Lessons from Old Acquaintances

In a post on the Daily OM website, Madisyn Taylor sets the stage for a magnificent writing opportunity:

. . . when fate brings old friends back into our lives, there is always a reason. They may act as messengers, reminding us of a part of ourselves we have forgotten to nurture. They might appear to give us a chance to react in a new way to an old situation. They may even bring up unresolved issues so that we may complete them, giving us the chance to move forward on our life path.

Write on Madisyn! She attributes the reappearance of old friends to fate. But who cares how we explain it? You don’t have to subscribe to any particular belief system to see that however they reappear and whatever the reason, they can indeed offer learning opportunities. In fact, so can casual acquaintances and arch enemies.

I have good news. You do not have to have direct contact with these people to learn from them. They don’t even have to be alive. Memory is enough, perhaps even better, because it reflects only your reaction and reality, and that’s something you can work with. You can safely meet anyone on the page.

Give it a try. Think of a stimulating or challenging relationship from your past. Spend a few minutes replaying memories. Then get out pen and paper and reconnect on the page using questions like these:

• How do I feel about this person and memory? Name the feeling(s)
• What happened to cause me to feel that way? Was it something I did or someone else?
• Would I feel the same way if it happened today?
• What do I know now that I didn’t know then? How have my attitudes and beliefs changed?
• How else can I look at the situation? About others involved, circumstances and/or self
• What would I do differently if a genie gave me do-overs?

Use the list as suggestions. Each situation is different. Chose your questions to fit the occasion. I do recommend writing by hand at this early stage. Research has shown that writing by hand activates most of your brain while keyboarding engages mainly the frontal part. Hooking in those extra brain cells is likely to trigger richer memory and detail and flesh out the heart of your story. Keyboarding is fine for the craft.

When you feel finished with questions, you’re ready to turn your responses into story, incorporating insights you gained from the list. For example, nail the original memory with something like, Trixie called me a coward. I turned and walked away so nobody would see me cry.

Then add insight and proposed do-over: Eventually I realized that she was a bully, and I should have stood my ground. Today I’d ask, “Trixie, I’ve never seen you do that. Go ahead. Do it. Show me how brave YOU are.” Or something like that. I’d speak calmly, but firmly. When you write your version, flesh out the scene with  more context and detail to give readers a full experience.

At least two powerful things are likely to result from this exercise. First, the new power response will be embedded in that memory, probably forever. Each time you recall that event, you’re going to feel stronger, some would say healed.

Then, assuming you share your story with your writing group, family members or friends (and that’s strictly voluntary), they are likely to benefit from your insight. They may remember and re-view a similar circumstance to their benefit. Or they may learn from your example and be better prepared to deal with a situation that has yet to arise.

Come to think of it, I feel ready now to write about a dysfunctional company I worked for twenty years ago. If I had written about it then, I would have done so primarily from a victim perspective. Today, after years of sporadic journaling, I realize how naïve I was at the time and see many things I could have done to improve at least my corner of that messy world. Twenty years ago I thought of writing an exposé, but I was afraid I’d sued by that major corporation. Writing from today’s more informed perspective, I’m certain I could safely publish a compelling, beneficial account. But the moment has passed. My memory of that time has dimmed, and other stories seem more compelling. I’ve learned what I need to know and that’s enough.

Thanks for Reminding Me

Remind: to cause a person to remember; to bring something to (someone else’s) mind.

Thank goodness we have people to bring to mind things we have virtually forgotten, even when they turn our faces beet red. I just found this 15-year-old story scrap in a log of posts to the now defunct Lifestory Yahoo Group. It illustrates both the power of collective memory and the value of keeping a scrap bag of story pieces.

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The other day my honey told a story that totally cracked me up. When I finally quit laughing, I said, "Well, I guess nobody can accuse me of taking after my mother when it comes to having a sense of humor."

My mother is widely considered to have lacked a sense of humor until the last few years of her life when her brain began melting down. Then a childlike sense of humor emerged, and she laughed at the drop of a hat, even at the silliest things.

"Your grandmother had a sense of humor, why wouldn't your mother?"

"My grandmother had a sense of humor? You've GOT to be kidding!"

My grandmother was born ornery, and she was occasionally downright mean. Actually I do remember her giggling at things when we were alone. She had a cute tinkly laugh. But I don't recall ever hearing her laugh around other people. As the oldest grandchild, I enjoyed special status, and I saw a side of her others missed.

"What about the time before our wedding when you were showing off your honeymoon nightgown and negligee?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You don't remember how embarrassed you were when she laughed and told you how nice it would look pulled up over your head?"

I nearly fell on the floor. Until he mentioned it, I’d forgotten all about that, including telling him about it. I never ever would have recalled that story on my own. So much for not remembering that Grandmother did laugh in public. All the women in the family were gathered around, and I had to have been the color of a ripe tomato when she said that. Embarrassing as it was back then, today it seems hysterically funny. Impossible as it seems, I'm ten years older now than my grandmother was when she said it. Maternal generations in my family were short.

---

My honey is helpful that way, remembering things I forgot decades ago, and I help him out the same way. He remembers large chunks of what I've forgotten, and other relatives remember things beyond that. Lifestory writing is even better when it's a team sport! Unless your memories collide in a combative way, and that can get tricky. But that’s a subject for another post.

In a different vein, I recall half a dozen stories from that summer of our wedding: The Breakfast Fiasco, Can You Bring a Gun To My Wedding?, The Case of the Missing Room Reservation, Dashed Expectations, and a couple more yet to be written. Perhaps I shall polish these and piece them together as a sort of paper patchwork memory quilt, much like I’ve already done with Adventures of a Chilehead.

Finding that scrap was a good reminder of the value of saving bits and pieces of story, even if they lack the conflict or other elements of full-fledged stories. Short anecdotes can be thought-provoking or fun to review later, and often come in handy. You might want to finish them later as full-featured stories. Or you can tuck one into a larger story or an email or a blog post, or even post it on Facebook.

When I posted stories to that group, mostly a handful of paragraphs and fewer than 500 words, to post in that online group, I pasted each one into a Word document for safekeeping – which turned out to be an excellent idea because the group suddenly went poof! I have over 500 stories and anecdotes in those archive documents. Each was quick and easy to write, usually prompted by previous posts.

Follow my example. When you write a new story in an email, copy it and save it in an ongoing document as I did with this one. Those accounts form a sort of journal, and your scrap bag of stories will grow. Who knows? In five years you may find that you’ve written a book, one email at a time.

Do you have examples of long-buried memories someone else reminded you of? I’d love to hear about them in comments!

Composite Memory

I was in third grade when Ike ran against Adlai. I’ve formed a composite memory of that campaign, the only one I clearly remember. My composite image is set outside the door of my third grade classroom. The classroom windows faced northeast, and a thick row of ponderosa pines bordered the school yard about fifteen feet beyond the sidewalk and a strip of grass running along the side of the school. Class began at 8:30, and we were careful to be standing outside our room a few minutes early so we’d be ready to bolt in the door the minute Miss Hones opened it.

We usually lined up as we arrived, but as election day grew near, we began to form into two camps outside that door. I stood with the Republican kids to the right, next to the protruding partition separating our room from the next one. The Democrat kids clustered near the partition at the other end by the door.

