and she was drawn to me in return.

Over the next year, I chronicled my friendship with Sam in my journals and my “Volunteer Notes,” as I followed her from the shelter, to detox, to a psych ward, to rehab, to a halfway house and finally to a hospital in the Bronx, where she lay near death, suffering from the late stages of a virulent autoimmune disorder.

By this time, I knew I wanted to write a book about my volunteer experiences, which was handy, since my publisher was expecting me to come up with a second book to follow my debut memoir, Girlbomb, and they wanted it soon. I asked Sam’s permission to include her as a major character in the book – I’d been showing her much of what I’d been writing about her throughout our friendship – and she agreed, pleased that her story would live on after her.

Then came a revelation about Sam’s illness, a turn of events so shocking that I thought, I really must be a character in a book, because this can’t be happening. Over the next few weeks, I came to realize that Sam was sicker than anybody suspected, in ways nobody could have guessed. I discovered that truth really is stranger than fiction – and, often, just as hard to write.

So how was I supposed to write a book about events that were still unfolding? Well, first I got an extension on my deadline from my (wonderful, patient) editor. Then I scheduled a bunch of extra therapy sessions with my shrink. I collected all the e-mails and journal entries, and read them in one fell swoop. And then I sat at my desk and wrote as honestly as I was able to write. Sometimes I broke down and cried; other times, I slammed the laptop shut and pounded my fists on the desk. But mainly, I tried to tell the truth as I understood it, even as the truth kept changing on me.

It was a grueling experience, living through the ordeal with Sam, and then having to relive it while the pain was still fresh. But once I’d pushed myself through it, my perspective changed: I was able to see myself as a character, the events as a story. And now it doesn’t have to live in my head and my heart the way it once did. It lives safely between the covers of a book – a book I can now call closed.

Janice Erlbaum is a former columnist for BUST magazine. Have You Found Her is her second book. Her previous one, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, was named one of the New York Public Library’s 25 Books to Remember. Erlbaum lives in New York City.

When Robyn Scott was seven years old, her family swapped a tranquil existence in New Zealand for an adventurous new life in Botswana.Twenty Chickens for a Saddle is Scott's beautifully written portrait of her idyllic childhood there. A graduate of Cambridge University, she lives in London but works and travels frequently in Africa.

"What does your family think?"

This question is the unchallenged front-runner among those I've been asked about Twenty Chickens for a Saddle, the story of my childhood in Botswana. It is also the second question I put to myself when I set about writing, and one that I have asked my family and myself repeatedly ever since. The answers, unsurprisingly, have been varied and evolving, and, while never disapproving, thankfully became more positive as the initial clumsy pages slowly metamorphosed into a respectable book.

That is, except in one case: one that illuminates the heart of the challenges for me in writing this story.

My literary agent, meeting my maternal grandparents a few months ago, had posed the well-worn question. We were having sundowners – whiskies, brandies and salted peanuts – which, but for the lush backdrop of a Cape Town garden, were straight out of the now faraway world of the book. "It's a decent read," replied my grandfather. "And quite nicely written," he added. Then he frowned, almost accusingly. "But maybe now you can explain to me what on earth the fuss is about? Why would anyone care what we all got up to in a little town in Botswana?"

This had been the first question I asked myself two years earlier, when it was suggested I should write a book. "No one would," I'd told myself. The conclusion was persistent: When, after a few months of others' encouragement, I dusted off the idea and wrote a hesitant first few thousand words, I reviewed them with dismay.

I had begun – unimaginatively – with my first day in Botswana, when I met both the country and my paternal grandfather; and when, in the gathering darkness, two brown fruit moths fluttered down and sipped red wine-laced grape juice from the corners of my grandfather's lips. The memory was vivid and magical. But in the unforgiving light of the morning after words met page, it seemed suddenly indulgent: Two moths? Who cares? The magic was in being there as a little girl . . . magical only to me.

Snakes, I decided: safely, objectively, indisputably exciting.

I rewrote the beginning, featuring a large, poisonous, ultimately disembowelled puff adder in the first few paragraphs, relegating the humble moths deep into the story. Increasingly confident, I proceeded over the next weeks to describe – littering adverbs and adjectives – the black mamba that had dangled menacingly over my shocked father from a shower head; the heart-stopping evening my little sister had heroically chased another (even bigger!) black mamba poised to fatally strike our tiny terrier; a burly, scarred friend of ours who'd bravely broken a crocodile's jaw; several swashbuckling snake-lion-mortal-danger stories from my wild grandfather's early days in the wilds of Botswana.

