tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62135006507919288572024-02-02T05:28:16.041-08:00Memoir MindA contemplative writing teacher explores the process of writing and reading memoir through reviews, discussions, links and reflections.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.comBlogger153125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-66629081207674760932018-09-16T13:19:00.000-07:002018-09-16T13:19:06.189-07:00Excavating Heart Berries<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglryyyoxhJama0sl4NFSvcOaUylRe9qX0pw82DdKQJfemB9N_AzoQPCpflDtHJP9pa8TnYkL0Dd0JXnIU7_dpd5bv5_DBnQdfOGSPzKIeUjb1qdA30D69ItySAxk2cj7iUUuiIeM3h3gI0/s1600/9ziuxQCCTbK%252BhQH9UzWkvw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglryyyoxhJama0sl4NFSvcOaUylRe9qX0pw82DdKQJfemB9N_AzoQPCpflDtHJP9pa8TnYkL0Dd0JXnIU7_dpd5bv5_DBnQdfOGSPzKIeUjb1qdA30D69ItySAxk2cj7iUUuiIeM3h3gI0/s320/9ziuxQCCTbK%252BhQH9UzWkvw.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I have spent a lot of the last 36 hours submerged in the memoir </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Excavation</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> by Wendy Ortiz. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79);">I anticipated reading this book for a long time. I read an <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-possibility-of-repair.html">essay by Ortiz</a> and most recently someone discussing how she does something miraculous with this memoir - Ortiz talks about having an affair with a teacher in his late twenties while she was a teenager, without casting him as a perpetrator or herself as a victim. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I was intrigued. At first, this was a personal memoir study/feminist theory kind of intrigued. Then the end of June, and the beginning of the Shambhala blowout happened, and I got even more intrigued. So I finally put it on hold and got it from the library. Still, I sat on my loaned copy for three weeks, and finally, up against the due date, I started to read it.</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Just as I was cracking it open, i went on a walk with a close friend, and she mentioned that she had just finished that very memoir and asked if I'd read it yet. I replied that I hadn't but I was just starting. </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">My friend's teenaged daughter, who had also read it, deemed it wasn't written very well. My friend and I talk about this kind of thing often, this tender thing of critiquing/judging art. What did she mean by “Not well written?” My friend reflected for herself that she agreed with her daughter, and in her case, not well written meant “Not well held,” “Without the right container,” “Unprocessed in flavor.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I've just finished the book - and I'm not sure how I feel yet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Some parts were deeply arousing, and I let them be - I let fantasy take over, I let myself feel her and his arousal then, and mine now, even if all three are confused. This felt volatile and I was angry at feeling aroused - alternately at him, then at her, then at myself. He should have controlled himself, she shouldn’t have written it in an arousing way, I shouldn’t have been aroused. So many shoulds.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The arousing parts are well written. Lots of the book is well written - processed, held, interesting to behold. Substantial parts of the book felt slapped together, too surface level, unexplored, unprocessed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A few weeks ago, I read the memoir </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Heart Berries </span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">by Terese Mailhot and I struggled with similar issues. Both of these memoirs are experimental in form; Mailhot's writing is far more lyrical, and her processing seems deeper than Ortiz’s. But also some parts of Mailhot's book felt too easy, not thought through enough. I felt a heat rise up in my jowls as I finished. Was I judging her writing this way because she is Native and doesn't fit my white, even though not scholarly and generally pro-lyrical, gaze?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Mailhot’s memoir has an interview at the end, which I gulped up. In it she says parts of the book may appear effortless, but those are the parts she had to work at the hardest. Ortiz cites Lidia Yuknavitch (</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Chronology of Water</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">); Mailhot, Sherman Alexie (</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">You Don’t Have To Tell Me You Love Me</span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">) - both people who wrote more lyrically looser memoirs that I thought could have been tighter despite their brilliance. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">So is this a newer form of memoir? Am I missing something here - the modernity my peers and near peers (all four of these authors are in their 40s and 50s) have picked up on? All four are higher educated in writing, or at least have workshopped with professionals, so who am I to say anything about how tight or loose their writing should be? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I feel a little small and unsure. I question whether my assessments of published, much less in-process work - my own and/or my clients’ - are accurate. They - I are/am not perfect. There's always more to learn. And yet. As I reconnect to my memoir and try to write about abuse and sexuality in nuance ways, I feel i want to do it differently - somewhat like they did, and yet different still.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Early on in writing, I wrote a review that never got published of a hip hop book for a magazine. The editor, who had specifically commissioned it from me, said even after a few revisions they found I was too focused on trying to make the book I was critiquing into another book. “You can't seem to review the book you read,” he said “You are reviewing how it compares to a non-existent version in your head.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(61, 76, 79); color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;" /></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3d4c4f; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;">That accurate critique of my critique comes back to me now. I realize now this is actually less about credentials or self-doubt, and more about trying to expand and learn, absorb possibilities, while still getting clear about what I prefer and what I need to do. I don't need to decide on whether one person's work is better than another's - I simply need to take from it what is worthwhile for my own writing and that of those I work with, and leave the rest. I am developing the resilience to not make conclusions about value or merit for things I don't understand. Instead I can rest with them, be curious, keep studying. </span></span></div>
miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-21173892904114065492018-07-31T14:54:00.000-07:002018-07-31T14:54:12.471-07:00Nanette and Nature of Storytelling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have finally watched <a href="https://youtu.be/5aE29fiatQ0">Nanette</a>, Hannah Gadsby's wonderful live comedy show.<br />
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Ilana and I haven't watched many comedy performances in the last ten years or so. We find stand up to be formulaic and disappointing, generally. We both loved <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappelle%27s_Show">Chappelle's Show </a>because of the meta aspect, as well as the incredible way humor was used as a direct tool against white anti-blackness. We also both love absurdist comedy sketch shows - Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, et al.<br />
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But people just kept telling us to watch <u>Nanette</u>, often without explanation. I don't want to give you much of one here, except to say that what Gadsby has to say about owning our own stories: how we tell them, who we tell them to, and with what tone - is all crucial and critical to memoir.<br />
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Comedy routines generally don't have much to do with memoir. But the direction Gadsby takes will help you re-think your own story/ies and how to present them on your own terms, without diminishing them, or denigrating yourself. Check it out and let me know what you think.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-91315996811210654962018-07-17T17:49:00.000-07:002018-07-17T17:49:19.155-07:00The Possibility of RepairIt's been a hell of a few weeks. There have been incredibly difficult times in the Shambhala community (read all about it <a href="http://insidespace.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-letter-from-miriam-on-current.html">here</a>), and just recently, someone posted an article I found related more for me to memoir than to our current situation in Shambhala.<br />
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It's <a href="https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/feature/punishment-is-not-justice">here</a>.<br />
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In the article, memoirist Wendy C. Ortiz discusses her own memoir, <i>Excavation</i>, as well as numerous novels and her own experience as a psychotherapist. A lot of what she says resonates with my own process of telling about my childhood sexual abuse, and with the complexity of books I have discussed here, such as Zoe Zolbrod's <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2017/05/telling.html">The Telling</a> as well as Claire Dederer's memoir and my discussion of it here in <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2018/05/on-victimhood.html">On Victimhood</a>.<br />
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Because things are so difficult and full at my end, I am not going to say more than this for now. I am giving myself permission to simply post things I find interesting, without much commentary, and link them to other writing I have done at depth. I look forward to what reading Ortiz's memoir will do in terms of affecting my own telling about abuse, as well as conversations I have with clients I work with in terms of how to tell about their own experiences of abuse.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-90588990682559173692018-05-15T09:23:00.000-07:002018-05-15T09:23:09.198-07:00No One Wants to Hear It?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Women get the message early on that no one wants to hear our stories. This is a real message - in that, we really do receive it. It is not real, though, in that, actually, people *do* want to hear our stories.<br />
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When we work on our affirmations only, when we encourage ourselves and each other in limited quantity, we miss the systemic sexism that keeps women telling their stories down. I've been reading Rebecca Solnit more lately, and while I have definite critiques for her (she never mentions racism, not once, not explicitly, in <i>Men Explain Things To Me</i>, which is a serious chronic white feminism issue), she is incredibly articulate about the silencing of women. And this is crucial for women writing memoir, and those reading women's memoir, to consider.<br />
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So along with<a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-navel-gazing-isnt-insult.html"> this recent post on Melissa Febos</a>, I wanted to include some encouraging - and enlightening - passages from Solnit.<br />
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In describing an incident where a man mansplained her own recently released book to her at a party, and neither she nor her friend could get a word in edgewise to explain it was her book, she wrote:<br />
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I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.</blockquote>
On describing a Native Canadian feminist movement, Solnit reminds us that women's stories must be spoken if we are ever to see the larger, systemic trends:<br />
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One of the most exciting new political movements on Earth is the Native Canadian indigenous rights movement, with feminist and environmental overtones, called Idle No More. On December 27, shortly after the movement took off, a Native woman was kidnapped, raped, beaten, and left for dead in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Ontario, by men whose remarks framed the crime as retaliation against Idle No More. Afterward, she walked four hours through the bitter cold and survived to tell her tale. Her assailants, who have threatened to do it again, are still at large.</blockquote>
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We have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident. We have dots so close they’re splatters melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects them, or names that stain. In India they did. They said that this is a civil rights issue, it’s a human rights issue, it’s everyone’s problem, it’s not isolated, and it’s never going to be acceptable again. It has to change. It’s your job to change it, and mine, and ours.</blockquote>
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Silencing is a symptom; speaking up is a cure. However, not all of us feel safe to do so - which is part and parcel with the same conditions that created out traumas. So get the support you need and take the risks you can. And if a tiny - or not so tiny voice - claims no one wants to hear it, share it with a friend. Remember why you wrote it. Remember those who have inspired you to write about it, and know they, too, doubted their right to write. Then, at least write it, even if you don't share it. Help alter the sea change currently in the works.<br />
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<br />miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-78268625462133680292018-05-10T09:29:00.002-07:002018-05-10T09:29:37.220-07:00On Victimhood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have so many things to say about Claire Dederer's memoir <a href="http://clairedederer.com/love-and-trouble/">Love and Trouble</a>* that I can't possibly fit them all into one blog post. Mainly, I find I just want to highlight her words and share them. So I will focus this post on the most highlighted part of the book - her final chapter - "On Victimhood."<br />
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One of the things I struggle with the most in my memoir, currently titled Not Alone, is how to talk about sexuality. How to write about it? Really. Really really. When I first started writing about it, it seemed clear - because it is clear - that I was strongly shaped by a couple of young victimhood experiences with sexuality. Older boys - not yet men, but certainly with more agency than me - taking advantage of me sexually. These were both traumas, the two sets of experiences, and at first I thought my memoir was all about how they affected my sexuality. Then I thought, "Well, losing my dad at age 12 certainly affected my sexuality as well." That's true, also.<br />
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The fact is, the more I wrote, the less focused on victimhood I was. The more interested in nuance, in exploring all the subtle effects of growing up, socialized female, being cisgender and bisexual. Some traumas, some beautiful explorations. It's possible my young body enjoyed some of the victimizing encounters - that's not uncommon, even if they cause trauma - but that doesn't mean I "asked for it" or even that they are less traumatic (pro tip: if your body enjoys something traumatic that happens to you sexually, it makes it EVEN HARDER to unpack all the shame).<br />