“I like Ike!” we chanted at the top of our lungs. “Stevenson! Stevenson!” they chanted in return, each group pausing to make space for the other. This chanting went on for several minutes until Miss Hones opened the door.

I say it’s a composite memory because although I feel certain this group activity took place daily for … who knows? A week? Two weeks? A month? … I have only one mental image. That image is clear and complete. I feel the nip of late fall in the air and appreciate my warm wooly sweater. On this particular day in memory, the sky must be overcast, because the scene is drab and washed out, missing the brilliant sunshine that usually peeked through the trees. I feel the joy of shouting and feeling part of a group. I feel the joy of being part of something larger, something historic.

This election stands out for me because my grandmother had been a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1952, so of course my family supported Ike. Oddly enough, I remember nothing about the 1956 election, though once again she was a delegate. and once again Ike squared off against Adlai. How I wish now I’d thought to ask her in great detail what she had seen, heard and done at those conventions! How I wish she had written that story!

Most memories of place or repeating events are composite. Even specific memories are pasted into composite backgrounds. The day one shy classmate was about twenty minutes late arriving at school and hid in the coat closet until recess stands out, but only against a composite of an ordinary day. Recess is a composite with several variations including Boys Chase Girls (or vice-versa), jacks, jump rope, and so forth.

Composite memories are useful in many ways.

• Yeast for more involved stories or essays. My impassioned-but-civilized election memory stands in stark contrast to what seems barbaric behavior in this year’s electoral scene. I could explore that contrast in an essay.
• Food for thought in terms of exploring attitudes, values and relationships. During those chants I felt part of the Republican group. Much of the time I felt like a misfit at school.
• Source material for writing descriptions. The setting was the same outside that classroom all year long. In fact, it was much the same for third grade through fifth when my classrooms were all on that side of that school.
• Vignettes for inclusion in a larger story. This composite memory could easily become a scene in a tale of growing up in Los Alamos, or my involvement in politics or … who knows?

Standing on its own, this memory is much like a simple snapshot crammed into a shoebox. But like those piles of photos we have hidden away, who knows when one of those pictures will leap out to trigger a memory, seed a longer story, or just warm our hearts for a few minutes as we remember.

Honor those memories. Write them down, perhaps as I’ve done here, and treasure them. Skim back through them now and then, like you do with photos. You never know when they might spark a new thought, insight or story.

Clear the Haze from Pictures and Memory

The pictures above have deep meaning for me, and I think they are likely to strike a chord with most viewers, evoking memories of their own. I want my stories to have that effect. I want readers to see themselves in my words, finding new ways to see old situations and become more fully themselves.

I recently found this left-hand picture from 1973 in a pile I was sorting through. Something in it stirred me, though haziness dimmed my response. I decided to try restoring it.

I scanned it with my Epson V600 scanner using Professional mode on the scanner interface. I used the Color Restoration tool and the Unsharp Mask tool set to high. That produced over 90% of the result you see on the right, but I wanted more. I cloned out spots on the pillow and sharpened the picture a bit more. Then I added a warming yellowish tone to approximate the wall color I recall.

The crisp, haze-free result makes me feel like I’m “back in the picture,” especially when I view it full size and zoom in on details.

I used an ancient version of Photoshop for this, but Paint.net does almost as much as Photoshop and it’s free. Picasa, another popular free choice, is easy to use. Most scanners should have some semblance of the  Epson’s capability. My husband’s 12-year-old Epson can do this, just not as fast.

Once I got a clear view of the photo, I sat with it until I sank into the feeling of having those tots around full time, and gratitude I felt. I thought about how different they were from each other. I looked at our clothing and recalled the joy of sewing. George is on the left. I made his jeans. I made Susan’s shirt to match one I made for myself. I made John’s trendy fake vest shirt. Sewing with knits was big in the seventies. I’m surprised to realize that my shirt and pants both came from stores. Nearly everything in my closet was my own creation.

I remembered the challenge of reupholstering the tattered Goodwill sectional my mom was tired of. Fake animal fur was affordable and trendy. It was a perfect fit for the shag rug in our brand-new home. When we bought new living room furniture, this old stuff went down to the family room. On the right side you see the crewel embroidery project I was working on. That huge picture perfectly matched the carpeting. I put it away years ago. I may rehang it yet.

Oh, the hair – where did it all go? This was my Involved Earth Mother phase: PTO, League of Women Voters, Republican Women, bridge club and more.  I also recalled feeling overwhelmed at times, and wondering just where I fit into the larger scheme of things. Mostly it was a time of settling into house and community and keeping those lively youngsters and their daddy fed, clothed and happy.

I made a list of memories I can use in stories spawned by that picture:

• Shag rug: hard to live with! Vacuuming flattened it, and I used a garden rake to restore it to fluffiness. Needless to say, I did not do that on a daily basis.
• Bare feet. I lived in bare feet in the house. I still do in the summer.
• Making things. I loved crafting enhancements for our home. Repurposing “found objects” was my specialty. I hope to get back to that soon when we move into another new-to-us home.
• Informality: Our life style was and still is informal. What you see there is no formal pose. It’s typical.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

My final thought is that stories are like that these pictures. I liken the left one to an early draft. A robust round of editing clears the haze, letting the story shine through. A few more tweaks enhance detail. The final version conveys the sense of the situation so well that readers feel “in the picture,” much as I do with the finished version on the right.

Write now: Find an old picture that’s hazy and indistinct. Play with settings on your scanner and use Paint.net or Picasa to touch it up. Zoom in on details in the finished result and look for stories everywhere.

I Want My Grandchildren to Know I Wasn’t Always Old

I watched as an old woman entered the room, leaning heavily on her cane. Although each step seemed to be a huge effort, her sagging figure was elegantly dressed, and her face, a road map of wrinkles, tastefully made up. She sat heavily in a seat near the door, in the front row, not far from where I stood, waiting to present a book talk about The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

I begin these programs by asking everyone why they are interested in writing their lifestories. I get a variety of predictable responses: “I have a few memories I want to write down for my kids” ... “I do genealogy and want to write about my family” ... “My children are on my case to write things down” ... “I’ve had some experiences I learned a lot from that may help other people.” These are all good reasons to write.

This woman had a new one, and it brought down the house. “I want my grandchildren to know I wasn’t always old!”

Her comment resonated with us all and led to an animated discussion of the way children think of anyone who isn’t free to roam around and play all day as old. How hard for them to imagine that we once saw shapes in clouds and marveled at bugs crawling across a dandelion bloom. Or that we played tag with our friends and told secrets on sleepovers or agonized over dropping the ball at second base. Or that we could ride our bikes across town when we were twelve or hang out in the woods with our friends with no adult around.

What can we do to remedy this?

WRITE ABOUT IT!

Write about those clouds and agonies and all the fun things we did. You don’t have to write long, involved stories. Write random memory paragraphs for now. Use these tips to get started:

• Make a story idea list specifically for childhood memories. Include sensory elements like the feel of the wind on your face, the way your dark hair felt scorchingly hot to the touch on a sunny day, the scent of lilacs or pine sap on warm days, how your fingers went numb building snow forts.
  