I soon ran out. And after four frustrating discussions with my parents and siblings, I had just a couple more. Beyond these, the dinner party hits, nothing. Think harder, I pleaded. By then putting together a proposal, I was becoming concerned that even if an agent liked the idea I might nevertheless, horribly, find myself with nothing more to say.

My agent, David Godwin – now eyed quizzically over a crystal whisky glass – had liked the idea. "But the book came alive for me with the moths," he'd said to my astonishment. "You should begin with the moths." And so began for me the delightful process of discovering how the quieter, character-rich moments, hovering discreetly in the shadows of grander memories, often most comfortably inhabit the page. And in evoking these, began in each of us a gathering snowball of recollections.

The recollections came, naturally, in varying shades. But when I showed the first draft to my family, all but two differences were quickly resolved. My father disputed that he and his father stopped talking to each other. "He stopped talking to me," he maintained. My mother disputed a description of the mechanism of a catapult built to stun geckos, to scare them into dropping their tails, to feed to the pet snakes in our schoolroom. On both, I stood my ground.

Hours before the deadline for the final draft, my mother was helping me do a last frantic fact check. I walked into the lounge to find her perched on the sofa, surrounded by hundreds of pages – several including arguably less-than-flattering descriptions of her. In her hand was a wooden ruler, pierced with a drawing pin, almost a la the catapult. Seeing me, she smiled, pointed it at the bookcase, and released a rubber band stretched along its length. The band flew wildly off course. "See," she said triumphantly.

The moths begin the book. Of the early stories, the puff adder alone is found in its pages. The catapult mechanism remains unresolved. We are all still talking to each other.

How I came to write ‘Why I Came West’ It seems like I’ve always been writing books about the Yaak Valley: or have been, at least, since I first wandered into this valley in the most northwestern corner of Montana, in the summer of 1987. The valley is roughly a million acres of low-elevation Pacific Northwest rainforest nestled in a bowl of the Northern Rockies, the wildest and most biologically diverse valley in the West.

I inhabited that first year in a state of suspended bliss and wonder, wandering the hills and writing fiction. It was only after I had been there four full seasons that I began to notice, however, the slipping-away, then rushing-away, of wildness – new dust-riven logging roads being plowed far and high up into the valley’s wildest haunts. At that point, I began to write about my love for the valley, and my hopes for its future.

That’s what writers generally do when the object of their affection is at risk of being lost. There’s all the more inclination for a writer to write, trying to slow or deflect or outright prevent the damage.

I’m not sure when it occurred to me that in all my years and all my books, I had not yet so much changed anything in the valley, but had myself been changed by the struggling, entreating, lobbying and yearning – the ceaseless caterwauling of 21 years of activism on behalf of this hard-logged and overlooked place that doesn’t have a significant enough political constituency (only 150 people live year-round in the upper, wilder half of the valley) to gain much Congressional notice.

I’ve come to realize that everything about this valley has shaped me into who I am – has given me cause to question my faith as an environmentalist living in the woods. The only way to be effective, I think, is to dive deeper into the local community: tough duty for a hermit poet. And watching vast stretches of overstocked second- and third-growth forest die has turned me into a logger, of sorts – though I still cherish and demand, with what feels some days like every breath and every thought, wilderness designation and protection for the farther, wilder country: the true untouched remnant wilderness, guideposts of ecological health.

Living in the forest and tasting the wild grouse – hunting them with my dog – and following the elk in the snows of autumn, and gathering mushrooms in the spring, and berries in the fall, has turned me from a hunter-for-hobby into one who is about as close to a subsistence hunter as can still found in the Lower 48.

Living off the grid in deep cold winters has turned me from a sometimes-effete literary guy into a plumber and mechanic of sorts. A sharpener of saws.

This valley has shaped me, but everything about the West has shaped me. Growing up in petrochemical Texas in the 1960s, under the shield of Anglo-Western myths, shaped me; studying wildlife science and geology in northern Utah, a Gentile among the Mormons, in that beautiful landscape and gentle culture, shaped me. The American West has always buffeted and shaped individuals, and continues to do so; this is one of its great values to our nation and society, and one of the many reasons the protection of our last big wild vital places – our homeland – is so important, not just for the sake of the mountains themselves, and the shimmering dignity and vitality of intact wild places, and the plants and animals and processes that live there, but for our own questionable and malleable and puny selves, as well.