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So when I came upon this final chapter in Dederer's memoir, which I was already relating to strongly for its exploration of how her sexuality came up for question again in her mid forties, I was blown away by statements like these. I feel like I am phoning in this blog post just quoting a lot from Dederer, but the fact is, in this final chapter she says so much of what I have wondered about, including feeling icky writing it.<br />
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I only wanted to tell stories of how sex had happened to me. Mary Karr has said that the reason she wrote <i>Cherry</i>, her memoir of teenage lust, was that teen sex was never written about, just teen victimhood. Now that I’ve had a whack at it, I can see why—it is easier to write the victimhood. The victimhood was like a vehicle that took me closer to what really interested me, what was obsessing me in middle age as it had done in youth: sex. But if I wrote only about assault and predators, I didn’t have to face myself as a sexual person.</blockquote>
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Sex was a home and a site of purest simplicity. You just were. It pains me to write these words more than any other words in this book: I liked it. It’s still so hard to say it. The premise of this book is that I was wild and unhappy as a teen, and my unhappiness stemmed from my sex-crazed nature. But what I really felt was what I feel now: Life was hard, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and I was profoundly, near-fatally afraid of failure, and sex was the only thing that made me feel better. And who doesn’t want to feel better?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The conflation of victimhood and desire is very hard to talk about, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, at least for me. Even writing that sentence makes me afraid, as a feminist, that I am saying something wrong. But for me the freest and purest expression of sex has come with the playacting removal of volition. Being constrained in some manner, whether by hands or ties or just the physical weight of another’s body. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Of course the moments—and there are more than I’ve told here; a list—when I’ve actually been assaulted were the opposite of pure and free. This is the complication. We all understand that rape isn’t really a sexual act.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Two facts, in conflict and simultaneously true. I can be excited by the idea of victimhood and still have been victimized. Even if I’ve turned into grist for the sexual mill, nonetheless, I didn’t get to choose to be victimized that first time, that first among many. I didn’t get to choose the historical circumstances that have complicated my life. I get to own and even enjoy my excitement over being dominated or punished, but I also get to be pissed at a culture that didn’t protect me.</blockquote>
In this #metoo moment (or, to be more accurate, white female popularization of #metoo, which began long ago under the guidance and care of women of color with less public awareness paying attention to it), words like this feel all the more risky and also essential. Unpacking the complexity of sexuality, especially victims' sexualities, is not only respectful but also crucial. We cannot rest in the place of polarization and dualism, as tempting as it is. Not only do we wind up dismissing those who victimize others, we other the victims themselves/ourselves.<br />
<br />
Dederer's book has upped my own game in my own memoir.<br />
<br />
<br />
*I also want to name that this title is almost the same as a brilliant short collection of fiction from 1973 by Alice Walker, <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169572.In_Love_Trouble">In Love and Trouble, Stories of Black Women</a></i>. Please read this as well. It's a memoir blog, otherwise I'd discuss that, too!miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-57525348277164220382018-05-01T19:43:00.001-07:002018-05-01T19:43:20.155-07:00Understanding Blooms Later<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Death bloomed early for me, like the Corpse Flower, one of the first in spring, which cultivates a rotting scent to attract its fly food. Ugly, complex, and 100% natural, it blooms long before the conventionally beautiful blossoms like Dutchman's Breeches and Trillium.<br />
<br />
But awareness that others experience this kind of loss bloomed late. For a long time I thought I was alone, experienced no one who could relate to me, even when I joined an early Internet listserv for a sociology student's research study of young people who lost both their parents before the age of 30. Most of the people in the group said they had loved their parents, felt close to them; no one else reported a complex grief like that of mine about my mom.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Bullshit_Night_in_Suck_City"><i>Another Bullshit Night in Suck City</i> by Nick Flynn</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Heartbreaking_Work_of_Staggering_Genius">Dave Eggers' <i>A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniu</i>s</a>, and so many other memoirs, blogs, and essays have helped me find others who have had complex grief in their orphan hoods. And, with time and a lot of therapy, I even began– am still beginning–to see how much loss there is in living relationships between parents and children. Understanding my friends whose mothers, in particular, they have conflict or trauma with that remain deeply unresolved, even though their mothers remain alive.<br />
<br />
<br />
I think it's because <a href="http://bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com/">Samantha Irby</a>'s book <i>We Are Never Meeting In Real Life </i>seems to NOT be about complex grief that it struck me so strongly. <br />
<a name='more'></a>In the beginning, the collection's essays are more about being fat and black and having mental health challenges than losing her parents. So I was totally taken aback at her essay "Happy Birthday "in which she finds out her father, long not active in her life due to alcoholism, has died. The day before her 18th birthday.<br />
<br />
From "Happy Birthday":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My aunt called. My father had had two heart attacks and a stroke. Or two strokes and a heart attack. Fuck, these are the kinds of details that blur. I can tell you with near certainty that I was wearing an oatmeal-colored knit turtleneck sweater, but not the ratio of heart attacks to strokes my dad had at the end of his life.</blockquote>
Now we were talking. Someone else who could crack dark jokes about complicated parental loss, point to connections between those same parents' treatment of her and her challenges now, with love, humor, and direct honesty.<br />
<br />
The "Happy Birthday" essay is almost half way through the book. To be honest before then I was ready to stop reading at any point. I found the writing amusing, but not quite open enough. But after that essay, an egg had cracked open. I was hooked. In a further essay, "Nashville Hot Chicken," she goes on to describe taking her now wife on an early date road tripping to Nashville to spread her dad's ashes years after his death. Yes. This is what I read Caitlin Doughty, the famous ask-me-anything coroner, for. Doughty is one of the only writers I've found who will describe cremains and the horrid humor that is trying to figure out what to do with them. And still, for Doughty it's not personal, not yet, not like it is for Irby. And me.<br />
<br />
From "Nashville Hot Chicken":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In hindsight I realize that that is a heavy fucking thing to ask a normal person with actual human feelings to accompany you to do. In my mind it was like Weekend at Bernie’s, but in real life she has a mom she talks to on the phone once or twice a week and isn’t used to my whole LOL I KILLED MY MOM shtick. This could be an emotional minefield.</blockquote>
Before Irby starts writing earnestly about death, queerness kept me coming back– antics with sex toys, hoping lesbian bed death is real because of a lack of sex drive. But my heart sprang open when she invited complicated death into her essays.<br />
<br />
Is it just because I can relate? Is it because I'm grateful to see anyone write candidly about death? Is it the late late bloomer in me who finally gets to hear other orphan stories I can relate to? Long after learning to make do, with orphan stories I don't relate to, or with still-living parents and difficult relationship tales?<br />
<br />
The fact is, orphanhood is a huge part of my identity. Irby is only a few years older than me – we have a lot generationally in common. It's the combination of her being enough like me and cracking open something hard and taboo we aren't supposed to discuss - especially things I relate to like death and queerness - that keep me reading.<br />
<br />
In the middle of reading others collections of essays, letters, and research on orphans, a book in which orphanhood is a substantial influence – but not the main subject – is extremely powerful and shows me ways to integrate.<br />
<br />miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-2106860310916045452018-04-17T15:06:00.000-07:002018-04-17T15:06:13.189-07:00Stunning Piece from Junot Diaz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma">Here's an amazing piece by Junot Diaz in the latest New Yorker.</a>*<br />
<br />
Trigger warning that he talks about being the victim of severe sexual abuse as a child, and how he re-enacted many of those same dynamics - only now as the perpetrator - as an adult with his female partners.<br />
<br />
I have been thinking about victimhood a lot lately, as a part of the whole #metoo situation, but also because there are parts of my sexual history that, in my opinion and in some of my readers' opinions, fall into a strictly grey area. Places where my relationship with someone perpetuated my own victimhood, and I didn't make a conscious choice to continue that, but somehow I was also choosing to be there and not saying no.<br />
<br />
I am struck by this same ambiguity - without evading responsibility - in Diaz's article.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
I struggled with Diaz's fiction for a long time. I knew in my heart his male characters' machismos were about more than being players - they had some deeper resonance of disconnection and possibly trauma.<br />
<br />
About a year ago, I saw him give a talk at UW Madison, and he blew me out of the water. He was frank, open, direct, and clear. At one point he said something he mentions in this article - he stated directly there is a long legacy of sexual abuse in Dominican families. He says in the article that this was his answer for a long time - a way of pointing to what he experienced without stating it outright. After he said that in the talk, I turned to the friend I was attending with, and we both agreed - he had been abused sexually as a child. We could just feel it.<br />
<br />
So it is powerful to have him name it. And I am grateful to that friend, who is Mexican-American, for helping me parse through my white experience of his Dominican-American descriptions of relationships with women, to find deeper, more nuanced understanding past my knee-jerk judgements. It helped me stay open and appreciate his work, even in the middle of discomfort. That openness feels paid off reading this article, where I see validated the understanding that even being a perpetrator is far more complicated than we want to acknowledge.<br />
<br />
I hope to see many more stories like this emerge - not as apologies, not as exploitation of having been abusive, but so we can really feel the richness of the legacies of sexual abuse in so many cultures, and start to understand all the ways we inadvertently keep them alive.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>*As I wobble my way back into blogging regularly, some weeks I am letting myself lean on posting links to something I have read recently that I think you will appreciate, with just a few comments. I'm trying to find balance and sustainability in blogging - imagine that!</i>miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-454215787488397652018-03-29T15:11:00.000-07:002018-03-29T15:11:02.610-07:00A Powerful Quick Share From Jen LoudenWow.<br />
<br />
All I have to say is Wow.<br />
<br />
Here's a recent Jen Louden blog post, wherein she reveals the memoir she has worked on for the last four years doesn't work. The title is <a href="https://jenniferlouden.com/memoir-doesnt-work-im-not-devastated/">My Memoir Doesn't Work and Why I Am Not Devastated About It.</a><br />
<br />
My favorite part is in the middle, but read all of it:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;">What I mainly feel is light and peaceful. </span><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;">That’s because I</span> <span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;">have learned and changed and grown so damn MUCH from writing this book and I wouldn’t change that for anything. </span><span style="border: 0px; font-weight: 700; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;">Writing these 500 pages (!!) has been more powerful than any personal work I have done.</span></blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><blockquote class="tr_bq">
I am a different person because I took on the shaping of my story. I am a different person because I wrestled with and made some sense of the suffering and ugliness. I am a different person because I stretched my self as a writer to choose to make the dross into meaning. Into story. </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="border: 0px; font-weight: 700; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;">We become the person who can write the story we want to write by writing it.</span><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;"> And even if the story doesn’t come out beautifully shaped and ready for readers, </span><i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;">even so,</i><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; vertical-align: baseline;"> we carry the boons of the quest back for ourselves and our community.</span></blockquote>
<br />
"We become the person who can write the story we want to write by writing it."<br />
<br />
This sounds reductive or iterative, but it is so so true. And it really takes me back to the zero ground place of - if we aren't writing memoir in order to write memoir, then we are writing for the wrong reason. Publishing and success are far from guaranteed, and what they bring will absolutely not match our preconceptions. So get something out of the journey, or stop doing it altogether.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-29284182601889486562018-03-15T09:01:00.003-07:002018-03-15T09:01:37.022-07:00Whose Death Is It, Anyway?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXrgPKvrE0zPUS3Zh_KlBWhbWbQovtBFhKjVjH075EWoCQANijjz5Za8Lc9pkR7w8dmlApuDh3vjPM6qN4viJw733pknpWAKYCmBpGnZwKgmdlldWbgT6gMF9YOLaPBzyBWel1No1F76uh/s1600/IMG_5016.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXrgPKvrE0zPUS3Zh_KlBWhbWbQovtBFhKjVjH075EWoCQANijjz5Za8Lc9pkR7w8dmlApuDh3vjPM6qN4viJw733pknpWAKYCmBpGnZwKgmdlldWbgT6gMF9YOLaPBzyBWel1No1F76uh/s320/IMG_5016.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">‘Imagine,’ I said, back then, to some friends,
in an earnest attempt to explain, ‘imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes,
all of them. All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes
into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard.
