title: Remembering Childhood: Workbook Your Way to a Finished Memoir
author:  Leslie Rupley 
description: Leslie Rupley authored Beyond the Silk Mills, a historical family saga, Remembering Childhood: Workbook Your Way to a Finished Memoir, and twelve ghost-written memoirs. She recalls that when her children were young they poked her when in public. Mom, dont stare! She stared because she was day-dreaming about passers-by. Where were they born? Whats important to them? What makes them afraid or elated? This curiosity about people and their histories drives her to write both memoir and historical fiction. Memoir writing was not her first career. She earned scholarships and graduate fellowships to finance her way through three degrees, one from William Paterson University and two more from Michigan State University, and embarked on satisfying careers as a reading specialist, educational evaluator, and a school district administrator. Between these vocations in education when her own children were young, she created A Parents Place to develop and market educational toys. While scouting in San Francisco for places to produce her waterproof painting smocks, she encountered near sweatshop conditions that heightened her empathy for the textile mill workers who play a significant role in her novel Beyond the Silk Mills. The history of Paterson, New Jersey as the center of the silk industry stirred her curiosity because both her predeceased grandfathers had labored in the early twentieth-century silk mills. Her dad often took her to visit the Great Falls of the Passaic River to admire the magnificent waterpower that gave rise to Paterson's early industry. This youthful fascination with the river and the surrounding nineteenth-century brick mills inspired Beyond the Silk Mills. Leslie began LTR Productions: Preserving Personal Histories in 2006 to write memoirs for her clients. When asked why she hadnt written her own memoir she answered, I think it would be more fun to make the whole thing up. Voila! Historical Fiction. Subsequently she did write a memoir in the form of childhood vignettes that are incorporated into her book Remembering Childhood: Workbook Your Way to a Finished Memoir. Leslie and her husband have three grown children and two grandchildren who live near them in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she settled in 1968. Aside from enjoying family and friends as well as writing and teaching, she volunteers, reads, knits, hikes, daydreams, watches TV westerns, cooks healthy food, eats too much chocolate, and laughs whenever possible.
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  Also by Gabrielle Zevin
  
  
    
  
  
  Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  ![e9781429933766_i0002.jpg](e9781429933766_i0002.jpg)
  
  
  [QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR](e9781429933766_toc01.html#toctitle1)
  
  
  ![e9781429933766_i0003.jpg](e9781429933766_i0003.jpg)
  
  
  GABRIELLE ZEVIN
  
  
    
  
  
  What did you want to be when you grew up? It changed every day, based on who I
  was talking to at the time. I never said writer, though, because everyone was
  always telling me I should be one. I don’t like doing what I’m told, at least
  not right away.
  
  
    
  
  
  When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
  
  
  I was always writing stories and letters and plays, so at a certain point, it
  became completely obvious.
  
  
    
  
  
  What’s your most embarrassing childhood memory?
  
  
  Oh, that’s funny … . I seem to have blocked it out. Actually, when I was six
  years old, my friend challenged me to a tree-climbing contest—you know, who
  could climb higher. It was toward the end of recess, and we both kept going up
  and up and up. I got