We need wilderness. The more confusing and crowded and "civilized" the world becomes, the more we need it. The faster it disappears, the more we need it.

Why I Came West is about the different paths that have led me to this understanding, and about the challenges that have been placed in my way. I’m pleased to report that our little community has drafted a legislative proposal that we sent on to our delegation, in March: one which includes some Yaak wilderness. We might finally be getting closer. The land is changing slowly, degree by degree and year by year, while the changes in me have been huge.

An acclaimed nature writer and novelist, Rick Bass worked as a geologist for eight years before moving West and settling in the Yaak Valley of Montana. His many books include The Lives of Rocks, Platte River and Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had. His latest book, Why I Came West: A Memoir, is being published this month by Houghton Mifflin.

I never planned to write a breast cancer memoir. Never planned to get the cancer that would inspire it. But in January 2006, my first novel was on submission and hadn’t sold yet. In the meantime I’d written a second novel about a woman who finds a lump in her breast and thinks she might have breast cancer and wonders if she’s lived a meaningful life. I sent it off to my then-agent and went in for my annual mammogram and was told it was “suspicious.” A week later I was having surgery and while I was waiting for my own results, I received an e-mail from my agent (who didn’t know about my health scare) that said something like, I don’t really like the breast cancer novel. I’m not sure I care whether that woman has breast cancer or not. Ouch!

But the writing disappointment was a minor blip compared to how the diagnosis rocked my world and shattered my sense of self. I was about the healthiest person I knew. I never got sick. No aches or pains. I ran. I practiced yoga. I ate mostly vegetarian, whole grain and organic. I was the person others consulted for health and anti-aging tips.

I felt like a fake, a fraud. Even after I was told I had the “good” cancer, it was non-invasive and they got it all out, I felt panicked and paralyzed. I couldn’t write, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything other than stare out the window at my garden not yet in bloom and Google health sites and obsess about recurrence rates. And make homemade batches of organic facial creams with stuff like shea butter and jojoba oil. I thought about starting an organic facial cream company for vain hypochondriacs like me. I asked my husband to bring home an electro magnetic field measurer (I’m still waiting for that… do those even exist?). I suggested we move to Utah and live off the land (even though I don’t know the first thing about gardening or farming, my husband reminded me).

Finally, after weeks and weeks of this, my husband pressed a journal into my hands and said, “You have to write this down.” I shook my head. I was not a journal keeper, never had been and I did not want to write any of this down. But one day I picked up the journal and a pen and without even thinking, I wrote: “I’m sitting topless in the oncologist’s office on Valentine’s Day. Cancer is a Bitch.”

Once I started writing, the words flooded out. I shook and wept and fell asleep and woke up and wrote some more. The ironic thing is, as I poured those raw, intimate thoughts out, I thought, I will never EVER show those words to anyone. I thought writing them down was a way I didn’t have to burden my friends and family with my crazy thoughts. (And now you can go buy them in hardcover or my newly released paperback and I hope you will!) Eventually, I wrote those thoughts into an essay I called "Cancer Is a Bitch" and sent it to some trusted writer friends who said it was powerful and I should do something with it. But what was it? What would I do with it?

Soon after that, I read that Literary Mama was looking for columnists and on a whim I pitched the idea of a breast cancer mama column and they said yes and I started writing “Bare-breasted Mama.” To be honest, it was painful to write and I felt naked, like I was exposing myself both physically and emotionally. But the responses from readers were so soulful and many hadn’t even had cancer but they either knew someone who had or were just responding to the midlife issues about motherhood and marriage and career that I wrote about. They thanked me for making them laugh (because believe it or not the book is funny!) and cry and think. Their words gave me the courage to keep writing and opening up and eventually to leave my then agent and pitch the idea of a breast cancer memoir to a new agent.

Next thing I knew I had a new agent, a new book, a new lease on life.

That was three-and-a-half years ago and my life has changed dramatically since then. I have not only launched my writing career, but also have launched two daughters off to college, watched my son turn into a skateboarding teen, run two half marathons, am in training for my first full marathon (in a few weeks!). I have also become a professional speaker and college and medical school lecturer. Plus I feel stronger and healthier, and more sure of who I am and where I am headed, than ever before in my life.