So you’re all on the floor. Right? So the thing is, you all share the same kind
of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel
anything other than completely alone. <i>That’s
</i>what it is like!’ </span><!--EndFragment--> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
-Helen MacDonald, <i>H is for Hawk </i></blockquote>
Today is the 28th anniversary of my father's death. My father. Before I revised my memoir to make the naming of various characters consistent - always calling my mom's dad Bapa, always calling Dad by that name instead of "my dad" or "my father," a reader noted that whenever I referred to Dad, I used the first person possessive. "My father's death," I would write, as if the death happened to only me, or to only him and I was the only child.<br />
<br />
Only, I am not. I am the youngest of three. And my siblings definitely suffered.<br />
<br />
My memoir is about my loss, not about theirs. But I still found it an uncanny consistency that I didn't call him, "our father." It's how I tell my story - this is my loss, and not just because I am owning my story, but because in my story, I am alone.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
In fact, this is the new, focused, working title of the memoir: <i>Not Alone.</i> The process of figuring out I am not alone in loss, in death, in trauma - that process/those processes have saved my sanity. That is really what my journey is about, where the survival is.<br />
<br />
For a long time, my experience was exactly that of the Helen MacDonald quote above, and I am pretty sure it was that way for my brothers. I know it was like that for Mom. I know she and I fought all the time in my early teens, competing over who missed Dad more. Because we felt alone, we felt the other didn't understand, couldn't understand our loss.<br />
<br />
It is somewhat the nature of loss in a society like the one I live in, North American predominately patriarchal, capitalistic, and white. Loss is something you suffer alone. It is stronger to do it alone. But it is also part of how I personally perceived I could get by - by isolating. And, in the end, I think it caused me more pain than good, as so many of our survival mechanisms do.<br />
<br />
Not that I blame myself for that. I am very resourceful and did the best I could do, just as I am doing now.<br />
<br />
Not all death anniversaries are hard. This one is medium so far. I feel tender and highly sensitive, wary of social interaction and as if I am a small child. But not so shut down that I don't remember my newer, more recent wisdom: to remember others have suffered similar losses, to bring them to mind and wish them love and relief from suffering, to see not that I have it "less hard" or "more hard" but simply that I am "not alone."<br />
<br />
This is the key to all of our stories - finding where the universal and specific meet and diverge. And finding how to own our stories without excluding all those - familial, cultural, social - who also were a part, in direct or indirect ways.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-7833939093268509692018-03-06T11:25:00.000-08:002018-03-06T11:25:01.227-08:00Why Navel Gazing Isn't An Insult<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyB6b6PFx2GirlflFD4PmcwR5R4tLhb1F_UVdIFIsiabzuD0hJUYb4GAL8WDxkSnPddQ0xso2E_S3chsPqwaKvYdoFwnHzfJmuNouDQ-gDtFjGhfjORRRIsbT3dnLFHxqrVVbY3inS9-zG/s1600/heart%253Aupside+down+heart.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyB6b6PFx2GirlflFD4PmcwR5R4tLhb1F_UVdIFIsiabzuD0hJUYb4GAL8WDxkSnPddQ0xso2E_S3chsPqwaKvYdoFwnHzfJmuNouDQ-gDtFjGhfjORRRIsbT3dnLFHxqrVVbY3inS9-zG/s320/heart%253Aupside+down+heart.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
Wow. Where Have I Been?<br />
October of 2017 ate me alive and only recently has spit me back out.<br />
<br />
So as I re-group and get my weekly blog schedule going again, I am going to just put <a href="https://www.pw.org/content/the_heartwork_writing_about_trauma_as_a_subversive_act">this amazing powerful holy fuck interview with Melissa Febos right here</a> for you to read...<br />
<br />
<b>Some juicy key quotes:</b><br />
"<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">It is a concern I have heard from countless students and peers, and which I always greet with a combination of bafflement and frustration. Since when did telling our own stories and deriving their insights become so reviled? It doesn’t matter if the story is your own, I tell them over and over, only that you tell it well. We must always tell stories so that their specificity reveals some universal truth. "</span><br />
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">I am complicit. I have committed this betrayal of my own experience innumerable times. But I am done agreeing when my peers spit on the idea of writing as transformation, as catharsis, as—dare I say it—therapy. Tell me, who is writing in their therapeutic diary and then dashing it off to be published? I don’t know who these supposedly self-indulgent (and extravagantly well-connected) narcissists are. But I suspect that when people denigrate them in the abstract, they are picturing women. I’m finished referring to stories of body and sex and gender and violence and joy and childhood and family as “navel-gazing.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">"I polled the audience—a room packed with a few hundred readers and writers. I asked for a show of hands: “Who here has experienced an act of violence, abuse, extreme disempowerment, sexual aggression, harassment, or humiliation?” The room fell silent as the air filled with hands."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">Who was I, a twenty-six-year-old woman, a former junkie and sex worker, to presume that strangers should find my life interesting? I had already learned that there were few more damning presumptions than that of a young woman thinking her own story might be meaningful. Besides, I was writing a Very Important Novel. Just like Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth or Hemingway, those men of renowned humility.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;"><br /></span>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif; line-height: 1.7777777778rem; margin-bottom: 1.4444444444rem;">
“No way,” I told my professor. I was determined to stick to my more humble presumption that strangers might be interested in a story <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">made up</em> by a twenty-six-year-old former junkie sex worker.</div>
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Do you see how easy it is to poke holes in this logic?"</div>
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif; line-height: 1.7777777778rem; margin-bottom: 1.4444444444rem;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a>"Let’s face it: If you write about your wounds, it is therapy. Of course, the writing done in those fifteen minutes was surely terrible by artistic standards. But it is a logical fallacy to conclude that <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">any</em> writing with therapeutic effect is terrible. You don’t have to be into therapy to be healed by writing. Being healed does not have to be your goal. But to oppose the very idea of it is nonsensical, unless you consider what such a bias reveals about our values as a culture. Knee-jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and bad science has always been the disguise of our national prejudices."<br />
<div style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif; line-height: 1.7777777778rem; margin-bottom: 1.4444444444rem;">
"Acknowledging all of this will not get your book published. Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the insanely hard work of making art. There are plenty of mediocre memoirs out there, just as there are plenty of mediocre novels. I labored endlessly to craft my memoir. But after it was published, I still fielded insinuations that I had gotten away with publishing my diary. Interviewers asked only about my experiences and never about my craft."</div>
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"Writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing. In order to write that book, I had to invest the time and energy to conduct research and craft plot, scenes, description, dialogue, pacing—all the writer’s jobs, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">and</em> I had to destroy my own self-image and face some unpalatable truths about my own accountability. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It made me a better person, and it made a better book.</div>
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Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery."</div>
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"To name just one of many such statistics in a grossly underreported set of crimes: The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey recently found that 46.4 percent of lesbians, 74.9 percent of bisexual women, and 43.3 percent of heterosexual women have been the victims of sexual violence.</div>
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But we shouldn’t write about it because people are fatigued by stories about trauma? No. We have been discouraged from writing about it because it makes people uncomfortable. Because a patriarchal society wants its victims to be silent. Because shame is an effective method of silencing."</div>
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"It is about having abandonment issues.</div>
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This sort of admission might make you cringe. But white straight male writers are writing about the same things—they are just overlaying them with a plot about baseball, or calling their work fiction. Men write about their daddy issues constantly, and I don’t see anyone accusing them of navel-gazing."</div>
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"Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.</div>
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You write it, and I will read it."</div>
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miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-23606548663340592502017-10-10T13:41:00.002-07:002017-10-10T13:42:26.157-07:00Poetry and Prose in One Memoir: Sherman Alexie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For years now, I've read Sherman Alexie's poetry collections and novels. I've always enjoyed the edge of fiction/nonfiction he skirts, willingly and openly, in all his writing. But his brand new memoir, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31420708-you-don-t-have-to-say-you-love-me">You Don't Have to Say You Love Me</a>, is the first time I've read non-fiction by him, even though he has written many articles and essays.<br />
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It was suggested to me to listen to his memoir rather than read it, because he narrates it, in a loving and living way. However, I found after a few chapters I also wanted to be able to read it. I could just tell he was also writing in poetry, and I wanted to see it on the page. I also wanted to be able to quote passages like this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My little sister doesn’t remember that photograph. She doubts it exists. “You’re always making up stuff from the past,” she said. “And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.” </blockquote>
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“That’s just a fancy way of calling me a liar,” I said. </blockquote>
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“If the moccasin fits, then wear it,” she said.</blockquote>
He has imaginary conversations with friends in his head about whether or not he made up a quote he wants to use in the memoir. He continually questions the past, memory, authorship - taking us way beyond "unreliable narrator" and deep into the territory of the mind. I love it.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Simon, a beautiful storyteller, doesn’t remember ever saying such a thing. “That sounds like something I might say,” he said to me. “But I don’t know if I have ever said that particular thing.” I don’t remember when I first learned of the quote. Did I read it in one of Simon’s poems or stories? If so, then why doesn’t Simon remember that he wrote it? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Can a writer forget something that he’s written in one of his own books? Yes, of course. I wrote my first novel over two decades ago, and fans often stump me by asking questions about passages that I don’t remember writing. So perhaps I read that quote somewhere else and have mistakenly attributed it to Simon. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(In talking to another teacher in his head about this quote and attribution:) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“So maybe I’m the one who thought it first?” I said. “And I want to honor you and Simon.” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Well,” Alex said. “Crediting your thoughts to your mentors sounds more like you’re honoring yourself.” </blockquote>
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“That’s funny,” I said. “And sad. Is my ego the source of all my deception and self-deception?” </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Perhaps,” Alex said. “Since you’ve just invented this entire conversation about storytelling and truth that you and I never had, and put it in the first chapter of your memoir, then I’m just going to call you the unreliable narrator of your own life.”</blockquote>
But it's the poetry. The way the poetry covers a lot of the same territory as the prose but - differently, because that's how poetry rolls. He uses the density and power of poetry and line breaks to tell the truth in direct ways:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
At my mother’s funeral...</blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A cousin said, “Lillian was </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our last connection to the ancient </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Stories and songs. Lillian was </blockquote>
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Also a mean and foulmouthed </blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Woman who scolded everybody. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Right now, I bet you Lillian just arrived </blockquote>
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In Heaven and is scolding Jesus </blockquote>
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For playing the wrong welcoming song.” </blockquote>
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We all laughed and laughed </blockquote>
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Because, yes, my mother was </blockquote>
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Exactly the kind of mortal </blockquote>
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Who challenged the Gods. </blockquote>
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She was the reservation Medea. </blockquote>
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She was the indigenous Antigone. </blockquote>
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But just imagine how it felt to be </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Her fragile child. I never stopped </blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Being afraid of her.</blockquote>