  Or just start writing and let it all flow out as it will. Then go back and fill in the blanks. There is no “right” way to write this stuff.
  
  
• List both friends and foes. All kids have both friends and people who irritate them. These people may be other kids or adults – teachers for example. Write short stories about these people.
  
  
• Include elements of daily life. How did you get to school? Did you really walk three miles through three feet of snow, uphill both ways? Did you walk alone or with friends or siblings? Did you ride a bus for an hour?
  
  
• What did you eat and wear? The average American diet has changed dramatically over the last fifty or seventy years. Do your grandchildren know about canned Spam? And wearing suspenders with flannel lined jeans that had matching flannel shirts?
  
  
• Tell about your toys. Yoyos, jacks and jump ropes may seem exotic today. What about soapbox derby cars? Clamp-on roller skates with keys? Your favorite dolls or toy cars or cowboy guns?
  
  
• Include a mix of triumphs and disappointments. It’s okay to brag, especially about childhood exploits. Especially if you balance this with remembering when you didn’t get the part in the play, that cute girl turned you down for prom, or your third-grade teacher unfairly kept you after school for passing notes when it was really someone else.
  
  
• Take them to school with you. Don’t just tell about school. Show them the school. Use dialogue. Show them what the room looked like. Let them tag along to art class or assembly. And definitely take them along to recess!
  
  
• Write about your own grandparents. Tell how you thought they were old and all the things you did with the.

This list could include at least 100 more items. I hope it gets your imagination flowing and your fingers moving. If you need help with details about toys, games, or anything else, Google is your friend.

It’s fine to make an anthology of random loose pieces. And, after you have a couple of hundred short-short flash memoir stories, you may find a way to string them together into a cohesive memoir. Either way, your descendants will love this legacy.

Write now: Get those fingers moving and let your grandchildren know you weren’t always old!

A Grounding [TAP?] Root of the Tree of Life Writing

Guest post by Denis Ledoux, founder of The Memoir Network.

Just as with so many big projects in life, you’ll benefit by taking a moment to consider why you ought to start—or continue—to write this memoir of yours that is intriguing you and what role you anticipate it will play in your life.

I like to think of my thoughts below as one of the roots of the Tree Of Life Writing that needs to be nurtured.

You may not know it yet, but your impulse to write is probably solid.

In late autumn of 1988, as people were hunkering down for another Maine winter, I was asked to read from my first collection of short stories (What Became of Them) to a gathering of volunteer Foster Grandparents.

My collection clearly made use of autobiography—the approach to fiction that has always compelled me the most. Several dozen men and women, sitting at long tables, many smiling in recognition of elements in the stories I had just shared, said in one way or another, “These are people just like us!” They seemed to recognize the child climbing the apple tree at the edge of the meadow or to glimpse once again their own parents in the tired women and men trudging through the tenement district on their way back from the textile factory.

Most of the basic material writers work with is acquired before they reach the age of fifteen.

― Willa Cather

Story share time proves dynamic and teaches me something about why we write

After the short program of reading from my book of short stories, as has been my custom, I asked people to share their own stories with me and with each other. An astounding—but, as I was to find over and over again, completely natural—response occurred.

In a torrent, members of the audience began to tell me their life stories. These Foster Grandparents spoke with eagerness—as if speaking their stories was, at last, satisfying a hunger of long standing. Or, perhaps it was a need to preserve their story, to achieve some snippet of immortality if only in the telling to their fellow Foster Grandparents.

Their memories were set in a number of countries around the world and in a variety of cultures within the US. As people spoke, some grew animated while others exuded peace. Some spoke with pride; others with sorrow. All, however, seemed to need to tell the stories of their lives and of their families.

Stories prime the pump of memory

Once again, storytelling had “primed the pump” of memory to enable personal and family stories to pour out. After my reading that day, I left for home feeling justified in my faith in the primal function of storytelling to affirm and reaffirm meaning in our lives.

It’s fine to write for yourself—you deserve to be honored

Like the Foster Grandparents, if you need to write—or tell—lifestories because you need to establish a “monument” to your experience in the “city park” of your memory—and of the world’s memory—then you have a reason that may well see you to the end.

My big takeaway that can be yours, too.

I have come to also realize something more about writing, something that is a corollary of this need to be public: telling your story to yourself (in the privacy of your office, for instance) does not satisfy that hunger to tell.

People need to tell their stories to an audience. Sometimes that audience is your own family; sometimes that audience is much larger—as large as a city, a region, a whole country, or even the world.

Is that why you want to write: to share with a larger audience? If so, that is natural and good.

Questions to ask yourself as you start to write

Besides starting to write a memoir that records the story you so much want to tell, part of what you need to do is start to address who the audience for your memoir will be. (This is an on-going task, and you are likely to revisit it during the entire process of your writing.)

Ask:

~ who needs to hear your story?

~ whom do you need to share this story with?

Our distant ancestors told stories around the campfire. They did not tell stories just for themselves, sitting in the woods far from others: they told stories to an assembled group because they understood that telling and hearing were part of a process.

Yes, it can be intimidating to realize that your words are going to be read by an audience of real, live people—people who, in some cases, will criticize you. But, these real people—both those with appreciative remarks and those with cutting riposts—are part of your writing experience.

My send off as you begin—or continue—to write

Write for an audience (even if sometimes that audience is only you). Don’t let fear of judgement stop you. Pursue your dream of sharing your story.

Writing a memoir is important work. Do it!

Action Steps

1. Whom are you writing for? Be insightful now: whether your answer is my grandchldren or the Noble LiteraturePrize Committee. State why you have this audience in mind. What difference will this memoir of yours make for this audience?

2. If your audience is small, is there any way you could make it larger and still be comfortable with your goals? (I find that people’s sense of audience often grows as they write more.)

Denis Ledoux is the author, most recently, of How to Start to Write Your Memoir which is Book One in the seven-part Memoir Network Writing Series. This post is adapted from that e-book. Also in publication is Don't Let Writer's Block Stop You. A complete list of publications is available. To be placed on an alert list, send an email.

Odds and Ends

Everybody has a junk drawer in the kitchen or somewhere, a drawer where you put the stuff you don’t know where else to put. Stuff you intend to sort and put away properly “someday.”

I have a folder like that stored inside the general Documents folder – odds and ends of lifestory starts and sandpaper drafts. Bits and pieces of memory and story that beg for completion, but I haven’t had time, or lost the thread or … you know. Stories that made it past the Story Idea List stage, but not by much. Stories with beginnings, but no endings. If you don't have a folder like that, I suggest you set one up.

Today, when the post I’d planned didn’t work out because the video I wanted to include doesn’t display right, I decided to peruse my junk files. In the interests of full disclosure, I have more than one such folder. I found an older one with files dating back about four computers. I haven’t looked in it for ages, and I found some real treasures.

Among them is a file I’d intended to use as the first chapter of a memoir about my mother. The folder holding that file dates back to 1999, and I have not worked on it since. Usually when I find a file that old, I instantly find at least a dozen ways to improve it based on the countless writing lessons I’ve learned in the interim. Not this time. It’s all there: description in all seven senses, emotion, reflection, dialogue, tension stretching several ways, bait on the opening hook….