And in the midst of all this life hurtling forward, I made more discoveries. I discovered I could get up in front of other people and share my story with strangers and stand with survivors in solidarity and hold their hands in mine and hope I could give them hope. More significantly, the beauty and wisdom and raw truth I saw in their eyes filled me with hope and a newfound respect for the courage of the human condition and fueled me to not be afraid to share more of myself and be the person I meant to be and live the life I meant to live.

For me that means running my first marathon in a few weeks (oy!), the release of the paperback version of Cancer Is a Bitch, and more speaking and lecturing and a new book in the works and fewer whys and more why nots. And taking more time to gather family and friends around my old pine harvest dining room table overflowing with vases of hydrangeas from the garden still in bloom and good food and stories and hearty laughter and the gratitude and joy of being.

Gail Konop Baker writes from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. Her memoir, Cancer Is a Bitch, is available in paperback this month.

My new book, The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them, is an affectionate memoir of my experience as a single mother. The book spans the 18 years I spent raising my daughter, Emily, with the help of my family.

I didn’t set out to write a memoir, however. My intention was to write a how-to book, full of tips, hints and useful information. Because I’m a syndicated advice columnist, I’m used to telling people “how to”—how to cure a heartache, how to confront a friend or how to manage an obnoxious mother-in-law. Due to the success of my column, writing an advice book seemed like a natural fit. My agent and various editors referred to the advice book project as a “slam dunk.”
I was pondering the challenges of writing my how-to book during a trip I took from my home in Chicago to visit family in Freeville, the little farming village in upstate New York where generations of my family have grown up and grown old.

While there, I went to the village school—the same one I attended as a child—to watch my niece’s kindergarten play. On the very same creaky wooden stage where I poured out my own pint-sized aspirations as a kindergartner, I watched my niece and her classmates act out and reflect the story of our lives in this small community. The kids were dressed as chickens, pigs and Holstein cows. They sang and danced in a make-believe barnyard.
It was adorable.
I looked around. The audience was populated with people, many of whom I’ve known all my life. I sat in my folding chair, flanked by my daughter, sister and mother in the old auditorium my grandfather and other men in the village had helped to build.
Given my surroundings, I couldn’t help but think about the arc of my own life. My how-to book idea went away in that moment and I decided instead to write my own story.

In my work as an advice columnist, people often challenge me by asking how I know what I know. I’m not a counselor. I don’t have an advanced degree. I got here the hard way, by living my life and making my share of mistakes. I took the back roads of life, through marriage and divorce and raising my daughter as a single parent. I got here with the help and support of the people in my little world.

My agent was skeptical when I told her I wanted to write about my daughter, aunts and cousins, my sisters and mother. We are ordinary people whose lives, nonetheless, have been blessed with incident. I told her I wanted to write about people and livestock and the little community I come from. 
My agent asked me to write a chapter. She said, “I want to see if there is any there there.”

The first chapter I wrote detailed the loss and longing I felt when my own father abandoned our family farm, leaving his four children to run our failing dairy. And then I wrote another chapter, about the fumbling hilarity of coping with the livestock he had left behind. As I was writing the book, Emily graduated from high school in Chicago and I made the decision to move back to Freeville permanently. Once again, I was surrounded by my family—the women Emily refers to as “the Mighty Queens.”

I wrote about blind dates and my work life. I wrote about my faith and personal failings. I wrote about sending Emily to college and saying goodbye to the person I had raised and was now launching into adulthood. I wrote about “the Mighty Queens,” those women who had supported us, championed our successes and wept with us during our difficult times.

During the course of working on the book, my dear aunt Lena died and we buried her in our family plot in Freeville. I reconnected with the people in my hometown who are all characters in my life story. I fell in love with a man I had known since childhood. And finally, my story felt complete.
 In my work giving advice to other people, I often feel that the two hardest questions for any of us to answer are, “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” I’ve struggled with those questions myself—but finally, through telling my own story, I found the answers.

Amy Dickinson succeeded the legendary Ann Landers as the advice columnist for the Chicago Tribune in 2003. Her column, “Ask Amy,” is now syndicated in 200 newspapers. She is also a regular panelist on the NPR quiz show, “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.”

It was the most desperate week of my life. It gave birth to the most hopeful idea I’ve ever had. In July 2008, I learned that I had a seven-inch cancerous tumor in my left femur. I instantly worried about my three-year-old twin daughters and what life might be like for them.

Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought?  Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice?