And not long after, in prose:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And, if she could do it from the afterlife, my mother would schedule a giant powwow on her grave. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Okay, folks, welcome to the Seventeenth Annual Lillian Alexie Gravesite Powwow. Every song at this powwow will be a Special for Lillian. Every Grand Entry, Owl Dance, Blanket Dance, and Happy Dance will be for Lillian. And, yes, the venerable Prairie Chicken Dance will also be for Lillian. Okay, next drum is the Lillian Alexie Memorial Singers. This song will be an Intertribal. That means everybody gets to dance. Even you white people. Yes, that means all of you white people will also be dancing for Lillian. So, okay, Lillian Alexie Memorial Singers, whenever you’re ready, you can take it away!”</blockquote>
The whole memoir is a great exploration of what it is like to grow up with - then survive - a very unstable and powerful mother. It's also a beautiful pastiche of poetry and prose, showing where they overlap and where they serve separate purposes. It's an incredible journey through indigenous life, identity, and North American racism. Finally, it's a fine line exploration about running over the space between sanity and severe mental health challenges through multiple generations.<br />
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So many reasons to read it.<br />
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<br />miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-16791800868229315952017-09-05T11:24:00.000-07:002017-09-05T11:24:30.448-07:00Daily Life as Memoir Topic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Recently, we've been reading <i>Life Work</i> by Donald Hall for Read and Write.<br />
I chose this book for a few reasons.<br />
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<b>1. It is a "quiet" book</b> - very little drama, mostly reflective, and not really about a specific happening but more the intersection between life and work for a famous poet.<br />
<br />
<b>2. Donald Hall is an amazing poet</b> - his collections on his wife Jane Kenyon's death and after are powerful poetry memoir (<i>Without</i> and <i>Otherwise</i>) and his memoir about her death is a beautiful and also quiet reflection on loss. But what happens if this same poet reflects on simple family memories (we-moir) and contemplative topics?<br />
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<b>3. During the writing of the book itself, Hall is diagnosed with liver cancer; </b>this is after he and Jane both lived through bouts of cancer previously (and Kenyon dies of cancer two years later, which he doesn't know will happen as he writes this book). In other words, the memoir is both about the past and present, but also includes a dramatic happening as it occurs in real-time. Real-time memoir is a powerful experience - not looking back - or in this case, not just looking back - but living with a major event as it happens. He recovers, as we know because he published this book over 20 years ago and still lives today, but he doesn't know it at the time - and so he believes he is facing his own death square on and writes from that place.<br />
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Aging. Facing death. Impermanence. Work and when it is boring and joyful. Creative process as a daily practice. These are topics which can be dramatic and plot-driven, but are, for the most part, actually quiet when it comes to ordinary lives. So quiet we can overlook them as "something to write about" and instead go for what is big and stands out - a marked and traumatic loss, when we stop creating all together or finally put together the award-winning book and publish it.<br />
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Books like <i>Life Work</i> remind us that the meat of our lives - and work - is actually what we would construe as boring - simple, repetitive, daily, routine.<br />
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But this is where the magic is: in routine and ritual, in relationship and regard. Its good to read memoir like this especially when you doubt the worth of daily life as topic. Granted, Hall could publish something this simple because he was - and still is - well known. I am not talking about a strategy for publication. But if you doubt the worth of your daily life and doubt its worth as topic in specific; if you believe you need to have lived an amazing life (to the positive or negative bent), or have an exciting daily life to even write about it, think again. Read the quiet memoirs, the essays that lean more towards truths like death and loss, inspiration and connection in quiet, regular, daily ways.<br />
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Let it be detailed. Let it be tedious, even. Explore the details in your writing, and you will begin to wake up to them in your life. Let your work influence your life in this way, and vice versa. This interfusion strengthens your writing and your life both.<br />
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<br />miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-89230582703706474682017-08-29T13:31:00.000-07:002017-08-29T13:31:09.709-07:00Memoir with Recovery (and Dogs) Included<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Remember how a few months ago I wrote <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2017/04/recovery-isnt-covered.html">a post</a> about the absence of recovery stages in memoir?<br />
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Not long after, I picked up a copy of <a href="http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/first-look-at-my-memoir-the-education-of-will">The Education of Will</a> by Patricia McConnell. I auditioned it through the library (which I often do, before being sure I like it enough/will loan it enough/it has enough valuable passages) and then bought it.<br />
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I was very surprised to find that it not only satisfied my desire for covering the more "boring" aspects of recovery, it also is a memoir about far more than dogs. Which is good. Cuz really, I am a cat person, and have, for the most part, avoided memoirs about dogs (minus <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/251789.A_Three_Dog_Life">Three Dog Life</a> by Abigail Thomas, which is also not just about dogs).<br />
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Patricia McConnell is a famous dog behaviorist, whose counsel runs across the NPR waves from little ole Wisconsin, where we both live. I hadn't heard of her, but many folks bought the memoir expecting more "dog" and got "too much personal"; I was unattached, and was glad for the more personal aspects. Overall, it's a lovely balance of the journey of her recovery and her dog's recovery, multi-layered with skillful writing and lovely scenes of southwestern Wisconsin.<br />
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But what I find most satisfying is how she is not shy about how long it took her to recover from her PTSD and what was needed to do it. She details the therapist visits (though not ad nauseum), and how she got worse before she got better. She is clear that it was not a single uphill journey with her dog's behavioral issues; more like the hills and valleys of the rural area in Wisconsin where she lives. This honesty alone is worth it for me; it so happens the writing is also very strong and clear.<br />
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Here are some great passages - various selections showing her powerful language and giving us a sense of how long it takes/took:<br />
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Once my story spilled out to Anne (her therapist), I felt as though I'd slammed into my past at a million miles an hour, as if into an impenetrable wall...The term "fell apart" had an entirely new meaning for me now. It felt like "I" -- whoever that was -- was strewn about in the water like the result of a dramatic crash...I blurted out to the people in my face that I'd be raped -- that was the easiest story to describe...I found myself unable to speak after having finally given voice to much of what had happened in my past...</blockquote>
Then, in mentioning Will, her current traumatized dog's uncle, Luke, she hints at the length of recovery:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(he) lay beside me night after night, licking my face, curled up against me. His warmth and his love helped me to pull out of the high-speed emotional spirals, staying alive one breath at a time.</blockquote>
It's powerful to me that the word "recovery" is most often used in the addiction world. But it has a strong parallel with surviving from trauma, and that last passage, "staying alive one breath at a time" really captures that.<br />
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Finally, she gets down to the direct brass tacks about how long - and how much courage - healing takes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I would like to tell you that after the truth about my past came out, I was soon able to process it and move on. On the contrary, all of my fears became conscious ones...As Anne told me in one of our talks, "There is a reason why people repress things."</blockquote>
And she shows us the work, like a good math student - journaling, exploring her inner voices, Hoffman Process, yoga, and more...only to say (with 60 pages still left in the book):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I doubt there is any one thing that can help those who are recovering from multiple traumas. But accepting everything that was inside of me, especially the fear I had squelched for decades, made life profoundly easier. It was only one part of what I did during my recovery -- yet it helped. A lot. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
However, life continued to remind me that you never close the book on dealing with your past. You just keep reading the chapters over and over, until you begin to understand them on a deeper level.</blockquote>
Finally, near the end, McConnell states again clearly how long it takes, how the work is never quite done:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Recovery is an ongoing process that requires courage, honesty, and a kick-ass support system. Whatever happens to you during and after a trauma doesn't disappear as if it never happened. It just gets easier to deal with, if you know how to face it. Stuff comes up - it will always come up - and you have to look it in the eye and back it down, like a dog standing nose to nose with a ram. But you can do that if you've done the work before hand, if you have a good support system, and most important, if you have faith that what you need is inside you. You just have to take the risk to find it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Lesson learned: I will never finish dealing with trauma. But when I take the risks necessary to face it, I get better and better at it.</blockquote>
There's more - much more - especially when it comes to McConnell discussing how dogs and other animals deal with trauma and recovery in parallel to understand human lizard brain experiences and recovery. It's a strong book. If you want some honesty about recovery, it's a good place to go, and she nurtures us with the dogs just like they have - and do - for her.<br />
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<b>PS </b><br />
Speaking of local authors made big, one of McConnell's therapists in the book is Mare Chapman, who has an amazing new book out called <a href="https://www.marechapman.com/">Unshakeable Confidence</a>, which is a mindfulness for women book. Check it out and get some of the tools McConnell used in her recovery!miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-43905423811217642782017-08-01T09:00:00.000-07:002017-08-01T09:00:02.244-07:00The Myth of "If I Had Only Known..."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
It's a common desire for memoir writers to want to share their stories in hopes that "if a younger me had known what I know now, she would have made different choices..."<br />
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While I think there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this as a motivation, there are two pitfalls in it. For one, while it's great to be of help, and certainly plenty of memoirs help in many ways, it overlooks the fact that a lot of us DID have the wisdom we have now, but did the things we did anyway. In large part, that's because though we hear advice when we are young, and often have good intuitions, there are many social pressures and reasons to strike out on our own and do it our own way, despite good advice.<br />
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A few years ago, I invited Susan Piver to Madison to teach a writing retreat. One of the most powerful exercises we didn't wasn't about writing at all. We envisioned a future self who had some wisdom she wanted to impart to current self. After doing this exercise, she noted the future self lives inside the current self, already. We already know these things, inside us. We simply need to tap into that wisdom.<br />
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Memoir can be a mirror - a mirror of errors and a mirror of wisdom. But wisdom, to paraphrase a common phrase, is often wasted on the young. Simply knowing what the right answer is, or having gotten advice, cannot compete with the body knowledge and personal experience only time can deliver. Even if we read it in a particularly well-written and poignant or funny memoir.<br />
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Secondly, there's the fact that most people who read memoir are not kids/young folks. They are mostly adults who are our peers or similar ages - people in a reflective state who will learn more from similar stories to their own, rather than future versions they want to avoid or emulate. Peer audiences don't hear, "What I should know for the future," rather, "Seeing how they learned similar lessons I did or didn't learn." In this way, memoir serves more a purpose of interconnection and compassion, rather than education or instruction.<br />
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This is not meant to be a discouragement to try and help others through memoir. But it is important for us to have humility and recognize the human condition. If our desire is simply to model a good way of handling things, or to show someone else how to get through the tough stuff, we have to admit we made mistakes as well, and to acknowledge no one has a life exactly like ours. We also have to be patient, because even if we write a perfectly well crafted, metaphorically strong memoir in hopes the next generation of young women in our family, for instance, won't date the messed up folks we did, we have to realize we can't overcome years of socializing and epigenetic tendencies with 200 pages of words.<br />
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Most wisdom doesn't manifest through written instruction. For the most part, people hate advice. We can't simply read something and understand it, not if it is real wisdom. We need experience for integration. We can do our best to make suggestions for future generations, but be wary of the voice inside you that hopes you can prevent similar mistakes with your own memoir. Each young person finds their way, through reading, conversations, and, yes, making mistakes in their own way.<br />
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Memoir is best done and shared when the intention is connection, not instruction. Figure out what it is you want to share, not to pass down or push as your own agenda. There is nothing you could have known then that you didn't. Honestly. Writing memoir means resolving what we did or didn't know, and writing from where we are now, not from regret or judgment of ourselves or others.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-76297156725071711622017-06-18T11:33:00.001-07:002017-06-18T11:35:19.278-07:00Equanimity Through Ancestry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yesterday, as part of my quarterly Read and Write* offering, we discussed <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13409655-crazy-brave">Joy Harjo's memoir <i>Crazy Brave</i></a>. A student commented on how Harjo really takes into account her own heritage, her family's ancestry, and the overall context of her father and stepfather's situations when she shows her struggles with them.<br />
