Memoir in progress
Medusa’s Notebook
Medusa’s Notebook is about the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
At sixteen, Cristina meets a man eight years older than she is. The relationship shapes her life in ways she can’t fully understand for years. When her own daughter turns sixteen, she revisits the journals she began keeping at fourteen and comes to understand what she couldn’t see at the time.
Writing with an unflinching gaze, Cristina tells a story that makes room for love and harm, choice and manipulation. Exploring issues such as consent, agency, power, and love, Cristina confronts the experiences that silenced her voice and shaped her sense of self, and begins to reclaim both.
With her editor: Revision 4
About Cristina
Cristina Sweeney grew up in northern Michigan, where water, birch trees, and sand shaped her.
She studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, focusing on short fiction and essays. She left college with three lessons: over-editing is the death of good writing, not everyone will care for her prose, and that’s okay, and there are no snow boots on earth that can keep her toes warm in winter.
Since leaving Michigan, she has lived in North Carolina and Virginia. She enjoys open-water swimming, music, cycling, traveling, drinking tea, and writing. She lives with her husband and two Great Danes.
She writes about the stories we tell ourselves, the experiences that shape us, and what we see differently with time.
A writing life
For the last 35 years, Cristina has found ways to keep writing in her life while earning a living. As a marketing professional, she has written the stories of accountants, engineers, lawyers, and business owners. Each client has their own voice and skill, and it has been her job and highest honor to communicate for those who struggle to do this for themselves.
She has taught, written, and spoken for the Legal Marketing Association, the Association for Accounting Marketing, and the Society for Human Resources on topics such as blogging, community outreach, professional development, marketing audits, and writing compelling biographies.
She is one of the early “mommy bloggers,” before “mommy blogger” was a word to describe, or possibly denigrate, a legion of women locked in their homes with newborns and toddlers, desperately trying to hold on to the last semblance of their IQ. Her blog, Homeslice Virginia, ran from 2003 to 2013, and moved from her children and their growth to divorce, motherhood, and mental health.
She has been active on social media since 2007, and was an original member of SMCRVA, the Social Media Club of Richmond, Virginia.
Get Cristina’s essay, “The Girl in the Journal,” free.
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