“I asked each of them to teach a different lesson to my girls—how to live, how to travel, how to think, how to dream.”

Three days later, I awoke with an idea of how I might give them my voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to form a “Council of Dads.”

My initial instinct was not to tell my wife, Linda. We should focus on the positive. We should live in the moment.

But I quickly lost my resolve. Linda cried at first, but as soon as we began discussing who should be in my Council, she started rejecting my nominees. “I love him,” she would say, “but he doesn’t represent you.” She added, of another, “I would never ask him for advice.” Starting a Council was a very efficient way of finding out what my wife really thought of my friends!

We needed a set of guidelines.

First, no family members. We figured my family would already have relationships with the girls. Plus, as Linda said, your friends know you differently from your family.

Second, men only. Many of my close friends are women, but with their mom still around, we sought to fill the Dad space in our girls’ lives.

Third, intimacy over longevity. We thought some more recent friendships might better capture the father I wanted to be.

Finally, a dad for every side. We looked for men who might capture different aspects of my personality.

We ultimately settled on six men: my oldest friend, my camp counselor, my college roommate, my business partner, my closest confidant and a tortured romantic poet friend. I asked each of them to teach a different lesson to my girls—how to live, how to travel, how to think, how to dream.

I then asked each one for a single piece of advice to convey to my daughters. Their answers ranged from the best way to take a trip—“Be a traveler, not a tourist”—to the best way to make your dreams come true— “Don’t see the wall.” One advised them not merely to seek the answers but to “Live the questions.” Another counseled that even when they experience pain they should still “Harvest the miracles” around them.

Their answers surprised, at times confused, but ultimately moved me.  They also changed our lives.  I remember after my first conversation with one of the dads, I said to Linda: “Their wisdom is not just going to change how our girls live.  It’s going to change how you live.” (The advice had to do with the proper way to jump in puddles.) These answers were intended for my girls, but they’ve already made me a better dad and friend.
And therein has proven the magic of the Council of Dads. We did it for our girls. But it has transformed us. The experience helped build a bridge between our friends and our kids. It created an entirely new community in our lives. It reminded us of the power of friendship.

Recently, on my girls’ fifth birthday, the Council of Dads convened for the first time ever. They argued about politics, parenting and height. They complained about the weather, one another, me. In short, they were men! (My wife said she had wondered for two years what they would talk about. The answer: sports cars!)

But our girls didn’t care. They were delighted as they moved from dad to dad, reveling in the private bond they share with each one. Our girls don’t understand the shadow that hangs over the idea. All they know is that these men are not just Daddy’s friends.

They are their friends.

That night, after the girls were sleeping, we went around the room and each man spoke of how the experience had changed him. One felt the Council helped replace the voice of his own father. Another took the advice he gave our girls and changed how he parents his own children. The last person to speak was my confidant. I call him my ThinkDad. He calls himself The Contrarian.

“When I first heard the idea of the Council, I rejected it,” he said. “You would triumph over your illness. We wouldn’t need to exist. Today I realized I was wrong. Whether we’re healthy or sick, male or female, we all need to be reminded of what’s most valuable in our lives. We all need to be surrounded by the people we love. And seeing the looks on the girls’ faces today, I now know we all need our own Council.”

Bruce Feiler is the best-selling author of Walking the Bible and America’s Prophet. His new book is The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me. Feiler has been cancer-free since completing chemotherapy last year.
 

John Kralik is a lawyer whose 2008 vow to write a daily thank-you note inspired a memoir and a new way of looking at his life. He lives near Los Angeles. Read our review of 365 Thank-Yous.

You wonder what you will feel like in the last moments of your life, when you finally look death in the face . . . how your beliefs about death and the afterlife will play out. For me, it moved really quickly from abstract to tangible, given I was buried under six floors of rubble following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. I will never pretend to understand why God allowed me to be rescued while many others did not make it out alive.

I traveled to Haiti with Compassion International to document the organization’s work to permanently rescue children from poverty. As I was trapped, I found it ironic that I had come to Haiti to rescue children from poverty. Little did I know that I would need rescue.

After a day of capturing footage my colleague and I had just been dropped off and stepped into our hotel when the Haiti earthquake erupted all around us. I was trapped in the wreckage of my collapsed hotel in an elevator car the size of a small shower. My head and leg were bleeding as I fought to stay alive using all the resources that I could—my iPhone and its first-aid app, camera, journal, sock and shirt. In moments of despair, I had time to reflect on how I viewed myself, my marriage, and my faith in Jesus Christ. The earthquake shook loose a lot of things in my life that weren’t important, leaving me with a firmer foundation.