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The student, though you may have already assumed this, because we are trained to do so, is white.<br />
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<b>Before getting to how Harjo does this masterfully both in this memoir and in her poetry, I am going to address one of the more painful points white folks almost never discuss with each other, much less in regards to memoir.</b> The white person's tendency is to romanticize the ancestry of people of color, especially Native Americans. If we have any chance of having Native American blood, even if only 1/16th, then we romanticize our own ancestry. This is not the same thing as respecting someone else's origins; this is fantasy and exoticising. This tendency comes from the lack of connection we have to our own ancestry. And that comes from the choices our ancestors made in order to be white. Maybe we haven't actively made such choices in our generation, but at some point, some of our ancestors were given the choice to continue identifying as the nation and culture they were raised in, or assimilate. And because they were what we now call "white" at least in appearance, or close enough, they did it.<br />
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We all have heritage. Every. Single. One. Of. Us. White folks, too. We all have lineage - lessons passed on to us, good and bad. We all have culture. It's just that white supremacy renders it invisible to whites. This is the price we pay so we can feel normal, and be able to overlook others, or patronize their culture or ancestry by seeming to compliment it as "genuine."<br />
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This is not a "white pride" angle. This is part of what makes white life often feel so desolate, so mechanical and unconnected. It's part of the price we've paid and continue to pay unless we actively choose to turn it around. And in this earlier post, I mentioned an ongoing conversation I have with a good friend about how this also means that in memoir, and in real life, most white folks' stories about their parents and grandparents are negative. There's very little accommodating for context, very little connection to the cause and effect that took generations to get to us. Reading, for instance,<a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2016/06/parent-memoirs-with-equanimity.html#more"> these two memoirs by Nick Flynn and Ariel Gore </a>give you good examples of writing about parents as main subjects in memoir with some equanimity that is rare in white family story telling. However, it is without effort (seemingly) that in <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2015/03/fire-shut-up-in-my-bones.html"><i>Fire Shut Up In My Bones</i> by Charles Blow</a>, he is honest and clear about the faults of his parents, but lacking in the kind of egotistical judgment white memoirists tend to laud onto their parents.<br />
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<b>Joy Harjo is a master at writing with equanimity through understanding ancestry.</b><br />
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<a name='more'></a>Harjo had a shitty run with two fathers - her birth father and stepfather were both violent alcoholics. And she loved them. And. Not despite, not yet, but and. Not to excuse, but to understand deeply that the whole situation, from the beginning of human beings, is part of the story. That is a brilliant way to write memoir and understand life.<br />
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I leaned against my father. I adored him. And I was afraid of him. Together both of those places lived within me. </blockquote>
Harjo spends quite a bit of time really pointing to her family's origins, the tribes and contexts, all the way back (not really that far back, in fact, but farther than most white family's legends go) to the days of colonialization:<br />
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These fathers, boyfriends, and husbands were all men we loved, and were worthy of love. As peoples we had been broken. We were still in the bloody aftermath of a violent takeover of our lands. Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. We were all haunted.</blockquote>
In high school, at the inimitable <a href="https://iaia.edu/">IAIA</a>, Harjo writes this experience about being a Native adolescent, which is so universal for anyone who grew up with difficult families - and fathers, but especially for people of color:<br />
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We continued to battle with troubled families and the history we could never leave behind. These tensions often erupted in violence provoked by alcohol, drugs, and the ordinary frustrations of being human.</blockquote>
There are parallel versions of scenes with her father, one in which he gets home in time and they make homemade ice cream and relax on a summer day - the other where he stays out late drinking and comes home screaming to a disappointed family. Did both happen? Did one or the other? Harry is able to deliver to us all the possibilities, with her simple statement: "the story veers from here."<br />
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How can white memoirists gain this kind of perspective? We don't need to take on others' ancestry in order to understand larger context. We can feel the grief of not knowing, as many of us do not. We can get curious about the larger story of sexual abuse, alcoholism, or even the larger lineages of loving nature or art throughout generations in our families. When we approach memoir with the understanding of "<a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2015/05/we-moir-vs-me-moir.html">wemoir</a>", compassion becomes available to us, and we are able to start to see our whole karma.<br />
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<b>One last thing - I am always still looking at the difference between poetry and memoir, and poetry as memoir.</b> As Harjo primarily writes poetry (not prose), I also reviewed a lot of her poetry in preparation for this Read and Write. IN particular, her latest collection, <i>Map of the Next World</i>, has a combination of stories and poetry. In<i> twins meet up with monsters in the glittering city</i>, a long prose poem, Harjo says this about Native fathers:<br />
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Our fathers and many of the men of our indigenous nations destroyed themselves with a whirling bright power that was meant to bring new visions to the people. It is still here among us, made strong with every kind act, with the very act of our beautiful survival. Perhaps even the spirits of our fathers have fed this power because their sacrifice showed us the way.</blockquote>
This is an amazing tone. It completely respects her fatherss manifestations, including their follies and faults.<br />
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Today is Father's Day, which is mixed for a lot of people. Aspiring for equanimity is a long journey, and not one to punish yourself over if you haven't "attained" it.<br />
Keep writing.<br />
Keep asking.<br />
Keep exploring.<br />
And keep reading, noticing the way people of all backgrounds write about family, especially their parents. Know there is never one version, and never one person at fault. Ever. Go deeper.<br />
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*Every quarter we read a book, usually memoir, to explore its structure, writing style, and get immersed in its language. Next book is Life Work by Donald Hall and we will meet to discuss it September 16.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-48697556182025561502017-05-30T15:11:00.000-07:002017-05-30T15:11:02.547-07:00It's Not the End of Anything (For Fuck's Sake)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A writing student sent the following message to me and some of her comrades this week:<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">I just read an article in the <i>New Yorker</i> about the end of the personal essay—did you all see it? And what did you think? Memoir really interests me but am I too late???</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over&source=gmail&ust=1496263804078000&usg=AFQjCNHr7tYAp5yk0XWPfAgkMgsSjlMJjA" href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.newyorker.com/<wbr></wbr>culture/jia-tolentino/the-<wbr></wbr>personal-essay-boom-is-over</a></span></blockquote>
If you haven't read the article, please, go ahead and skim it. I will wait.<br />
Done?<br />
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Let me tell you what happened to me when I read it:<br />
Reading it made me angry. Angry at the need to declare something is over. Angry at the assumption that all personal essays are alike. Angry at the conflation between sensationalization/confession versus reflection/contemplation. Not angry at my student - let me be clear - but at the industry, and the way people write about it.<br />
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Despite not finding a <i>NYT</i> post from a couple of years back about how memoir was over as a genre, or that boom done, I know I have read at least one other such opinion piece, and they tire me. Why do people need to stick in a fork and decide something is done? Good grief. The only thing done is time, and not even that is as done as we sometimes wish it were.<br />
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Finally, what this opinion piece does is lump together a bunch of different kinds of personal essays - crisis pieces, especially - and completely does not include very deep and powerful examples of steady, long-running people working in this genre. People who survive fashion, who are dedicated to deep exploration. <br />
<a name='more'></a>It has a mocking tone, and basically says, "Good riddance! Good riddance to self-absorbed confessionals, body horror, etc!" Fine. That's how that person feels. But that's not all personal essay is, and using that broad a term both dismisses a much steadier and more powerful and long lasting wave, as well as showing the ignorance of the author and their need to be dismissive. Which is popular in literary criticism, and pisses me off.<br />
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P.S. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/books/review/match-book-nature-memoirs.html?_r=0">See this post a month ago from NYT</a> on book-length memoirs which are grounded in direct experience and do not include any crisis or confession quality to them. It's interesting that the person's inquiry is about wanting memoir without catastrophe; most people writing even about nature, which the author points to, can't help but find catastrophe there, too. But this is code for the kinds of things the writer of the first article is mocking.<br />
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<b>Here are some of my (hopefully more nuanced) answers:</b><b>1. When it comes to writing, the personal essay itself is not over.</b> Not at all. Personal essays have been around for centuries and will be around for centuries more. The form will change, what we associate with personal essays will change, but trying* to explain personal experience will continue for a long time. Which leads me to this point:<br /><b>2. If one's main concern is about fashion - e.g. what is booming or not - in publishing, then one will get very tired very fast of following what is hot.</b> If personal essay's popularity were really measured accurately, we'd see it pop up and down and up and down over the last few decades.If you are worried about whether it will get published, frankly, it either will or won't. Something being in fashion/booming/popular actually does not increase your chances of being published when you write in that genre - in fact, popularity gluts the market and makes it all wash out in terms of quality and possibility. Speaking of non-glutting possibilities:<br /><b>3. When it comes to publishing, there will always, always be journals, websites, books, publishers who want personal essay. </b>Always. Your style may be out of fashion, out of trend, but you'll find a place where it fits in. Or not. Which leads me to this final point:<br /><b>4. If one wants to write personal essay, then write personal essay. </b><b>Really. </b>I know you might be tired of this in this blog. I am forever focusing on process over product. But the fact is, if you are hoping by the time you want to get something out in the market that it will be part of a trend, you are on an endless hamster wheel. Write what you want to write, what you NEED to write, and write it really fucking well. Work on the craft, again and again. If you want to get published and not just write, submit, get rejected, submit, get rejected**, and eventually, something will get accepted. Or not. That's how it goes. How it's always gone. If we hope publication will bring us satisfaction, we will put up with feeling miserable during the process. While writing and revising are far from easy, we have to learn to love that challenge. Then, by the time we are done, it was worth it even if no one ever looks at the damn thing, much less publishes it.</blockquote>
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Ok. My rant is done. Again, it is not against my students, but at the criticism industry that needs to ratchet up mockery and dismissal, and narrow down what's available in order to get a laugh or make a shocking headline. Sigh. Nothing is done. Really. Not ever. So keep writing your memoir/personal essay. Don't give a shit about fashion. Only work on orienting your writing towards what sells or will appeal to an audience once you are clear about what it is you need to write. And even then, when you work on your bend and approach, do not base it on the assumption that your attempts will get you publication, or publication will get you money or happiness. Love the process. There's really nothing else.<br />
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<i>*Essay comes from the french essayer, which means "to try"</i><br />
