writing

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

A lot has been happening since the release of my new book https://a.co/d/hnSw2X4

I read a few excerpts of my book at the International Conference on Shared Parenting. Afterwards, both at the conference and then upon returning home, I was interviewed for podcasts, including the new I’m Her Mother: An Exploration of Parental Alienation (available on Spotify).

My presentation from the conference was translated into Greek to be shared on https://achildneeds2parents.gr/ I cannot say for sure if it is already up on their site or not, because it’s all Greek to me.

I found out my book will be featured in an upcoming issue of Contemporary Family Magazine.

In other creative news, I am beginning to take notes on my next book idea. It is too soon to share the details though.

I am reading Someday Is Today: 22 Simple, Actionable Ways to Propel Your Creative Life by Matthew Dicks, and I love it. I met Matthew once at a MOTH live storytelling event in Boston. He is a teacher, storyteller, writer and productivity expert. His level of creative productivity is ridiculous, but I can almost guarantee that reading his book will make any creative person want to strive to waste less precious time, myself included.

Happy Monday!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

I have just finished reading The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks. It is not the first time I’ve read this book, but it is the first time I can truly say it feels like Hendrick’s theory will stick.

His theory is this: We all inherited a limit in childhood for happiness, success, love, and abundance. This settling point became our belief about how much good we could have or feel in our life. According to Hendricks, this leaves most of us with an Upper Limit Problem. When we begin to exceed our own expectations, we will do something to sabotage that. The ways in which we sabotage are many, too many for the scope of this blog post.

Once we become conscious of this Upper Limit Problem, and change our beliefs about what we are really capable and worthy of, life becomes more fulfilling, abundant, and exciting. After reading his book three times, at three different stages of life, I can finally say I get it now. I’m a believer.

Happy Monday!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately getting various things in order so that I can fully focus on my memoir revisions. There is something about having my home, calendar and to-do list in good order that frees up my mind to write.

Doing deep work requires we stay in the moment. I don’t know about you, but loose ends tend to pull me right out of the moment. I feel fully prepared for this week of diving right in and doing the work to the best of my ability.

Last week I shared a blurb written for my book https://danalaquidara.com/2023/02/13/minimal-monday-46/

And as promised, here is another one:

“Dana’s book is a moving story of alienation from the child’s point of view. It is heartbreaking to see her try to make sense of the trauma she was subjected to as a girl. Everyone who works with children of divorce should read this book so they understand why a child may not “admit” to wanting to see a beloved parent and how loyalty conflicts can last well into adulthood.”

–Ginger Gentile, Director of the Erasing Family Documentary and Creator of Reversing Parental Alienation Consulting

Happy Monday!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

In another month or so, I will be getting my manuscript back from the publisher and will have a week to make the requested changes. During that week, I imagine myself hiding away in order to fully concentrate on the revisions. That act of complete focus on one project is a luxury and a gift in modern times. I somehow feel both intimidated by the task and elated at the thought of it. Do you know what I mean?

In the meantime, each week I will share one the blurbs I’ve received for my memoir, YOU-KNOW-WHO. Here’s the first one:

Family custody stories invariably focus on the dramas surrounding real-time battles over children, the tug-of-war syndrome. But what of the long-term effects? And how those effects shape those same children long into adulthood? In YOU-KNOW-WHO, Dana Laquidara chronicles a different kind of trauma, the time-released microbursts that continue to resonate not for years but for decades. The author’s mother was exiled from her life when she was just four years old (and the child’s life was “cleaved into before and after,” as Laquidara so searingly writes), long before academic and legal studies into Parental Alienation had gained traction. It has taken the author a lifetime to process, to understand, to heal. Her journey is one that she recounts with skill and compassion and boundless love.

–William J. McGee, author of HALF THE CHILD, a novel about child custody and abduction

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been collecting blurbs for my upcoming memoir. In addition, one writer pulled out some lines from my book that he liked a lot. I am sharing these lines below.


• I’ve become the best-behaved little girl, but my hair is still unruly.

• She will tuck our mother back into the past, not worthy of any more effort, and I will do the same.

• Once Catholics, we had stopped going to church several years ago, jumped right off the moving sidewalk of sacraments before her Confirmation.

• I can feel her regret that is so vast it could swallow her; I think her grief might turn her to particles, to the dust in the desert she lives in.

• In this moment, the art is everything.

Happy Monday and Happy Creating!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

Each year I reread one of Don Miguel Ruiz’s books, and this year I’ve chosen The Four Agreements Companion Book.

Ruiz’s books are full of great wisdom and insight, but I want to share part of a passage that I think is pure gold in its simplicity.

In Chapter Seven, Ruiz writes about seeing through our old beliefs that we adopted from others in order to get to our authentic truth. He acknowledges that this can be very difficult because the belief system that breaks our integrity has our loyalty. So how do we know what is true?

“Go inside and listen to your body because your body will never lie to you. Your mind will play tricks, but the way you feel in your heart, in your gut, is the truth.”

(Ruiz, 2000, p.152)

Isn’t this reason enough to live in our bodies? To take great care of our vessels? To get out of our heads, and to experience the richness of life, including truths that are beautiful and those that are painful, is truly living.