I don’t know why I was spared while others were not—including a Compassion International colleague who was right next to me when the quake hit. I don’t take lightly the difference between my outcome and the suffering of others. But, I tell the story of the 65 hours I spent buried in the rubble of the quake in Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana.

As I spend this week in Haiti revisiting the sites and people that I met last year, the sounds and the smells are so familiar as if the island nation was shook by the earthquake just yesterday. Then, I look down at the scar on my leg, a scar that will forever remind me of my time in Haiti and the Haitian people there who continue to suffer and work to get back on their feet post quake.

I have an advantage. Last January trapped beneath six stories of rubble I was taught very literally about how quickly life can change in an instant. I worked hard in the months following the quake to hold onto the clarity and now it share with others through my experience in Unshaken.

Dan Woolley, an interactive strategies director at Compassion International, is the author of Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana (Zondervan). In response to interest in the first-aid app he used to save his life, Woolley is currently working on a different kind of first-aid app—one that helps people focus on what matters most. More info at DanWoolley.net.

Rescue photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Rick Loomis.

Return photo credit: Reuters

When she set out to write a book about Americans' long-standing interest in self-improvement, writer Jessica Lamb-Shapiro was forced to confront a painful event in her own family history. The resulting journey forms the heart of her insightful and often funny new book, Promise Land.

Truth be told, a book about self-help was the last thing I wanted to write. My father, a child psychologist, had been writing self-help books since I was a child, and subjecting me to self-help culture for just as long. Self-help was about as interesting to me as the homemade cooperative board games my father and I used to play (no one wins). But when my father signed up for a weekend workshop with one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul authors, I was intrigued. It seemed odd to me that someone with so much experience writing self-help, who was smart and thoughtful and by normal standards successful, could still be seduced by the promise of improvement.

"Thinking about my mother’s suicide while writing a book about self-help suddenly seemed not just ironic but incredibly, regrettably, relevant."

Going to that conference with my dad reminded me how funny and absurd self-help could be, and at the same time how meaningful or tragic. It reminded me that self-help is not about Tony Robbins or Eckhart Tolle, but about the countless individuals whose irrepressible, unrelenting desire to improve sustains them. I’ve always been fascinated with the never-ending aspect of the American Dream. I also wanted to explore the idea that people who didn’t read self-help books were still affected by self-help culture, how it’s part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Once I looked into the history of self-help and found out Victorians loved it, I was sold on the topic.

For a few years I struggled with the structure of the book. I had the idea that I could look at different genres of self-help—books on parenting or grieving or dating—but it ended up feeling flat and repetitive.

When I started looking at books on grieving, I couldn’t help but think about my mother’s suicide when I was a young child. My father and I had barely talked about her death, and reading those books gave me a sense of community and continuity and made me feel like less of a motherless weirdo. Thinking about my mother’s suicide while writing a book about self-help suddenly seemed not just ironic but incredibly, regrettably, relevant.

Not only had I started a book about self-help, which I hadn’t really set out to write, I was now writing a book about a taboo subject in my family, which no one wanted to talk about. On top of that, I had a real aversion to “memoir,” and it seemed especially ridiculous for someone in their 30s to write anything resembling one. Worse, I had been writing a book that was supposed to be funny. You know what’s not funny? Mother suicide. I felt like I had been batting a piñata, but instead of candy and toys severed human limbs fell out. Children screamed, and everyone left the party.

On the plus side, adding a memoir element solved my structure problem. A pyrrhic victory.

I’ve always liked that about writing, the way it can blindside you. The way you can blindside yourself. This is why I titled my prologue “On Missing The Obvious.” Writing the book forced me to talk to my father about my mother. Over the years I spent writing Promise Land: My Journey Through America's Self-Help Culture, we visited her grave for the first time, and my dad started talking to me about her life, and what her death was like for him. It was difficult for me to bring up something that I knew was so painful for him, but talking about it together seemed to help. Which isn’t to say that some days didn’t end in tears and hours of watching of puppy videos on the Internet for emotional triage. But ultimately, my book about self-help ended up being a kind of self-help exercise for me, and maybe even for my dad—which, if you think about it, is kind of funny.