<i>** Always make sure your voice/tone/content matches the publication you submit to. Don't send blindly. But look wide and deep for niche and small places that might just fit your bill, and you theirs. Start there, and grow.</i>miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-11286373672041793292017-05-16T16:29:00.003-07:002017-05-16T16:29:43.168-07:00Telling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="text-align: start;">I've just finished a memoir called <i>The Telling</i> by Zoe Zolbrod. It addresses an inquiry I've been having lately, a debate with myself and some of my clients - mainly in my own head, and not here in the blog, but from a totally surprising perspective. To sum up, I've started posts (and not finished) about a gist that is something like:</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">"When is it the right time to write about something and when is it not yet?"</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">Or, even more accurately:</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">"When is it the right time to SHARE what you are writing in regards to memoir, and when isn't it yet?"</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">Many, if not most, memoirs, reveal something the writer has not revealed to herself previously, or to others in more public contexts. Certainly, as in the case with Zolbrod, that "telling" is of a quite private matter - being molested by a male cousin when she was younger. However, even if the revelation is about how much we actually disliked our ex, or the way our mind actually works and is less virtuous-seeming to us than it seems to others in our life, confession, exposure, telling of any sort is a bit queasy-making, and is a part of the process of memoir, like it or not.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">What is it you are trying to tell the readers? And is it something that is changed in the telling? In Zolbrod's memoir, she not only tells us about the molestation, but also about the act of telling - the book opens with her telling someone for the first time. Later, near the end of the book, she reveals that she has come to understand the act of telling ITSELF changed how she saw what had happened. At the time, telling the other twelve year old girl was an attempt to show her own sexual experience; instead, the other girl made it clear that what Zolbrod was sharing was inappropriate and icky, though she was not articulate about how that was so or why. Zolbrod hadn't particularly liked the molestation, but hadn't always hated it either, and so the quest to explore who, how, why, and even if we tell began for her, in parallel to her path of healing.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">Zolbrod actually resisted therapy, paralleling her journey of growing up processing the abuse on her own with the trends towards naming, pathologizing, and demonizing both sexual abuse of minors and also the "false memory" movements - both for and against. She intuited that if she were to go to a psychologist, her memories might be altered, manipulated for the case of a therapists satisfaction; in the end, the single time she saw someone, the therapist barely noted it at all, as she describes here:</span></div>
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She blinked behind her glasses, rims the same silver-gold color of her short hair, lenses that needed cleaning. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said gently. “If you think it didn’t have much effect on you, you’re probably right.” </blockquote>
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So much for my fears that psychologists tended to see sexual molestation as the cause of any problem, which were stoked by the once widespread accusations that they pushed people to dredge up memories that weren’t even quite there. The therapist’s response was nothing like what I had feared all these years, which was that the sentences would be met with the leash-pulling certitude of a dog sniffing for a bone, with the imposition of a story that I didn’t recognize as my own. Trends in psychology must have changed since the eighties and nineties, the information about child sex abuse no longer unfolding and new. Yet I felt let down. In some ways, I suppose I was still looking for what I also had never wanted: a grown-up to take this tangled mass of yarn from my too-small hands, give it back to me balled up and explained, categorized if not taken care of. But I looked no further for a therapist who might have been able to help me understand this yearning. That kind of assistance was not to be.</blockquote>
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This description of looking for what she never wanted blows me away. In fact, what blows me away the most in this whole memoir is Zolbrod's refusal to pinpoint her experience into a single cubbyhole. She explores her cousin's experience, her father and mother's experiences; she offers all sides then refuses to stand firmly in one spot. She will not be fixated; there is nothing to fix.</div>
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It's tempting to believe that we have to have an answer, something tied up nicely in insight form for the reader as a part of memoir. That we have gotten to a certain state of understanding and the reader will be satisfied with that as an offering. But, as I noted in this recent <a href="https://insidespace.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-importance-of-unanswerable-questions.html">insidespace post</a>, unanswerable questions are really the stuff of life, and despite the desire we may have to draw moral absolute firm and hard ground around things like childhood sexual abuse, it does reduce our experience excessively to talk about it in such dualistic language.</div>
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Zolbrod has many, many other things to say about the writing process, about abuse itself, and about telling, so I won't include it all here. But in the lines of what I have said already, Zolbrod shows great reflection in her process of deciding to write the memoir, to do it as a memoir, and talking to those affected by it in this paragraph:</div>
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My most electric writing occurred when I grappled directly with my own memories. My most clearheaded responses were to current events that raised issues of sexual abuse that resonated with my own past. I began swelling with the feeling that my own story was the one I wanted to tell. Anthony (her husband) supported me in this, even when my excavations into territory I had avoided all my life made me moody and tense, and even though he found it too painful to read what I was producing. His response contributed to a question I already had: for both myself and others, would my telling this story be more likely to heal, or help, or hurt?</blockquote>
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This gets back to my original question - when is telling useful? And it has so much less to do with others, and more to do with what we actually intend to do with the telling. There's no one simple answer, but if you are wanting to tell in order to make a simple answer of your story, that is likely one hint that it's not a good idea for you to tell it. Not publicly. Not in memoir. </div>
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Memoir is not "a take" on life. It should show complexity, honor with compassion all the parties involved, and include a depth and breadth of understanding. Ideally. That having been said, if you need to write it, just write it. Don't think about publication and whether or not you have equanimity. Just write it. Then, when you are ready, find someone you trust to share it with. It may turn out that's all you needed to do - write it and share it with one other person. Step by step, you can figure out how, why, and to whom you need to tell whatever it is you need to tell.</div>
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miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-5984815988683337912017-04-18T13:11:00.000-07:002017-04-18T13:11:32.211-07:00Recovery Isn't Covered<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Discussing a memoir called<i> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2249920.Loose_Girl">Loose Girl</a></i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2249920.Loose_Girl">* by Kerry Cohen</a> with a friend the other night, we ruminated on the lack of the recovery period in memoirs. Recovery. Not the sexy, busy, crazy, wild part where you go manic/have a sex addiction/are institutionalized, but the long, arduous, boring-as-hell-in-real-time but actually super-fascinating-and-inspiring-for-others time period.<br />
<br />
We are both often disappointed by the lack of recovery. In fact, we could both use a whole other memoir post-<i>Loose Girl</i> and that ilk (as much as we love these books for their incredible honesty), focused just on recovery alone. How it is to tow the long road from figuring out for real now you have a problem (addiction, mental health challenges, etc) to the point where you can even begin to consider writing a book like this (now-ish).<br />
<br />
The "credentials" that appear on a memoir of someone recovered - family, job, degrees - all are supposed to suffice for recovery. We need to imagine how someone got from realization to present moment, as it is often covered in a chapter, if that. I am thinking of often very commercial books like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12262741-wild?from_search=true">Wild</a>, or <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23315840-fast-girl?ac=1&from_search=true">Fast Girl</a>, but these issues plague even more literary, mindful and small press memoirs like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1098486.The_Center_Cannot_Hold?ac=1&from_search=true">The Center Cannot Hold</a>, or a favorite here on this blog, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9214995-the-chronology-of-water?from_search=true">The Chronology of Water</a>.<br />
<br />
To stop the memoir after all that action and then leap forward to publication in an afterword, if at all, is painful for those of us who live in survivor or recovery mode. We come wanting beautiful painful words, yes, but we also want slow joy and hope, building up how to get by brick by brick, day by day.<br />
<br />
Those who do focus on the nitty gritty tend to ONLY do that - <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7113.Anne_Lamott">Anne Lamott's</a> books are all basically recovery books, in which she relentlessly shares her failings and insecurities. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=mary+karr&search%5Bfield%5D=author&search%5Bsource%5D=goodreads&search_type=books&tab=books">Mary Karr,</a> once she gets past the core childhood memoirs of <i>Cherry</i> and <i>Liar's Club</i>, does that with <i>Lit</i> a bit more. And the work of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17421.Abigail_Thomas">Abigail Thomas</a>** really does this, continuously exploring not just individual difficult events, but the rich weaving of life that goes on behind and underneath survival and recovery.<br />
<br />
What I'd love to see is more books in-between - books based on single events, but with recovery woven into the story. It's the denouement, and it is too short-shifted right now. Somewhere between more on-going, contemplative, life-writing memoirs (one of Abigail Thomas' books is titled <i>An Actual Life)</i>, and those about single incidents, dramatic effects, or recovering from addiction, there must be a middle ground with a fuller picture included.<br />
<br />
*previous posts with Loose Girl <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2013/01/confession-versus-expression.html">here</a> and <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2015/10/who-tells-and-how-they-tell.html">here</a>.<br />
** previous post with Abigail Thomas <a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2015/02/our-need-for-story.html">here</a>.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-16193205947691794842017-03-15T12:49:00.002-07:002017-03-15T12:49:38.020-07:00Then and Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSR33xO-7PgvkY3RrJPJp2xRgSw5DRK9lyaA1QWWCIcaQySeYgGlKD1H4HpfFuMQWanlqOmR0yLRCuQFD-iUZS2pun0JUT1fcoQTEOiw-Trv5ijD8sEj4PyV4MvD4BANeHjaLKO1xe9Rhk/s1600/DSC_1287.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSR33xO-7PgvkY3RrJPJp2xRgSw5DRK9lyaA1QWWCIcaQySeYgGlKD1H4HpfFuMQWanlqOmR0yLRCuQFD-iUZS2pun0JUT1fcoQTEOiw-Trv5ijD8sEj4PyV4MvD4BANeHjaLKO1xe9Rhk/s320/DSC_1287.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />A few weeks ago in one of my
classes, two women happened to write about ex-husbands. The prompt had nothing
to do with spouses, though it did ask about people’s relationships to love.
What is auspicious and amazing is that, out of 28 students in all my classes,
only these two wrote about ex-spouses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What’s also amazing is the
difference.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One person, student #1, wrote about her
ex-husband, from whom she split only a few years ago. The other, student #2, about her ex-husband from over twenty years ago. With their permission, I am sharing part
of their writings, to really show what a difference time makes. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">These
are very different women with very different former marriages; I don’t mean to
imply they are the same. Yet something about the two of these side-by-side
really spoke to me. It’s hard to know when we’ve had enough time to have
perspective on difficult things in our life – even if it hasn’t been enough to
find equanimity, we should still write about it. But it is also hard to keep a
feeling of connection, even if we have found some balance. With distance, we
can neuter our story, make it seem benign; if we are too close, it can feel
very strong and we are unable to get out. Both of them have found middle ground between proximity and distance, with time, of course, but also a lot of work and reflection and compassion for themselves and their former spouses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">What I love about the writing from student #1 is how much she has gone back to own
her own past and patterns. This is a powerful exploration of how we got into
situations like the one she was in, without blaming herself. She's still struggling, mind you, but she's opening to herself a lot. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'll let student #1 tell you:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><a name='more'></a>...this pattern (from childhood) continued. Seek out friends and lovers who were
mostly unavailable, hard to please and hard to gain approval from. And when I
did get approval, I would finally feel worthy. </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;">I sought these people out. Friends who were cynical. Friends who
weren't such great friends. I wouldn't choose the lover who was walking towards
me, arms open, eyes on me, smiling and saying my name. I chose to partner with
the one who looked at me once, looked away and then glanced back, "who are
you again?"</span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;">...And now I am sensing a shift. It feels like
hate. But I would declare that I have never hated! And hate is less evolved
that the direction that I am heading. I practice lovingkindness daily! And yet,
as a drive along alone in my minivan, I whisper these words aloud to him,
"You have taught me how to hate." "I now hate you."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;">Student #2 wrote about her ex from
decades ago, whom she is now </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;">able to have interactions with amicably. One
of the things I love that she is able to say is this – “The point is, even in
the hardest moments we knew we loved each other and <i>often that didn’t make it
easier </i>(my emphasis).”</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: inherit;">For some reason I am thinking of
my first husband and how beautiful his skin was, browned by the sun, his
Italian genes expressing themselves olive. We were such good friends,
such supports for each other, but we built ourselves a box that felt too
comfortable and I had to climb out of it. That was such a painful
time. But that is not the point today. The point is, even in the
hardest moments we knew we loved each other and often that didn’t make it
easier.</span></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">...I don’t want to think of loving as
hard, but it certainly isn’t the easy float down the river often portrayed in
our culture. And not just romantic love, all loving.</span></span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">…We hurt each other and we
disappointed each other and ourselves. And yet </span></span>w<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-family: inherit;">e always—what?