That story is the exception. I also found meaningless scribbles that I’ll probably delete. Someday. But maybe not. Maybe I’ll leave them there, and someday one of my kids will look through my hard drive and find these files and either spend several days reading through it all or simply delete the entire file structure.

Maybe I’ll keep them all for a while yet because just as I look at the kitchen drawer you see in the photo above and remember where we got the chopsticks we’ll never use, or the countless trips to the bread store represented by the balls of string, and the sweater or dishrags I’ll never crochet from it, and the fragrant bottles of wine that held all those corks and the friend we drank it with, or the good intentions of the friend who gave us the beeswax candle I’m “saving for someday”, and the market in Victoria Falls where I bought the giraffe salad servers from a destitute woman too proud to beg, I realize that drawer is full of my life. Parts of my brain and heart live in that drawer, and much larger parts live on my hard drive.

Yes, I’ll keep the story crumbs, the odds and ends, and I’ll move that chapter about Mother up onto the active list. I’ll make yet another folder and move all the odds and ends of Mother stories into it where I can easily find them. I may yet get that memoir done. But even if I don’t, I have a solid start.

Write now: look through your scrap folder and find an unfinished story that merits polish or finishing, then take it to the next step. If you don’t have such a collection yet, open your kitchen junk drawer and find a memory. Write about it.

Memoir Writing on Steroids

 It’s the memoir writing process on steroids! I thought. These scholars are creating a memoir of civilization in the Andes. …

For over a dozen years I've dreamed of visiting Machu Picchu, and I would have been quite content to go directly there and come straight home. That dream has come true on a much larger scale, and the ton of bonus insights I derived in the process have caused my understanding of Story to explode like a super nova.

Some people spend weeks or months boning up on a location before going there. Not me. I hit a place cold, get an overview from guides and local resources, then fill in the blanks later. In this case, I was ahead of the game. I'd watched a few documentaries and done a little reading about the Incas, but I was totally unprepared for the fire hose gush of compelling pre-Inca history that our guides saturated us with for over two weeks.

Over the last decade or so, teams of archeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, linguists and others have made remarkable progress in piecing together fragments of information from multiple sources to give an expanded picture of life in various times and regions. For example, they have now discovered that although the Incas and others did not use writing as we know it, they did have a system of recording detailed historical information. They embedded stories in weaving and painted them on pottery. They recorded words and stories in knotted strings along with complex accounting records.

Before this trip, I had no idea that the Incas were merely the capstone on a vast pyramid of previous Andes civilizations and empires. Through a combination of enticement and coercion, the Incas united the Quechua, Aymara, Moche and assorted other people in the Andean region into a single, loosely knit empire. They were astute enough to take the best each culture had to offer, assimilating and building upon the accumulated skills and wisdom of those people.

As I listened to accounts of how old assumptions are being reinterpreted to incorporate new knowledge, I got goosebumps. I realized that in a very real sense, historians are now creating what amounts to a mega-memoir of Andean civilization. What they are doing is remarkably similar to what we as individuals go through in compiling memoirs. We also sort and compile memory fragments into cohesive stories of times, events and experiences. 

One thing that especially struck me as I pondered this epiphany was the fact that these experts didn’t just keep digging for more artifacts. They have continually pondered the significance of what they already had and developed new tools for analyzing it. They have not shied away from the occasional need to challenge assumptions and edit the big picture as the need arose. 

A major key to recent progress has been the growing levels of collaboration among researchers in a wide variety of disciplines. Each brings a unique perspective has resulted in much deeper, multidimensional understanding.

There’s a major lesson for memoir writers in the Andean discoveries: we can also benefit from reassessing what we already know, perhaps with the help of a team of others to provide new perspectives. We can also use tools like old photos (not just family ones – check the web for photos of places and things from various decades in your past), old phone books and other historical documents, music, and conversations with relatives and past acquaintances. 

Perhaps the most important cue these researchers give us as we explore explore new perspectives is to question assumptions and perceptions. Look for the roots of current attitudes and beliefs and follow them to new conclusions. Follow the researchers’ example and put your memoir writing on steroids. 

Write now: spend time on research to deepen your memories of the past and write about them. You don’t have to write an entire memoir. Vignettes and essays are enough to answer questions in years to come. Leave a comment about resources you find especially helpful.

Milestone Memories

Milestones are key components of lifestories and memoir. The events they signify are the moments we feel our life shift or turn a corner. Our perspective changes, if only slightly, and the moments stick in memory, perhaps sweet as cotton candy residue or irritating as cockleburs.

Last night was a cotton candy milestone for me: along with my husband and our older son’s family, I attended our oldest grandchild’s high school graduation in Lake Oswego, Oregon. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat and watched through teary eyes as Keith strode to the podium, laden down with honors cords, to address his classmates and an audience of about fifteen hundred. He did so with superb aplomb. I cheered loudest of all at the end.

Over the course of the three interminable hours I spent squirming and wiggling on that rock-hard gymnasium bleacher, I recalled Keith’s birth, the arrival of other grandchildren, each graduation we’ve attended, and a long list of other milestone moments.

I’ve been thinking about milestone's a lot recently. Late May through early July is a major milestone season for my family and me. I graduated from high school on May 28. and began my first job on June 5, which was also the day I first met the man I married a year later. The last weekend in June I will attend my LAHS ‘62 50th reunion. I find the symmetry of Keith’s graduation in juxtaposition with my impending reunion compelling.

Milestone moments deserve to be celebrated and commemorated. Many call for celebration in person with others. All are compelling story topics on their own merits. I wrote a blog post for One Woman’s Day about June 5, a Double Milestone Day.

Writing about these experiences pays multiple dividends:

Personal satisfaction. Writing about happy or rewarding milestones allows you to re-experience the joy and pleasure and excitement you felt at the moment and share the energy of the experience with others.

Broadening perspective.  Focusing on individual senses, perhaps on the often-overlooked sense of smell, may reactivate subliminal memories and uncover meaningful connections to other memories. Most especially, you may find additional ways to view and interpret the situation.

Healing painful memories. Looking at painful situations from other perspectives is a primary key way to removing their sting, and as mentioned above, reflecting and writing about key memories often triggers new views and perspectives.

Clarifying your message. You may recall Mark Twain’s advice in my previous post. He urged you to begin writing afresh after completing a story to your satisfaction. Fully developing a single story as a polished vignette is terrific preparation for incorporating that memory into a more comprehensive memoir.

Creating a legacy of story. Very early in The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I emphasize that any story you write, however crude and unpolished, is better than writing nothing. I explain that my mother left behind comprehensive drafts of her lifestory. Time ran out for her, and she was unable to integrate multiple drafts and individual accounts into a finished memoir, but the details are there and her story is complete up to the point where she met my father. Her descendants and their flock of cousins will have a wider window into the past as a result.

Write your stories now, before your time runs out, and give yourself the opportunity to savor them afresh as you share them with posterity.

 Write now: if you don’t already have one in mind, make a list of milestone memories from your past. Pick one and write a complete story about it. Include lots of sensory detail along with personal reflection about the meaning the moment had for you.