Promise Land is the first book by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, who has published fiction and nonfiction in The Believer, McSweeney's, Open City and Index magazine, among other publications. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York.

It was summertime, the world slow and hot, when I first learned Grandma’s shocking secret. My baby boy was almost three months old. He and I had not yet gotten the hang of breastfeeding, but were getting there. I was exhausted. My brother Grant called with the news.

“Grandma has a long-lost child,” he said. “When Grandma was just 16, she was raped by a stranger and got pregnant. She really loved the baby, but she gave her up for adoption. That was in 1929. She’s always missed her baby. Anyway, that daughter, who’s 77 years old now, just found Grandma. They’re going to be reunited in a few weeks.”

Author Cathy LaGrow (right) with her long-lost aunt, Ruth Lee (left), and grandmother Minka Disbrow.

This narrative was interrupted by a great many “What’s?!” from me.

At some point, my brother mentioned that one of our six new cousins was an honest-to-God astronaut who’d been to space four times.

Grandma was now 94. I’d known her all my life. She was dignified, strong, uncomplaining. I could never have imagined this: a monumental secret, a beloved, lost child.

Grandma and her daughter had their joyful reunion that summer. Several years later, after I’d had another baby and waded through another long round of diapers and interrupted nights, one of my new cousins, Brian, suggested that the reunion story would make a great book.

“I’ll put some stuff together,” I told him. “I’ll do some research and writing, and then maybe we’ll find somebody to author the book, and I can turn everything over to them.” Grandma was very healthy, but she’d just turned 100 years old. There was no time to lose.

Grandma was now 94. I’d known her all my life. She was dignified, strong, uncomplaining. I could never have imagined this: a monumental secret, a beloved, lost child.

And so it began. Grandma lived 500 miles away and had no computer, so I typed pages of questions: What were your parents’ full names and birthdates? Why did they come to America? I’d mail off the questions and she’d return them within days, answers printed in her careful penmanship.

With my two small boys tumbling underfoot, it proved impossible for me to work from home. I started driving to the local library on evenings and weekends. Sometimes I’d hurry home at my sons’ bedtime for sweet goodnight kisses. Other times I’d still be at the library when the staff dimmed the lights at closing time.

I pored over details of early 20th-century life on the South Dakotan prairie. I checked ship’s manifests, consulted historical train schedules. I searched through online records: newspaper articles, county graphs, weather bureau statistics. Grandma and I spent two long weekends together, recording hours of conversation.

And I wrote. Paragraph by paragraph, Grandma’s life began to take shape. As I fell more deeply in love with the story, I realized that no other author would take more care of it than I would. Although my credentials consisted of a single published story and a modest blog—which I used mostly to discuss geeky things like particle accelerators and black holes—it became clear that I was going to write this book.

Summer days passed with me tucked away at the library while my guys played at a park, or fished at the river. I tried to ignore the sun beaming gorgeously beyond the windows. At home, laundry piled up. Stacks of research papers sprouted on tables. Last fall, I spent Thanksgiving alone at home, kneeling on the carpet, pages spread around me. As I edited, I ate handfuls of microwave popcorn and tried not to miss my boys, or the turkey they were eating at their grandparents’ house.

When it was time for Grandma to review the bulk of the manuscript, I booked a plane ticket so I could hand-deliver it. She still lived in the same cozy Californian apartment that I’d visited as a child. Back then, I’d always be dashing off to the nearby beach, trailing beach towels and sand buckets.

Now, my nerves jangled. I’d poured my heart into this project for nearly two years, and I’d done it for her. Although I’d taken great pains to be accurate, I wondered if I’d gotten a million things wrong, anyway. What if Grandma had to slash sentences on every page? The publisher had assigned a tight deadline. There wouldn’t be time to start over.

I handed her the chapters, a highlighter, and a pen. “Mark anything that isn’t right, Grandma,” I said, “and I will change it.” She read late into the night. The following morning, she gave the chapters back to me, and I began to flip through. This was the moment of truth. I turned page after page.

Grandma had changed exactly three words. She loved the book. I’d gotten it right.

Cathy LaGrow has been married to her high school sweetheart, Dan, for almost 25 years. She is a licensed, nonpracticing U.S. Customs broker and a piano teacher. She lives in Oregon, where she's often found in the kitchen baking or curled up in a chair reading. Cathy's mother is Minka Disbrow's second child, born nearly 18 years after the baby Minka gave up for adoption.