Cared for? Respected? Well, loved each other although it didn’t
always look loving.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;">How do we get to a state like student #2 has found, in our
lives, in our memoir? It's not all hunky-dory, but it is clear and with enough space to assess with kindness. It's a place from where we can see the larger context. Even if student #1
never is friends with her ex again, she is making friendship with herself, and
that is a key step:</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If I were to intellectualize this, I would say that now that I
have taken hold of the littlest and most hurt places of myself and secured her
with me, I will no longer abide by internalizing my anger. This must be
what externalizing anger feels like. It is completely new to me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Another shift, at a school function on Monday
night, as I listened to the other parents speak and as I looked around the room
at their demeanor and faces, I felt a gravity shift from those abandoners to
the ones who walk right towards. To the ones who thanked the teachers. You were
not among this group, your silence, your jaw clenched, your judgment and
reticence. I no longer find that behavior compelling. I am no longer am drawn
towards that. </span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It would be nice if we could write memoir without having to do all the work around resolving our stories, but that's just not the case. Time and time again, I encounter students who wish they could just tell the story without having to process it. Memoir isn't the same as therapy - by any means - but it is awfully hard to write it without support, help, processing and yes, therapy. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 13pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 13pt;">And what if you </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">don't write memoir? Then you have still helped yourself heal, especially your relationship to yourself, which is key above all, ex-spouses aside.</span></span></span>miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-51791199112575877842017-02-21T09:08:00.001-08:002017-02-21T09:08:34.049-08:00Gaze, Voice, and Audience<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Who are you writing for?" is one of the prime questions in any writing. I don't believe it is something we have to worry about too much in rough draft, but as soon as we begin revising, we need to be considering who this is for. Not just why, the deeper reason why, but to whom we are writing.<br />
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It's a hard question, though, because audience can't be too big or too small. "Everyone," is not a working answer. Too vague. "My sister," is too specific, though you can find clues in there. Why your sister? Because she, too, survived an abusive childhood? In that case, maybe you are writing to people who survived abusive childhoods. A somewhat narrow (though not narrow enough, unfortunately) audience, but getting closer. Perhaps then people who want to know what it was like, not just survivors. Ah, now we are getting there - an interest group, an audience, big enough to be diverse, small enough to have focus.<br />
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Who your writing is for affects your voice. If you are writing to other academics, then you use a different language than writing to general Joe Schmoe. If you are writing about being institutionalized and are writing only to others who have been institutionalized, then the jargon and culture will sound different than if you are reaching out to people outside the system, whatever that system is. How do you capture both the inner - of your own individual culture, experience, era - and communicate it to the outer/other - people who didn't have those experiences but are sympathetic and want to read your book?<br />
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Sometimes our writing is purely for other audiences. I've been thinking about this a lot this week, after seeing<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Not_Your_Negro"> I Am Not Your Negro, </a></i>a film based on thirty pages of James Baldwin's notes, ostensibly about the deaths of three of his friends: Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. In some ways, what he wrote of this draft was a memoir of watching his friends die, but it also was, as is often the case for Baldwin, an eloquent analysis of race, a deeply motivated attempt to communicate to white people what it is like for him, and his brothers and sisters, to be black in America.<br />
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It's interesting to read the reviews. Pretty much down the center line, those who are white review it as powerful, necessary, beautiful. Blown away by Baldwin's words and voice, stunned into emotion by viscerally violent imagery both of back then and Black Lives Matter movement now. Those who are black review it as powerful, too - who doesn't love Baldwin's voice? - but also find they believe it is made for a white audience. People who need to be shocked into paying attention. One review even points to how the film <a href="http://newsouthnegress.com/notyours/">relies on a form of black necrophilia</a>, something she and other black folks are not really in the need of seeing, since they know it exists anyway.<br />
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Especially if your memoir serves to inform, it is crucial to consider what those who haven't had your experience will experience, and what those who have had similar lives will relate to and resonate with. The fact is, you may isolate some folks - other people who had traumas or even joys similar to yours may not want to read your work. My wife, who is transgender, finds pretty much all memoirs and fictional works related to transgenderism to either hit too close to home or be way off the mark - regardless, she already knows and doesn't need more. I don't blame her. As her ally, I read and watch nearly everything I can get my hands on. So I am even more of an audience than she is.<br />
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And for people who can't relate at all but are curious? You can only go so far as to invite someone in - if you have had severe mental health challenges and your audience includes someone who doesn't even know what the DSM is, if you are black and write primarily about that experience and your audience includes a lot of white folks, if you are young and queer and hope to include folks in your grandparents' straight and cisgender generations - these are bridges to cross, and gaps that need reaching.<br />
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You will not cross all of them. You cannot. That's why "everyone" is not a good answer. If you happen to catch some folks outside of your focus, that's ok - great, even. But you can't count on that. Who your audience is shapes your voice, and knowing a bit about their gaze - something folks in many forms of minority-ship know all too well (male gaze, able-bodied gaze, white gaze) - is crucial.<br />
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Study your experience. Don't just write about it from your perspective. Read bits of what you write to safe representatives from the groups of folks you are interested in but not sure how to reach. Is it reaching them? What else do they need? And in the end, you have to decide - if your story gets too bent by trying to reach others, then maybe it's not meant to be shared with them. But do share it. Please. We need all the stories we can get nowadays - real and raw and direct.<br />
<br />miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-24627513453498458132017-02-14T14:39:00.001-08:002017-02-14T14:39:33.171-08:00Listening and Hearing<img id="id_46c6_842_71c0_f72b" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYi5vKaz25UMPuF_oBnBmJ4u96opa34g1mO-S7RzN_d_l1Ej74GJz_Nl1m_HPG7h1fSRks1OEHCt4_aQ6lcUbRDkGbMPDtleB_9HRL_hR9I54qHXG4GgkuuI2lSB1aDgwnqMjO7kNr45VX/" alt="" title="" tooltip="" style="width: 353px; height: auto;"> This is a wonderful writing from a student, a response to the prompt "Listening and Sounding" in last week's class. The many layers of listening and speaking, of remembering memories, and of the ways our stories about ourselves change all feel well-handled here. I appreciate her straight-forwardness mixed with wry humor. Thanks for sharing this first draft of direct writing with us, Barbara Samuel.<div>-------—--------------------------------------</div><div><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I found a cassette tape that I thought I’d lost long ago. I don’t know how it found its way into the plastic storage box I pulled out of the closet in the back bedroom. I don’t even know how the storage box found its way into the corner of that closet. Or why I chose that day to dig around in the closet and investigate things that had remained in the dark for years.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">When I was in my early twenties, before two-thirds of my life so far had unfolded, I was still suffering from many forms of psychic torture. I had been living in Madison and with my partner for just a few years. But I was certain that I was on the verge of becoming completely crazy, unreachable, and I attributed that to the aftereffects of a disastrous acid trip I’</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">d</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">experienced at college </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">several years before</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">. My shrink, on whom I became completely dependent, suggested I tell him about that night, step by step, leaving out no detail. He said he would record it. By telling the story, </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">he said, </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">it would lose some of its power over me, and I would have the tape to play back for myself if I ever needed confirmation that I was okay.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">My narrative took up most of the </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">sixty-minute tape</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">. I don’t remember ever playing the tape back, listen</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">ing to what I said. I kept it </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">in my top dresser drawer </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">for years, </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">until it was no longer there. I searched for it a few times and then forgot about it. When I found the cassette in the box in the closet, I didn’t know what it was. Written on the outside </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">in someone else’s handwriting </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">were the letters SAM in capitals. I couldn’t think of anything besides the </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">Rafi</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> song compilations we made when my son was a baby.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">When I finished rummaging in the box –</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">a</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">n unexpected</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">goldmine of memorabilia – I took the tape downstairs to the kitchen where I still have a combination radio, CD and tape player, now lightly blanketed in kit</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">chen grease. I put the tape in</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> but it was backwards. I put it in again</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">, correctly</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">, a</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">nd I suddenly heard my voice; t</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">hen nothing but scratchy sounds from the machine. I pressed stop, opened the little door and discovered a length of </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">tape caught in the mechanism and becoming crinkly. In a controlled panic, I gently disengaged the tape and found a pencil with an eraser. Five minutes later, the tape was flattened out and rewound. I tried again. This time it played.</span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">As late afternoon became evening, I stood in my kitchen listening to my twenty-five-year-old self, telling her shrink about the drug experience she suspected might have ruined her life. It was pretty boring. I was disappointed. There were long pauses. Sometimes I laughed at my</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> young </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">self as I listened. “You said this wouldn’t make me go crazy. How do you know? Are you sure I won’t go crazy?” “No; I really don’t believe you’ll go crazy.” My shrink</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">’</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">s voice. </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">What a pair we must have be</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">e</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">n, he with his </span><a name="_GoBack"></a><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">thick</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">New York accent, I with my incessant need for reassurance.</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">At times, I wanted to </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">say to my young voice, hurry up;</span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;"> get to the good part. But there was no good part. My memory had created a much more vivid story than my narrative on tape revealed. In the </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">now </span><span style="line-height: 21.600000381469727px;">dark kitchen, the dogs clamored for their dinner.</span></span></p></div>miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-81655999129651979332017-01-31T09:47:00.001-08:002017-01-31T09:47:07.328-08:00Immigrant Buddhist Memoirs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I am what they call a "convert Buddhist" - born white in North America, to a nominally agnostic family, but raised in Christian culture. I came to Buddhism in my late teens and early twenties, and adopted Shambhala Buddhism, which contains threads of original Tibetan Buddhisms and also American adaptations, specifically for people like me.<br />
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But I am aware this is not the only experience by far. One of my ongoing "research" projects is to learn more about race in North American buddhism - specifically how the convert buddhisms we have now in North America often cater more towards white folks than people of color. In the meantime, I am also taking up efforts to immerse myself in the experiences of immigrant buddhists, sometimes called "ethnic buddhists" - folks who (or whose parents) came to the US as buddhists, and attend temples or places of practice oriented towards only their kind - e.g. Thai, where all attendees are Thai or Thai ethnically, and speak only Thai together. This seems especially important now, in the heightened era of intense national discrimination against immigrants.<br />
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This search lead me to the memoir of a man about my age, <i>Talk Thai: The Adventures of a Buddhist Boy </i>by Ira Sukrungruang, who grew up in a Northwest Chicago suburb. His parents immigrated to the US as adults, and he was born in the US. But his experience was a definite conflict and confluence of Thai and what's generically considered "America" (e.g. whiteness) - Thai at home, English at school; Buddhism at home and Temple, Christianity at school and with friends; ethnicity clear and strong at home, challenged by whiteness at school and in the world. Here's a passage that shows both neck-in-neck when he was very young:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Before school each morning, I chanted quietly: I am a warrior, I am a warrior. I put my Buddha in my mouth..and I prayed to him, asking for a better day. I slipped into an alternate world. I am on top of an elephant - a warrior, a king - bursting through the wall of of Mrs S's classroom. With me are the animals of the world. I stand on my elephant, raise my arms up to the sky, and tell my classmates I am their new leader. Henceforth, I am not a crybaby. I do not talk funny; it is you who speak with an accent...Yes, this is how today will turn out. Much better than yesterday. Today I will be king. </blockquote>
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As soon as I stepped out of the house, however, my built-up courage seeped out of me, and the strange invisible walls of this country closed in. I remember watching a nature show about bees on PBS, remembered that if an alien bee mistakenly flew into a hive it was immediately terminated.</blockquote>
Sukrungruang has a great sense of humor, and has clearly processed a lot of his experiences with kindness towards his parents' struggles and his own. He speaks to experiences common - though by no means justified - of being bullied because of not only weight, but religion and, most commonly, race. He speaks of idealizing superheros and specific white boys/men. One of my favorite passages is about which white folks different family members idealized, and how they varied:<br />
