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The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.

Leigh Newman

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Leigh Newman
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: May 15
Writer
Anchorage
Alaska
Going
Age
Fish
Memoir
Fighting
Fishes
Boots
Easy
Minute
Post
Write
Especially
Guts
Stills
Parents
Posts
Flipping
Still
Minutes
Hips
Landed
Back
Wasn
Divorce
Alaska
Writing
Parent
Cultural
Fourteen

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My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.
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I was an only child. And it's very much my temperament. I remember playing with a piece of string in my room for hours. I had never thought about what it would be like to have siblings.
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You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.
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The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.
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It feels like people talk a lot, in their relationships and in therapy. But my family wasn't like that. My dad wasn't and I wasn't. Things were said, but via the language of action.
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If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.
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How do you stop longing for what you absolutely know you can't get? Which really means: How do you absolutely know you can't-and won't-get it, not ever? How do you pinch out that wisp of feeble, ruthless hope?
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I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.
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My dad felt pretty strongly that I know about the basic workings of a plane and so he taught me how to read and set the instruments, as well as the basics of taking off and landing.
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There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.
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While you can't keep your heart from getting broken, you can stop breaking your own heart...once you realize the difference between what you can control and what you can't, and that it's far, far more fun to lavish all that attention on your own self-worth.
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It was a life with purpose. And it was also a lot of fun. Fishing is fun. Hiking up mountains is fun. Building a wall out of river rocks dug up from the bottom of a glacial lake is not fun. Not at all. But it does give a work ethic that you can take anywhere in the world.
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When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.
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I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into a monster. Which she wasn't. She was a human: somebody who loved me and somebody with a problem.
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Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.
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Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.
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The reason I could fit in with so many different kinds of people was that I had no self. And then the problem is, if you don't have a self, how can you be with other people? Who the hell are you with them?
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Most dreams are also part reality (otherwise we wouldn’t believe them), and reality happens to be a condition that gives you plenty of chances through your life to rise to - no, soar through - the occasion.
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The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.
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If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.
Leigh Newman