Valentine Memory Whispers

When I think of Valentine’s Day, I always think of red heart boxes full of chocolate candy. When I was young, my father always gave a great big box of candy to my mother, and smaller boxes, with half a dozen pieces each to my sister and me. I always ate all of mine right then and there, and nibbled from Mother’s until it was gone too.

But I have many more Valentine’s Day memories. For example, I remember decorating shoeboxes each year for classmates to fill with valentines. That was a tense situation. Back then there was no mandate that you had to bring one for each person in the class, and somehow everyone seemed to know how many who got, and who gave which to whom. I always groaned inwardly when I counted and found a shortfall. It didn’t matter that only one person ever got a card from everyone in our class. I wanted to be in that category too, and I wasn’t!

Did I remember on those Valentine’s Days that there were always one or two people I simply could not bring myself to address cards to? Why would I have thought I’d get one from everyone when I didn’t give one to everyone?

Embedding questions and reflections like that adds juice to a story or memoir, and they aren’t always easy to answer. It takes a bit off practice to even recognize those whispery thoughts that arise as we write – they are easy to ignore, but worth heeding. They add a “mystery ingredient” to stories. When you capture one of these thoughts, take a break from writing  for a bit of memory analysis.

My example

I close my eyes, lean back, and picture myself sitting at our gray limed-oak dining room table, staring out the window at the sky. The table surface is just below armpit level, so my arms stretch straight out. A dittoed list of classmates is on my left. A pile of valentines from the bag I bought for a dollar at Draggon Drug is spread out before me.

These are so dumb. Nobody talks like that, I think as I flip through them. That’s actually part of their effectiveness. Nobody really talks this way, so nobody will take them seriously. I know it’s just a game we play to be nice and fit in, and oh, how I want to fit in! It’s not easy, but I work my way down the list, picking a card for each, signing my name, and addressing the flimsy envelopes. I draw a line through each name as I finish. I’m pleased with my progress.

Then I come to a name that stops me cold. Wilber Winslow (name changed to protect the guilty) is such a creep! I’ll throw up if I have to give him a card, even if I could find one that says “Roses are red, violets are blue, reform school’s the place, for people like you.”

I know he won’t give me a card, so why humiliate myself by giving him one when I know I won’t get one in return? I’m in proactive self-defense mode.  A girl has to have some self-respect.

Yes, there’s my answer. I knew I wouldn’t get cards from everyone, and I’ve gotten in touch with my inner Mean Girl and the angst and frustration of fourth grade.

That’s a more interesting story and perhaps more helpful to my grandchildren, one of whom just worked through a similar situation, but with a difference. In this enlightened era, in her school, they are required to give a valentine to each member of the class – even the bratty boy who teases her mercilessly behind the teacher’s back. But that’s her story to write when she grows up.

Write now: think of a tense situation in your past and try re-entering the scene. Think it through. What do you see? What do you hear? What are you thinking? What story are you telling yourself? Write about it. 

Photo credit: Dan4th Nicholas

Writing Your Traveling Life

Anna meets a wallaby in Sydney

Trips pose a challenge when writing life stories and memoir. If they took place decades ago, unless you kept a journal and/or lots of photos, you may have trouble remembering even such broad details as where you went. Ask me about that – I’m among your numbers. After many tens of thousands of miles on the road here and abroad, I realize that I go along for the ride and enjoy the scenery, but pay little active attention to where I am at any given moment. I have impressions, but few specific memories.

More than once I’ve left home with a blank journal, intent on capturing trip details. Maybe my mistake was capturing too many details. My good intentions always fell by the wayside within three or four days, but the notes I did write are terrific. Not even the pictures are much help, because we never got around to labeling them, and after twenty years, who knows which village was which?

Since the advent of digital cameras and laptop computers, this has gotten better. Now that I’m taking my own photos, I pay more attention to where I am when I take them. Photos are great memory joggers. But they aren’t quite enough. Words help. Labels are better than nothing, but a few notes are even better.

Now that wireless connections are available all over the world, often free, the situation has improved. While the day’s photos download from camera cards, I take a few minutes to write an email to people back home with details of the day’s events, highlights and observations. If I’m not online, I save the email and add to it each day until I do connect. Of course I keep a copy when sending. That lets everyone know, more or less in real time, what we are doing, and it serves as a trip journal for me.

Our daughter has taken this one step farther. She is in New Zealand this month and next with her family while her husband teaches at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. Rather than trying to stay in touch by email or limiting contact to Facebook friends, she set up a blog and posts every couple of days, complete with several pictures. She’s not only sharing accounts of daily life down there, she’s serving as an ambassador for New Zealand with her humorous tales.

Everyone they know and hundreds more are following the adventures of the Mack family, and such adventures they are. The Chilean volcano ash cloud caused them to be rerouted through Sydney, Australia where they were delayed four days en route to New Zealand. After learning to drive on the other side of the road, they are learning their way around the massive earthquake detours in Christchurch. Their six-year-old daughter was attacked by an indigenous parrot in a wild-life park. Both girls are learning to ski (it’s winter down under). I’d love and follow that blog even if she weren’t my daughter, and you are all invited to follow it too.

There is one factor to consider before going this public with your travel reports. Security. She can do this safely because a house sitter is living in their home and feeding their great big dog. I don’t have this sort of protection, and my house is secluded in woods. I would not feel safe letting the whole world know I’m on the other side of it, so I’ll stick with emails to people I know and trust.

Write now: pull out pictures from a vacation and write about the trip. Tell it all, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Stories

What story does this picture tell? I was intrigued when I noticed it on A Writer’s Right to Keep Writing and followed the trail to bingobongo’s source image. I challenge each viewer to add a comment with a couple of sentences answering that question, and to do it before reading any of the other comments. I guarantee you that no two stories will be quite the same. Themes may emerge, but each story will have a unique twist. This illustrates that no two people see or understand the same way, and pictures require clear verbal communication to ensure that everybody is on the same page.

Now and then when we have a little extra time in a writing group, I pull out my folio of a few hundred pictures I’ve clipped to use as prompts for a freewriting exercise. Some are as simple as a single flower blossom. Others are complex scenes. Many feature people doing things or interacting with other people. The instructions are simple:

“Look through the pictures and select one that calls to you. Take a couple if you wish. Look at the picture for a minute or two, then start writing whatever story comes to mind.”

If we have lots of time, we may write for fifteen or twenty minutes, but more likely it will be five or six. No two people write about the same picture, so no two stories are the same. It wouldn’t matter if everyone wrote about the same picture. (No two stories would be the same.) People are always amazed at the depth and quality of the stories that emerge from this exercise. They tend to be rich in detail and highly personal. They always go home with dozens of new entries on their story idea lists.

Sometimes I use these pictures to start a story myself. They are great for smashing through a crusty case of Writer’s Block and they always result in stories I would not have thought to write on my own. Family photos are also a great source of story prompts.

If you want to start a collection of writing prompt pictures to use on your own or share with a group, assemble a selection of magazines, ideally with a wide variety of content and heavily illustrated. The pictures may be photos or any other art. I trim all the words. Other people leave words and sometimes incorporate them into the stories. I’ve used pictures from travel magazines and brochures, sports , history/culture (i.e. Smithsonian, Nat’l Geographic), home décor, cooking, parenting, news, and general interest magazines. Any size will do – half a page is ideal.