Happy Monday!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

With each new year comes the rewarding and fun task of choosing a fresh planner. As I’ve already written about, I love using Cal Newport’s Time-Block Planner to schedule chunks of time to work on writing projects https://danalaquidara.com/2022/08/08/minimal-monday-25/ . But I use a separate tool, an agenda, for my weekly and monthly calendar and to-do list, and I think I think I’ve outdone myself with my choice for 2023. I purchased the Dreambook + Planner which includes far more prompts for hashing out your life dreams, goals and values than any planner should. It also costs as much as a fancy lunch for two, but hey, it lasts all year. https://dreambook.vision/

I ordered this Dreambook + Planner just before life got so “lifey” for me, and then I hesitated to crack it open on January 1st. What was I thinking when I chose such an in-depth planner? Who has time to reflect and journal on things like Am I trustworthy to myself and Am I focusing on the right things? I could feel my eyes rolling at How do I feel in my body when I wake up in the morning and Three Questions for Healing and Evolution. I began to have some buyer’s remorse.

I’ve got a lot on my plate this year and perhaps I should’ve gone with my typical, good ole simple planner. But here’s the thing – When I did finally get myself to sit down with this spiral bound beauty, I felt optimistic, and peaceful, like I might actually benefit from it. When stressful life events come knocking, reminders like How can I reframe something stressful and What does it feel like to take a deep breath and Rituals to thrive are not at all bad. What are you procrastinating? What are you wasting energy on? And a built in Habit Tracker– who can’t benefit from that? My healthy habits keep me grounded and calm. Anything that helps me to stick to them is a good thing.

Sometimes we need simplicity, like a basic calendar. Other times, life calls for a deeper dive, and a lot more thoughtfulness. Perhaps this is my year for the planner that is like a calendar, journal, guide and motivator all in one. I’m taking a deep breath and diving in.

Happy New Year!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

I am having a bit of trouble with deciding how to end my book and I think I know why. Life is fluid, always changing, and I believe it is good to allow ourselves to change too. Limiting a story- and in the case of a memoir, half a lifetime – to the finite, physical containment of a book feels a bit confining. Today’s ending may not be tomorrow’s ending; there is always more to come.

I have never been a particularly nostalgic person and I think it is because I want to believe the best is yet to come. I want to feel like I am growing, changing for the better, and open to what is ahead. I don’t ever want to feel stuck or like I am clinging too tightly to what is or what was.

My memoir will have its ending like all books do. My story, on the other hand, will never be bound to the pages. The true ending will always be unwritten.

Happy Monday evening!

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ Leave a comment

I must admit, in light of Elon Musk’s recent shenanigans, I was happy to have the perfect excuse to ditch Twitter. It’s not as though I really needed an excuse, but until the quit-twitter bandwagon, I had been letting inertia keep me there. I was an inactive user (wait, is that an oximoron?) I had created the account long ago, back when I thought I had to do All the Things, and then I felt inadequate because I was too overwhelmed and inconsistent to actually partake in any meaningful way. I do appreciate that many people will miss the old Twitter; I am just not one of them.

I don’t want to do All the Things. I want to do a couple things well. I want to be happy with how my memoir is turning out, and once it’s published I want to do my part to get it in the right readers’ hands, those who will benefit from my story. I want to do this mindfully.

At a time when writers and other artists and entrepreneurs are being told to be heard, play big, and be seen, be everywhere, all I want to do is the opposite of that. More and more, I just want to be quiet. I want to keep writing and sharing my writing, but beyond that I want to be still. I crave to be in nature, and cook creative and healthy meals, and, borrowing from James Taylor, to shower the people I love with love.

It must be the act of writing memoir, the calling forth of my memories, regrets, and truth that is causing me to feel, I don’t know, reverent? Humble? I am at peace with the process but I require a lot of reflection, presence, and solitude to nurture this process and to allow the right words to come through me. And I am beginning to trust that this is enough for now, and that things are going to unfold as they should. I believe that my story will shed light, educate, and offer hope. I believe it so much that I don’t want to shout it. I want to whisper with my whole heart.

Or maybe I’m just lazy. But I don’t think so.

Perhaps it is partly due to the stage of writing that I am in, or my age, but I think it’s more than that, and I am curious to find out where this feeling takes me.

I know I am not the only one tired of all that steals our attention when we just need to be still. We are all finding our way to our balance, our sweet spot, the outer reflection of our inner worlds. It looks different for each person and it is never a linear path, is it?

Minimal Monday

~ danalaquidara ~ 2 Comments

One of my favorite and most challenging areas to simplify is my writing life. My memoir coach, the talented and magnificent Marion Roach Smith, has told me that every scene should move the story forward. (You can find Marion here: https://marionroach.com/)

The writing advice that we should kill our darlings, a phrase coined by William Faulkner, is ever-present in my mind these days. It means that writers “must ruthlessly eliminate any words, characters, side plots or turns of phrase that we personally love but that do nothing for the story.” Memoir should not be a recounting of everything we remember. It needs a theme, and the particular scenes that support that theme. Everything else needs to go.

Rather than calling it killing my darlings though, I prefer to say clearing out my writing clutter. It suits me better. And a major part of my revision process has been to do just that. Chapter by chapter, I am applying my love for decluttering, clarity and simplicity, so that every scene is poignant and nearly every word is necessary. Who would’ve thought my passion for decluttering and organizing would serve me so well in writing? I think Marion will be proud.