Rick Bailey, author of four essay collections, offers Snapshots as an approach to writing your life. Neither memoir nor autobiography, this is a collection of moments in a life, a scrapbook of vivid memories in micro-narratives. Read these 50 short memory captures. Then let yourself write. Give yourself a month and capture your memories in snapshots. The book’s appendices offer assistance with drafting, revising, and editing your snapshots, with the aim of getting them published for distribution to family and friends or with a wider audience if that's your goal. “These pieces are often funny—frequently poignant—always short and sweet. Just like life. Read this book and you will want to write your own snapshots.” (Peter Putnam, author of Talkin’ Bout a Revolution) “A collection of flash essays and a craft book with instructional guidance in the appendices, Snapshots will inspire would-be writers to tell their own life stories.” (Melissa Grunow, author of I Don’t Belong Here)” Excerpts: “I grew up next to a ruined river. The Tittabawassee was wide and smelly. In subzero temperatures, it did not freeze. It steamed, thanks to Dow Chemical, eight miles upstream, which used river water to cool industrial processes. The river was bad, but it was our river. And the river flats was where we lived our Huck Finn days, fishing, learning to smoke, climbing trees, starting fires, digging holes, making forts, behaving and misbehaving. No one, to my knowledge, ever went in the water–on purpose, that is.” “I drove over to the college every morning. The song I remember hearing most often on the radio those days, on the road or when I pulled into the Delta parking lot, was “All Right Now,” by Free. I wanted to be free. On the seat behind me in the car was a pile of textbooks I would not read, 650 pages of econ, a 500-page introduction to business. Add sociology and poli sci, it was 2000 pages. My brother’s plan was my plan: two years at the local community college, then two more at a four-year school to become a CPA. Was that what I wanted?” "We were having our first baby. No one had told me there would be another couple in the room with us. I’d seen birthing dramas on television, which usually involved a lot of screaming, and two or three professional people gathered around the bed encouraging the mother, and an ashen-faced, freaked-out dad, the potted plant in the room. We had done the Lamaze class a few months before, graduating with honors. One of the ideas in the Lamaze approach was: the father gets involved. And now, this was it. I expected to feel my wife’s fingernails sinking into my palm soon, when I started to coach her on her breathing." "Mid morning my mother is sitting on a dining room chair. It’s one of the spare chairs in their dining room set, made of dark wood, with rattan back and a soft green velvet cushion. It's placed away from the table, kept handy in case of company. She’s wearing a blue dress with long sleeves, dressed for the funeral. She is crying."