Another approach is to hit the web and search for pictures on sites like Flickr, Picasa, or Webshots. Select a topic and use Google’s Images tab to find pictures about it. Unless you plan to publish the picture, copyright doesn’t matter.

Write now:  just for fun or two overcome writer’s block, find one or more pictures and write about them. Begin a collection to share with a writing group, or invite a group f friends and neighbors to join you for an evening of writing fun.

Picture credit: bongobingo

Inventing Memory

Sometimes a book catches my eye and a small whisper urges me to read it. That happened yesterday as I helped sort books for the annual Used Book Sale at our library. The author’s name, Erica Jong, caught my eye first and triggered memories of reading FEAR OF FLYING caught my eye first, sparking a memory of reading that ground-breaking volume a few years after it was first published in 1973. Set in much smaller type, the title, INVENTING MEMORY: A Novel of Mothers & Daughters, furthered my interest. Perhaps it will have some Truth about memory and memoir, I thought, setting it  aside to take home.

I’m not quite halfway through the volume, and have mixed feelings about it several aspects of the book. But even so, I’m enchanted with the abundance of dazzling descriptions, and I have found many truths about memory and memoir. I’ll share a few here and leave you to savor them and suck out whatever meaning they may have for you.

    “It’s queer enough just to write books—to separate yourself from the whole world so as to re-create the world in paper and ink,” I declare.

    “I don’t know why anyone would do it,” says Mrs. Coppley. “Do you?”

    “Because it gives you back your life, calms your soul, bestows the ecstasy of understanding. And you hope it does the same for your readers.”

    *****

... his memories break down into set pieces, and he seems to tell the same story again and again. ... It is as if he made it all up long ago, locked it in his brain, and never revised it. He needs to repeat it again and again simply to prove he is still alive.

    “Promise you will write my story,” he says.

    And I promise. But how can we ever write another’s story?What we write is always some version of our own story, using other characters to illustrate the parables of our lives. I make furious notes, to please him and because I hope I may someday know  what to do with them.

*****

    The difference between writing a notebook and a novel: With a novel, you describe people; with a notebook, you assume that the reader—yourself?—already knows.

*****

    ... the book is spilling out almost as if by dictation from a secret source. I have no idea if it’s any good or not. I only know that I can’t stop.

While I’m wouldn’t give the book more than three stars for general readers, I’m glad I listened to that faint whisper and brought it home. The stunning descriptions and gems of wisdom like these are worth digging for and adding to my ever-growing collection.

Write now: use one of the quotes above as a writing practice prompt and see what thoughts about writing flow from your inner resources.

Virtually Moving

Over the last several days I’ve been totally immersed in moving. My mailing address has not changed, nor has my physical space, but I’m in a whole new place. I’ve entered the world of Windows 7. But never fear, this post is about the mental process I’ve been going through as I make this transition — which is not yet finished — not about computer stuff.

As I sorted through files to make sure  my C: drive was backed up before I began the installation, I was strongly reminded of the packing we did before we moved from Washington to Pennsylvania twenty-five ago. I began feeling similarly nostalgic about the XP home I’ve lived and worked in for eight years now.

When I finally got brave and made that last click that finalized my commitment to installing, I was torn. I was leaving behind a huge chunk of my past and forging ahead into a brave new world. I did not know what lay ahead, what hurdles I’d have to overcome.

As the CD reader spun, I did what any self-respecting life writer would do (that is, any self-respecting life writer who has an old repurposed laptop camped at her elbow, although a pad of paper and pencil would work equally well). I swiveled my chair to the left, opened a new document, and began writing. I wrote about my feelings as the installation progressed. Sadness, hope, dread ... all of it. Then I began seeing similarities to physical moves, to times in my life when I’ve had to let go of the past in order to move forward.

The document isn’t finished, but it has grown rather long and is taking a distinct shape. As I wrote, I found that each stage of the process invoked memories. I’ve come to see that moving into a new virtual home is a perfect metaphor for moving in general, physical, mental or spiritual. The operating system is the frame or skeleton of the house. Once the OS (in this case Windows) is in place, you have to divide the space into “rooms” by installing programs like Word, PowerPoint, Firefox, you name it. You can even decorate your new home with features like a new desktop picture, a color scheme, “skins” for some programs, or desktop gadgets.

Ultimately, once the structure is finished, it’s time to move in. All those folders and files need to be “unpacked” and put away.

Anyone who has ever changed residences knows how memory works overtime as you pack and unpack, and wear yourself out with the challenges of getting everything set up and squared away. Moving to a new computer is the same. The stages of the process serve as both memory triggers and a series of hooks for hanging and organizing those memories.

I intend to keep working on that document.

Write now: about a moving experience you’ve had. Capture the feelings you recall having before, during and after. Focus on those feelings and see what additional memories they bring forth. You may hit a rich new lode of material.

Turkey Day

Turkey Day is nearly here. The radio is my head playing “Over the River and Through the Woods,” that old Thanksgiving classic I learned in second or third grade. I love that song, even though I never have seen that much snow as early as Thanksgiving. The other traditional Thanksgiving tune that stick in mind is the hymn, “Come Ye Thankful People, Come,” which I just discovered was written in 1844, the same year as “Over the River.”

Thinking back over my personal Thanksgiving history, I find a lot of variation. Childhood Thanksgivings in New Mexico varied. Some years we visited my mother’s family in Las Cruces, where most of my cousins lived. Those years enough food for a small army filled my aunt’s kitchen table, and tables for eating were set up in the living room for adults and an enclosed porch for the kids. Other years we went to visit my father’s parents in Clovis where things were a little quieter. Or we stayed home in Los Alamos, enjoying the meal with various combinations of friends and/or visiting relatives.

When Mother fixed the dinner, we always had turkey stuffed with my mother’s cornbread dressing. She left the seasoning of that dressing to my father, which baffled me at the time. Aside from making pancakes on weekends, seasoning the stuffing was his only contribution to cooking. We always had mashed potatoes with giblet gravy, candied sweet potatoes with toasty marshmallow topping, green beans (plain ones, not the soupy casserole version), 24-hour salad and fresh cranberry-orange relish. Dessert always included both pumpkin and mince pies, with lots of whipped cream.

During the years our children were growing up, Thanksgiving was always at our house, with my parents and brother joining us. In later years my brother's growing family was added. The menu remained stable, though the dressing was never quite the same without my father’s deft touch to season it. The last twenty-some years, the feast has changed. The distance between most family members has multiplied by a factor of ten. We alternate between staying home, often including assorted friends whose families are also far away, or going to visit my mother-in-law, who lives just east of Philadelphia.

Although this is not a tradition in our family, many families center the food preparation and meal around television with the Macy’s parade in the morning and football later in the day.

Isn’t it ironic how most of us primarily connect this holiday with turkey, travel, and television, followed by Black Friday shopping sprees? The holiday was instituted to remind us to be thankful for the many blessings we enjoy in this land of plenty. Even this year as the economy is melting like ice cream on hot pie, there is plenty to be thankful for, and I hope you’ll join me in recording some of those many blessings in stories. Encourage family members to share stories as you gather. Keep a recorder running, and/or make notes. In future years, your family will have a collection of stories to add to their Gratitude lists on Thanksgiving.