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I told my aunt I wanted to be white...<br />"Like Larry Bird?" Aunty Sue smiled.<br />I shook my head. Even though the Boston Celtics star had the sweetest release when he shot the basketball, he wasn't the white I imagined. I was beginning to categorize the different divisions of white. Larry was Sweaty White. Tom Select, my mother's secret crush, was Hairy White. Ronald Reagan was Boring White. Boy George was Scary White. The boys in my class were Wild White or Meany White or Stupid Fart Head White.<br />"Like who then?"<br />I wanted to be Ricky from <i>Silver Spoons</i>...he was a white kid who faced white problems, which were, to me, simple, which resolved themselves in half an hour. Ricky was Perfect White.</blockquote>
As a buddhist who is a convert, I deeply appreciate all his detailed descriptions about temple and teachings. What would it be like to grow up in Buddhism, to have it be a part of your culture so deeply that everyone believes it? I don't idealize that - it's not perfect - but getting to peek into that experience is deeply powerful and helpful for me.<br />
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There really is a huge divide in this country between these two main manifestations of Buddhism - I am happy to keep exploring through memoir what those feel like, alongside my other research in articles and essays.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-77667023790079937792017-01-24T12:52:00.000-08:002017-01-24T12:52:13.554-08:00Your Story Must Change<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This afternoon, on our annual winter writing retreat, one of the participants noted: "Dammit. Now I am feeling compassion for my mother. I wasn't supposed to feel that!" We all laughed - we know she feels plenty of compassion, always has, but it is true in her writing and stories its often been hard to uncover that. And if we can't uncover it in our writing, we won't feel it completely. We could also relate to what she said - it would be so much easier if her damned story would stop changing, if her mom could stay the evil bitch and she could remain the innocent princess.<br />
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If your story isn't changing as you write it, you are in trouble.<br />
This means you have to stay vulnerable, open, raw, and not fixating on a specific story.<br />
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There is no one version of your life, not even from your own perspective. As you write memoir, your understanding should change along the way. If it doesn't, if you find you are pinning down facts you've decided long ago are 100% true, then you should stop writing.<br />
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Memoir, like life, is not solid. There's nothing fixed or known for sure, even in retrospect. Our constant attempts to make that seem untrue are a part of the process of peeling back what really happened.<br />
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Today is the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death. Yet again, and again, my story about her, my loss of her, my life with her, changes. I stay open to the changes. At some point enough will be pinned down to finish the book, but in the meantime, there's no reason to hastily paste together a solid story. In the meantime, I let my story change, so I can keep changing, too.<br />
<br />miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-91656451903728351882017-01-17T19:51:00.000-08:002017-01-17T19:51:08.449-08:00Lithium Jesus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Lithium Jesus</i> by Charles Monroe-Kane came to my attention a few months ago, when a friend and fellow memoirian and student and avid reader sent me a text one afternoon, with a link to an interview Monroe-Kane just did, and an ad for a reading he was doing that evening. She was very excited - we are both interested in and keep an eye out for well-done memoir on mental health challenges, and the quote she sent me from the interview sounded very profound. It pointed to confusion about feelings of spirituality and struggling with sanity.<br />
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However, she got ahold of the book faster than I did, and was a bit disappointed. Mine took until this week to come in - he's a local author, and producer for Wisconsin Public Radio, so his book flew off the shelves. By then, I was a bit reticent, but wanted to go for it. Reading <i>Undercurrents</i> by Martha Manning and other similar books (<a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-right-distance-in-memoir.html">here</a>) or Alexandra Fuller's work (<a href="http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2015/07/mental-health-memoir.html#more">here</a>), I and some of my friends and clients I work with find it incredibly satisfying when someone can render on the page the direct experience of being outside what is normally accepted as mentally sane behavior.<br />
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And the fact is, all of the memoirs I've read from people with severe mental health challenges have been women.<br />
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So here's my hit, having just finished Monroe-Kane's book. The first 1/4 of it is powerfully insightful, full of incredible descriptions of religious experience and psychosis coming so close together as to be indiscernible. In this passage, he is describing recognizing the voices in his head while in church for the first time, hearing others speaking in tongues:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The warm air soon began to hum with a cacophony of "thank you, Jesus" and mutterings in strange languages. I found it scary yet familiar. As the volume and the intensity of the audience's intonations rose, I started to hear them, sprinkled in among the tongues - the voices had arrived. It damn near froze me in fear. For the first time, these voices were not from my own head but from the mouths of those around me. The mutterings became shouts; a handful of people began running up and down the aisles. soon, it seemed, the chorus had circled me... </blockquote>
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I walked to the altar. I don't know why. I think I felt at home in some odd way for the first time in my life...</blockquote>
The first 1/3 includes a lot of descriptions of the oddness of being a teen preacher, taking his summer vacations for missionary work in places like recently revolutionary Philippines and Haiti. Some of the scenes are almost funny, they are so unexpected, so out of the range of most people's summer teen experiences. To whit:<br />
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I had been in the Philippines for about three weeks, avoiding any discussion of my discerned spirit gift of healing, when Mr. Peterson invited me one day to preach the Sunday sermon inside his Olongapo church. This was a step up from street preaching, and I came ready. I delivered what I thought was a powerful sermon from the book of Daniel (my favorite book of the Bible). Channeling the prophet, at one point I slapped an inner wall of the church and wrote there, in white chalk, "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin." </blockquote>
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"This is <i>your</i> handwriting on the wall!" I hollered at the ever-growing crowd inside the church. I was venturing into some obscure biblical shit, but it didn't matter. I was feeling it. "Your days are numbered. Don't be Belshazzar!" </blockquote>
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(Eventually, some congregants bring him a woman paralyzed from the waist down, since he is purported to be a faith healer, at age fifteen) </blockquote>
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I assumed Mr. Peterson knew about my alleged gift, but he had never brought it up, which was fine with me. Frankly, I was afraid of it. Part of me didn't believe it. I was open to the idea, but was it my life's calling to be a faith healer? That's pretty heavy stuff and, to be honest, it's not exactly embraced as a "real job" by the world at large.</blockquote>
But a large portion of the book covers his switch from the religious zealotry of church and into the zealotry of activism, when he graduates from a Mennonite school in mid-religious crisis. He gets swept up in recently liberated Eastern Europe, and in the end, spends five years in Prague, as well as Amsterdam and other cities. While he occasionally mentions ponderings about Jesus, and occasionally shows insight towards his mental health, it's mainly in the form of looking back directly from now at the end of a chapter, wishing he had done otherwise. In fact, the whole latter half of the book is filled with endless stories of drugs, sex, activism, more sex, more drugs, and only occasionally with the voice of the first half, in which he weaves his now self in with his then self. By the second half, I found it hard to keep reading about all of his machismo exploits, with only the occasional reprieve, quite divorced from the narrative:<br />
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That party was a mistake. Ditching my lithium and pumping myself with a cocktail of mind-bending illegal drugs could have killed me. I shouldn't have done it. But that's me talking now - the middle-aged me. There has been a lot of honest blood, sweat, and tears shed since that night on the couch. I look back at that young man, alone and scared, and it breaks my heart. I will deny no one their path - including me. But if I had to do it all over again I would not have stopped taking those meds. Any of them. I wasted a lot of years in my twenties, experiencing unnecessary suffering from my mental illness. And, frankly, I'm lucky - and grateful - that I even survived long enough to write these words. </blockquote>
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But that was then and this is now. I'm sorry, young me. </blockquote>
This sounds discordant. It would have been more powerful to have woven that voice throughout, cutting in his writer self throughout, as he did more of in the first half. Instead, a lot of the drug and sex stories, though they are honest about not being as romantic as one might hope, wind up feeling tedious.<br />
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And a strange thing happens in the middle of all those drugs - he meets his future wife. I breathed a sigh of relief at the hint he winds up marrying her, soon after she appears in the narrative. I realized I was starting to believe this was going to go on forever. Suddenly, all the detailed tales of drugs and sex go back to only highlight reels, focusing on the juxtaposition of the insights he has being with a wonderful woman against the life he's been barely living for a few years.<br />
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It's almost too late. Almost. Maybe Monroe-Kane wants us to feel just how strung out he got before he turned around. By the time he meets his future wife and they move back to the States, and he shares an incident where the voices come back and are violent, I'd almost forgotten he had experienced mania. It had just felt like a long tale of misadventures of the male kind in middle Europe in the 90's for about 100 pages.<br />
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It's not unusual for the center of a mental health memoir to be bogged down with the intense slog of "fighting-taking-drugs-self-medicating-making-everyone-else-suffer"ness. Maybe I feel less sympathetic to Monroe-Kane because it's just so masculine - so uber-guy, and I can't relate to that as much as, say, Martha Manning or even Suzi Favor-Hamilton. In the end, his story is bright, smart, charismatic - as I imagine he is in person. I am glad he made it out and is doing well. I rate the book well - four stars - because for the right reader, it will be wonderful. For myself and my students, however, it lacks in the sensitivity and intertwined insight needed to make for a strong felt experience we can feel supported throughout reading.miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6213500650791928857.post-77050609061006257262017-01-03T09:50:00.000-08:002017-01-03T09:50:43.672-08:00Incident-Based Memoir Versus Thematic Memoir<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzVPaN8fPYaDykt71epvXdiQiT5veLgfPZ0AAd86ZMRhV-Gi3jeulYN1yUw8mEK3tPJIroQcXaURhwa8ukZI82P9uMIfZNqz8PJws2FBdwkiIbNuBj2RQY23xQi2gThSInJN5FuAtr9MsL/s1600/arm+of+waiting.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzVPaN8fPYaDykt71epvXdiQiT5veLgfPZ0AAd86ZMRhV-Gi3jeulYN1yUw8mEK3tPJIroQcXaURhwa8ukZI82P9uMIfZNqz8PJws2FBdwkiIbNuBj2RQY23xQi2gThSInJN5FuAtr9MsL/s320/arm+of+waiting.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Typically, there are two reasons/narrative threads under writing any given memoir. The first, and most common, is to write a memoir about a particular incident. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8114546-half-a-life">Half a Life by Darin Strauss</a> is about the author accidentally striking and killing a girl on a bike with his car when he was eighteen, and the impact that had on his life and community. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9588175-history-of-a-suicide?ac=1&from_search=true">History of a Suicide by Jill Bialosky</a> is about the author's sister's death from suicide and the author coming to terms with it. There are a million examples of these kinds of specific memoirs. They can be quite lovely and focused, giving a central event to focus attention on, and explain further experiences from.</div>
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However, when we read only these memoirs we get the idea that only folks who have had "big things" happen to them in their lives (read also: tragedies) can write memoir. It's good to notice even most memoirs written based in an incident also thread through the themes of someone's life, like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27308.The_Spiral_Staircase?ac=1&from_search=true">Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong</a>, in which her eventual diagnosis of epilepsy clarifies some of her difficult journey with spirituality, but in fact isn't the central focus of the story.<br />
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And, there are memoirs which truly just focus on a thread, a theme, or a connection throughout someone's life, rather than single incidents, and certainly not always around trauma. In our story-obsessed culture, these memoirs tend to get less media, but they are insightful and powerful nonetheless.<br />
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For instance, there's<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12528.An_American_Childhood?ac=1&from_search=true"> An American Childhood by Annie Dillard</a>. In some ways, this is a quiet memoir, less focused on specific big-bang personal moments and more on the ongoing magic of everyday experience. Her language is exquisite, and her reverence for childhood experience is both specific and universal at the same time. She doesn't have to have had any particular experience in order to write this - just to be totally awake and alive and aware:<br />
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<span class="readable" style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">What does it feel like to be alive?</span><span class="readable" style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!</span><span class="readable" style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.</span></blockquote>
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And yet, even when Strauss and Bialosky write about specific incidents, things we may or may not be able to relate to, it is what they can say now, from adulthood, with insight - incredible normal and yet brilliant perspectives - that carry their books. Strauss:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future. </span><br style="color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain.</span></blockquote>
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Bialosky:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">If there is a particular time that defined the clear yet inaudible sound of a life beginning to unwind, this was it, the moment before her life began to spin off course, like the point in a novel at which everything that has come before turns and past events reveal their significance. Yet we didn't see it.</span></blockquote>
See what is in common in all these passages? Sensory experiences, direct and yet relating to larger life lessons. Being anchored in personal experience with an eye out for what is universal. Metaphor and larger meaning built into specific experience describing.<br />
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And, in fact, Armstrong gives such a great description of how religion works in Spiral Staircase that I think it applies to life and memoir. Lord knows, even if we have major events/traumas/incidents in our lives, insight does not just arrive on the heels of such experiences. We have to apply life, consider it, contemplate it. And memoir can be a big key in this process:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.</span> </blockquote>
miriamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06107671021769120700noreply@blogger.com2