Among the many things I’m thankful for is the technology that allows me to create this blog, and for all my many readers. I wish each and every one of you the very best Thanksgiving ever, and another year of blessings.

Write now: a list of things you are thankful for, and then go on to write about your memories of Thanksgivings, past and present. Gather a collection of your family’s traditional recipes. Do you always stick to the same ones or vary the menu? What other traditions do you have? Do you recall unusual events or circumstances? How were people arranged for eating — all around one table, or a separate one for children? Keep those fingers moving and get it all down!

Memory Is a Fragile and Fickle Thing

Fragments of memory shimmer like shards of glass in the sun. How do I make sense of them? How do I glue them together into a coherent vessel of story? Where is the thread of shared meaning?

“You remember the time we went to that party at the Myers’ house on the fourth of July?”
“No. Who were they?”
“You remember — I worked with Jerry in 1978 for a couple of years, and they had those dogs ...”
“Oh, yeah. His wife was Marilyn. But I never would have thought of that if you hadn’t mentioned it.”

“I still get mad every time I think of the way Max refused to ... ”
“Have you ever stopped to think that if he had done things your way, you never would have ...?”
“No. I never thought of it that way!”

I didn’t play or listen to a particular Kingston Trio album for several years after a high school party one night, where I sat snuggled up with a fellow I’d had my eye on for awhile. Six or seven years later, I found a copy on a clearance table and picked it up for next to nothing. As I listened to “Tom Dooley” and the MTA song, and all those others, I was right back in that darkened party room, sitting shoulder to shoulder with my heartthrob, and oh, my! My heart raced all over again, and the memory of his body heat warmed my right arm. But alas! After spinning that platter a couple of dozen times, I began remembering about remembering and no longer felt the intensity of the original passion. Today that string of listenings is indelibly imprinted in the memory and the original party is a dim image at the end of a long tunnel, showing the forms of two young people I hardly feel I know.

---

On some core level, we all know that memory is a fragile and fickle thing, yet we have a strong need to believe that it’s dependable, stable, and meaningful. In a very real way, our memories define who we are.

New discoveries about the way memory works continue to flow forth from neuroscience labs. These discoveries are beginning to shake that belief in the stability of memory. Stephanie West Allen, author of the Brains On Purpose blog, posted a link the other day on the Life Writers Forum to an article on the Science Daily.com site. The article, False Memories Affect Behavior, details the ease with which we can form false memories that are so real, we’d go to the wall to defend them. Other articles on the page shed further light on this and related topics.

So, if memory is so easily warped, so plastic and fluid, can we believe anything we remember? What’s the value of our memories?

My current understanding (subject to the next round of scientific discoveries), is that whatever memories we believe to be real are the ones that shape who we are today, and how we’ll interact, make decisions, and interpret our perceptions. They still define who we are, and that person we are today will change a bit, evolve gradually, as our memories develop, mature, fade and morph.

However we remember them, writing about those memories will help order them in threads of meaning. It will help us discover previously elusive memories, and shed new light on old ones. If those memories take on a rich patina from running through our fingers and neurons time after time, they’ll glow more brightly for having done so.

Although I’ll continue to loosely follow developments in memory research, I’ll hold fast to the ones I have and not worry about their basis in documentable fact, whatever that may be. After all, I am my father’s daughter, and he has long held to the tenet, “Don’t let a few facts get in the way of a good story.” So why should I be concerned about a few warped memories?

Write now: about times when your memories have morphed and merged into a stream of related ones. Have you replayed a specific memory so often that you became confused about the original event? How much do your memories overlap with those of your mate or siblings? Which memories are real? (That’s a trick question!)

The Power of Photos

Few things have the memory kicking power of digging through old photos or audiotapes. I’m in the middle of a visit with my father, and I’ve been sorting through old slides and photographs, keeping the scanner whirring. What a thrill to discover dozens of photos I missed last time I went through this collection. Many of them were pictures of me wearing some of my favorite clothes. One of the pictures shows the skirt I made the first year I entered the Make It Yourself With Wool contest. That’s quite a story, and it reminds me of several memories centered around wearing that specific skirt and sweater.

Other pictures star my baby brother. He was just the cutest kid, and I’d want lots of pictures of him in any event, but some of those pictures have a bonus. In the background I see various rooms of the house we lived in when he was born. What a jackpot! I am currently compiling a collection of stories about growing up in Los Alamos, and these pictures will help me add more vivid detail about the house and general area, and I can include some of those pictures as illustrations.

The next blast from the past occurred when I began transferring some very old cassette tapes to MP3 format using the tape deck my dad has connected to his computer. The very first tape I transferred has music my brand-new husband recorded on reel-to-reel tapes the first summer we were married from records played at the folk dancing club we attended. I’d been dancing with that club for two or three years before I met him, and this music pops me right back in that room at the Los Alamos Community Center from seven to nine on Tuesday evenings. About twenty years ago I transferred those songs to cassette tapes, just before the reel-to-reel recorder died. Now any form of tape is an endangered medium, but the MP3 recordings should remain accessible indefinitely on a DVD disk.

I also have some tape-recorded conversations with long-dead grandmothers, and it’s eerie hearing their voices again. More memories to store in the digital collection! I strongly urge you to record some family history chats with your relatives, and I suggest using a digital recorder or a microphone plugged into a laptop with the free Audacity audio capture program running.

By the way, you may have picked up on the fact that my dad has even more cool tech toys than I do. He never touched a computer until he retired about twenty years ago, but he’s certainly made up for lost time. It’s never too late to start using computers.

The last find of the day may be the most stunning. In 1992 I went to Japan on a Total Quality Management study tour. We spent a weekend in Kyoto, and I had totally forgotten that I had tape recorded many highlights of that weekend, including our visit to the Emperor’s Palace and a couple of other places. I found that on the reverse of a tape that holds some of my husband’s family history narrated by his mother. I got goosebumps when I heard my own voice describing Japanese tour bus protocol. There is no other way I could have recorded those thoughts and observations so accurately and immediately. Now I can add to the story I wrote about that trip shortly after I got home. I probably recorded over half my audio notes, because I had not labeled the tape. Lesson learned!

Write now: rummage through your collection of old photos, music, videos, and similar things. List and write about memories you find.

Find the Story

“Find the story” or “Where’s the story?” References to finding the story have been staring me in the eye in blogs, books and articles on a regular basis for weeks. There has to be a message here, something I need to learn.

I know about story. A story narrates action and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a element of suspense, and it is told from someone’s point of view. Those are the basics. That element of action is what differentiates story from mere description.

It’s simple enough to write a short piece that qualifies as a story. You can see the development of the action in a short story. You can put your finger on the drama and conflict, whether it is between people, a person against outside forces, or a person battling her own inclinations.

When you write a book-length memoir, the challenge increases exponentially. To keep readers interested, a memoir needs to have an ongoing thread of conflict and development, similar to the plot line in a novel. This story line laces the string of component stories together into an integrated whole. It is crucial in determining which experiences and elements of life to include, and how to arrange them within the memoir.

Finding that story line, especially in your own life, can be an agonizing experience. Many would-be memoirists become gridlocked in their thinking, suffering paralysis by analysis. They don’t find much help in books on writing memoir. All of the many books on my shelf are heavy on memory retrieval tips, and most discuss how to juice up your writing, but none tell you how to pull together a major project. If it’s mentioned at all, it’s with a vague “start writing and the structure will emerge” type of statement.

In The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing, I do describe tools for compiling random vignettes into a finished project, but I have not provided a recipe for selecting the best tool. Even I, a nuts-and-bolts person, have to agree that “start writing and the structure will emerge” is Truth.

But that belief just softened. A few days ago I found a tool that should work for people who want to get a grip on the overall stories within their lives. Serendipity led me to a post in the Philosophy thread on the phpBB Arts and Humanities bulletin board. This post poses the question, “What’s your lifestory? Just the long and short of it?” It urges people to write something like the thirty second “Elevator Speech” that sales people contrive for networking. You may find the posted stories instructive. The longest takes fifteen seconds to read aloud.

Only a couple of the posted replies show enough thought to make an overall life theme clear, but don’t let that throw you. This is powerful. I tried it. I picked up a pencil and pulled over the scrap of paper I'd been using to jot random notes. These words poured out of the pencil with no preliminary thought on my part:

Raised as a geek. Stood outside the window looking in at life. Discovered real life is on my side.

How about that? That's free writing at its best. I do not recall ever having that thought in my life, and simplistic as it is, this sums things up rather well. I never cease to be amazed at the insights my subconscious mind, aka my Muse Sarabelle, will send my way if I simply pick up a pencil and scrap of paper and start moving my hand, ala Natalie Goldberg's advice in this terrific interview.

I could take this one more step and indulge in the Six Word Memoir rage, distilling it down to

Felt alone. Discovered love surrounds me.

Hmm. I think I’ll go post that one on the Smith Magazine Six Word Memoir site or NPR. Who knows? I might make the next NPR Six Word Memoir gallery.

Write now: the long and short of your life. Write the first thing that comes to mind, and sweep over your whole life. Keep it short. Keep it very short. Sum it up in six words, and post on Smith Magazine or NPR. Please also share the long or short version in a comment here!

Archetype of Spring

Thoughts of spring instantly activate a mental image of a specific scene in my mind: a late April day near the end of my sophomore year in high school. I see the scene as an out-of-body experience. I’m standing near the gray, limed-oak table in the dining room where the rest of the family is still sitting at breakfast. I’m ready to leave for school. The sun is shining brightly outside the picture window as I gaze out on the ponderosa pines lining the rim of the canyon beyond the fence, and the fragrance of lilac mixed with apricot blossoms wafts through the open window.

The focal point of the scene is the dress I’m wearing. It is my personal archetype of spring. I made this dress of the butter-yellow calico, sprigged with blocks of tiny spring green leaf motifs, that my grandmother sent me as a birthday gift a couple of weeks earlier. It’s a simple dress, with a scoop neckline, simple elbow length sleeves, and gathered skirt, and I added a sewn-in cummerbund and sash of solid green, matching the print. I feel like the Spirit of Spring in this dress. I love it more than any I’ve had, before or since. My heart bursts with gratitude that my grandmother let me make my own decision about how to use the fabric.

Sinking into the scene, I recall the joy of being sixteen, with the ink hardly dry on my driver’s license, busy as a bee pollinating apple trees with the drama club’s full-score production of Oklahoma!, chairing a Rainbow Girls’ bake sale, helping write the class skit for Topper Review, practicing my string bass solo for Music Festival, and even studying now and then. Life was good!

For me, spring is synonymous with buttery yellow, joy and sunshine, lilacs and fruit blossom scents, the buzzing of bees, freedom from sweaters, sweeping projects, and infinite possibility.

Today I glance out the window, looking for swollen buds on the forsythia, scanning the sky for swollen buds on trees, and counting the days until the first coltsfoot blossoms appear on that small sunny slope just down the road, as they predictably do between March 21 and March 25. I think about looking for something to wear, something buttery yellow, to offset the lingering clouds of winter.

This memory is not a story, but it’s the stuff of which stories are made. It encapsulates the joy and unbridled optimism of being sixteen, sure that April Love is just around the corner, and experiencing life to the hilt in the meantime.

I have similar memories for fall, Christmas, Easter, and other annual events. I write these memories down, with every sensory detail, to jumpstart my memory when I do write of these times, or of spring, or anything remotely related. I store them in a a folder full of “joy fragments.” As they stand, they may not interest anyone else, but they are worth their weight in gold to me. I read them when I need a Bliss Break.

What image comes to your mind when you think of spring?

Write now: about moments of bliss you have experienced, such as a spring day, the feel and smell of a newborn nestled against your cheek, snuggling with a kitten, flying down the hill on a bicycle ... pour it all out in vivid living color, smell, skin sensation, and all.

A Tangee Treasure Trove of Memories

I’m cleaning out a drawer in the hall bathroom. This bathroom has seldom been used since our youngest left home, longer ago than I care to recall. Searching in the back of the drawer, I find a pink plastic tube that holds a stick of something that looks like green wax. On a hunch, I remove the clear cap, swivel up the stick, and apply a bit to the heel of my hand. The green stuff turns vivid cherry pink.

My thoughts fly back to the year I was twelve. I spent lots of time that year eyeing Tangee lipstick at the Woolworth’s makeup counter. The junior-sized fake gold tube with a slider bar on the side held a stick of translucent, pale orange waxey goo that was said to turn the perfect color for any woman, based on her body chemistry. A barrage of memories connect with this one: secretly putting Tangee on at school and spending the whole walk home chewing it off, wallets and purses big enough for lipstick, comb, mirror, and all your friends' school pics, the girl’s dressing room/restroom in junior high, nylons and garter belts, “DA” haircuts, Eileen swooning over Elvis, dreams of being kissed.

As the mental slideshow clicks off, I return to the present. There has to be a story here, I think. But what’s the story? Is it the yearning of a coltish young girl to race around the track? Is it the allure of makeup for women across generations? Is it the flavor of the fifties?

I ponder the difference between just writing about Tangee lipstick and how it worked, how I was only allowed to wear it for special dress-up, like Rainbow Girls formal meetings, and how I graduated to more garish colors, and turning the facts into a story. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. They go beyond the facts to make sense of them and breathe life into them. Rather than elaborate, I suggest you click over and read a super story about Tangee lipstick by Amy Kennely. Amy's story is a masterful example of how to turn a couple of facts into a compelling story that shows her personality, her mother's, her friend's, and even that of the cosmetic's salewoman at the dime store.

Maybe my story today will be about how the yearning of that young girl engulfs every area of her budding life, stifled as Amy's was by a mother who wasn't ready for a daughter in lipstick and high heels. Or ... maybe it will be about the way finding one small artifact can open a fire hydrant of memories, and the challenge of finding “the story” within the resulting pool. I'm waiting for my muse Sarabelle to nudge me one direction or another

Write now: pull out your kitchen “junk drawer” or a seldom explored box and find a story in it. Check out more of Amy Kenneley's stories for further inspiration.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal