Category Archives: Memoir

To the Mountain

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01 Pikes Peak 2013

 

I admit it, I started out in memoir because it was easy. The story was there, I thought, the weird story of my life and family, the story I keep coming back to. Simple. I lived it; the characters were ready made. Everyone I ever met was always shocked when they’d find out I was the youngest of nine kids, that my parents split after all that work and time. So I started out whole hog–blogs, sensory writing, log-lines, the whole bit.

After I got the nerve to go back and visit the house where my story unfolded I went into a sort of writing paralysis. For an entire year I futzed around, trying an essay here, a flash piece there, a complete novel outline. Nothing in writing was right. I ditched the memoir with the bland realization that my story wasn’t all that. It was about a strangely fractured family, but it holds no universal appeal, not now and I am completely disinterested in telling it.

So what?

So this. For some reason I got involved in another project unlike anything I’d imagined myself writing. This is dark and twisty and old. It’s ugly and gorgeous and terrifying and it requires months of research–a thing I would have tried to avoid out of boredom and overwhelming fatigue.  A thing I would have doubted myself out of, giving up before getting on.

The thing is, everything changed this year. I don’t know why, but at some point I started trusting myself, not only in writing, but in life. I stopped dying my hair. I stopped making excuses as to why I am not just so and I moved the fuck on. So now I am writing. I am researching. I am making outlines across my bedroom wall and I am so god damned happy.

If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.–Sir Francis Bacon

 

 

 

Reflecting on Reflective Writing

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by Lynette Benton

In her post, No Man’s Land, Victoria raised intriguing questions about time periods in diaries and memoirs. She wrote that it was her understanding that diaries address current events, while memoirs record the past. Seems straightforward enough.

Diaries = present

Memoirs = past

But here’s a complication: She also mentioned seeing some memoirs that cover events as they unfold. (And I’m not even going into the idea held by some physicists and many mystics that time doesn’t really exist anyway and that everything’s actually happening in the infinite, illusive Now.)

Among the excellent memoirs written about events currently taking place in the writer’s life are those by Eva Hoffman (efforts to assimilate into American culture); Ann Morrow Lindbergh (desire to simplify her life); and Kate Millet (bouts with her own certifiable madness).

However, even journals written about the present include references to the past, or how else would we have meaningful contexts? The present always arises out of the past. Even if we’re suffering from amnesia, we have a past—and it’s likely that someone, somewhere knows that past.

So, since both journals and memoirs can be written about the present, it could be possible, as EVF stated in reply to the comment I left, “to get these forms all muddled.”

That’s because diaries and memoirs, along with personal essays, are all reflective writing genres, and share a number of trademark elements.

Self-disclosure is a major ingredient in these genres.

“Without meaningful self-disclosure, the memoir will lack authenticity and honesty,” says Linda Gartz, a family historian, who is also working on a memoir.

Further similarities among diaries, memoirs, and personal essays:

  • They all lend themselves to journeys of exploration.
  • Most cultivate an intimate, conversational tone. (Think: Eat, Pray, Love.)
  • The writer is firmly present as the “I” in the writing.

Another trait these genres have in common is a certain inconclusiveness. Gartz says her memoir “will end not with hard facts, but rather with reflection . . . .”

These forms invite us to on a journey of inner exploration. Instead of just a glimpse into the writers’ minds, we get to meander there as they figure out, and sometimes even discover, how they really feel about an issue by examining it, engaging with it, on paper. One idea leads to others.

Joan Didion’s graceful essay, “In Bed,” begins with a description of her suffering from migraines and ends, almost as if the idea suddenly struck her midway through her writing, with the insight that the migraines might serve a purpose for her.

One significant difference among these forms is that in general, journals are addressed to the self, whereas essays and memoirs are addressed to an audience.

Journals = private
Personal essays and memoirs = public

But every rule’s got an exception, right? Michael Kinsley, editor of The Slate Diaries, invited a variety of people to write diary entries for that excellent anthology. Did the fact that the guest writers knew their journals would be made public influence what they wrote?

In each of these forms, the writer shepherds readers through their personal feelings and perspective to universal experience.

***

Lynette Benton teaches creative writing all over the place—to teens and adults. She is also an editor. Her work has appeared in numerous newspapers and online venues, such as Skirt.com and More Magazine online. She uses her diary as a feeder for her memoir-in-progress, My Mother’s Money. You can reach her at Relief11@verizion.net.

 

The Other in the Mirror

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by Arvid Berge

A shirtless man stands in the light of a Guatemalan morning. He has a straight-razor in his right hand and shaving soap on his chin. He peers into a cracked mirror hanging from a nail in the doorjamb of his house. I watch him as I walk slowly past the gray unpainted structure that sits on an embankment, its foundation of rough stones rising up to meet the door sill six feet above the rocky hillside below the house. If there ever was an elevated porch to compliment the doorway, it is gone now. The man and the mirror occupy a doorway that exits out into Guatemala’s eternal spring air.

There are times in my life when I have moments of pure joy and contentment. My heart swells and I feel connected to every living soul. As connected to my fellow man as a child embraced in the arms of a loving parent. These moments come with the realization that in all humanity there is no “other”…. no one who is not fundamentally just like me.

I watch the man squinting into his cracked mirror, his nut brown Mayan features reflected in the equatorial sun. I recall my own morning ritual; shaving my face in an air-conditioned motel room, a Norelco electric shaver with AC/DC converter attachment buzzes against my chin, my pale features in the smoked mirror with its row of incandescent bulbs lighting my sleepy image.

I recall, also, my thoughts. First, there is the unavoidable recognition of my own mortality. Who isn’t confronted with such thoughts when taking stock of his or her image after a night’s sleep?

Then, of course, the thoughts, sometimes exciting…more often mundane, about the day ahead; the “must do’s, might do’s, should do’s and so on. Since I’m vacationing and a first time visitor to this little village in Guatemala’s northern province of jungles, jaguars, and Mayan ruins, my mental prospects for the day tend toward excitement. I tell my image in the smoked glass, “nothing mundane about this place”.

I’m thinking that same thought as I stumble along the rock strewn street and listen to the roosters crowing and dogs barking. I jump over a little stream of sewage flowing along the edge of the road to avoid being run over by a taxi coming from the one-lane airport that serves two flights a day from Guatemala City. The sound of the taxi diverts the attention of the man in the doorway away from his own image in the mirror and he turns his head toward where I stand. It is in that moment when I feel the joy.

This man in the doorway and I on the street, we could not be more different. Yet, we are the same. His world and my world are, as the saying goes, “worlds apart”. Yet, we inhabit the same world. He shaves his chin and I shave mine. His skin is my skin. My thoughts, no doubt, mirror his thoughts. I cannot see him as something other than myself. Everything I see in my mirror is also reflected in his. I can love him or despise him, envy him or pity him, dismiss him or embrace him, but I cannot see him as an “other”.

He smiles. And, I smile back.

.

Do you have to make everything a story?

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Yesterday I was hit square on the jaw with a memory so vivid I could have woken up bruised and not felt surprised. It was the kind of memory that lasts seconds in the life of a teenager, but pops up unexpectedly twenty years later and all you want to do is run head-on into it to feel and smell and taste that one clear thing.

My immediate response to the recollection was, “I could write this.” Then I preceded to compose sentences and list publications and punch the gas along a country highway between here and there.

Today I sat down (a gift to Linda; here I find in practice I am absolutely wrong about my Ups and Downs) to write out the memory, find the story and create something beautiful out of hormones and punk rock, and I realized that most of all I wanted to give the memory back to the person who helped create it.

Maybe the story is a story, but maybe too, it’s five lousy sentences on a Facebook page waving to an old friend.

 

 

Photo credit

Am Is Was Were

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photo by Maurice Kessler

by Kellie M. Walsh

After 20 years, I am selling my guitar. Am I no longer a musician? I only ever played—truly played—for a handful of those years. Was I n/ever a musician?

How many times must one X to be/come Y? When do/es I become synonymous with the doing, the am equal to the act? I am a musician, or I was a musician, or I may have been a musician, but I am not now, nor may I n/ever have been, a musician. I was what I did; now I am what I am not.

Yet I am where I am: [town]er, [state]ite, [metropolitan region]er, [coastal region]er, [abbreviated country]n, [continent]an, [planet]ling, citizen of the [whole damn galaxy]. And I am relative to whence I come/came: over here, native or local; over there, foreigner or alien. I even am where I no longer be: “Once a [city]er, always a [city]er.”

I am how I got/get t/here: on two feet: pedestrian; two wheels: cyclist; four wheels: skater; eight wheels: roller skater. On four wheels (motorized), I am a driver; on ten wheels (motorized), a passenger; on three wheels (airborne), a(n in)frequent flier. And balanced atop dozens of wheels coupled together by arms of steel and metal alloys, hurtling deep through the earth or high through the tops of trees, shifting between who/where I was and who/where I will be, dreaming into the moving black or to the (not-)far off mountains beyond of being elseone, elsewhere, I am, alas, a commuter. I think therefore I am, but I am not what I can think.

I am names and nicknames, identities and categories, truncations, abbreviations, diminutions, initialisms, neologisms, and at least three concepts appended with “mistress.”

I am (race) white, (reality) beige-peach-pink, sometimes (feeling) blue or yellow or green. I am what I eat (vegetarian/omnivore), how I buy (consumer/ist), whether I believe (a/theist) and what (myriad). I am innate: female. Cultural: woman. Sexually oriented: flexible.

I am relative, gender-neutral: spouse, sibling, child, grandchild; and relative, gender-specific: wife, sister, daughter, granddaughter. I am goddaughter, niece, first cousin, second cousin, third cousin, eventual fourth cousin, and daughter-sometimes-sister when my father can’t keep his sibling/’s name and me/mine straight.

To my mother, I am surviving; had she lived, she’d be a survivor. I may be/come a widow. I’ll likely be/come an orphan. But I am not. Yet.

I am not you, nor you I. And though you or I may be he or she or him or her, you and I are we, and we are not them—nor they us.

I am not a brand.

I am what I am not. I (y)am what I (y)am. But that’s not all that I am.

I am, indeed, what I do. Titular: Writer, Editor, Web Content and Development Manager. Procedural: writer, editor, Web content and development strategist. Spatially challenged: writer, editor, Web strategist. Verbal, easier: I write, I edit, I build Web sites. I am how I do: essayist, journalist, interviewer, playwright, copywriter, (generally bad) poet. I am that I do, whether when or why or if. Writers exist in the spaces between words, else they’d never exist at all.

Many older guitars are finished with a clear nitrocellulose lacquer that naturally yellows with age. Two decades ago, I bought a (then) new Pearl (powder) Blue guitar. By the time of this posting, I will have sold an old (to me), new (to her) minty, seafoam green one. Green/blue, old/new, mine/hers: it is all of these things, and none of them. I am becoming. And so am you.

***

Kellie M. Walsh is a (procedural) writer, editor, Web content and development strategist, and organizer of all things. Her writing has appeared in PopMatters, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction, among others, and on the sites of Fortune 500s, nonprofits, and seven-piece jazz bands. In her spare time she is working on a book about a flag that stalked a drummer around the world.

You can find more Fourth Monday action with Pam Parker’s flash Roadside Attraction, “Unroped,” and Chris Miscik’s sci-fi and fantasy images in the Gallery. If you’d like to contribute your writing, art or musical talent to the pages of V’s Place please send an email to e.victoriaflynn@gmail.com, and remember to sign up for future installments straight to your inbox by entering your email address in the take out menu to the left.

Love Wraps Round a Wrist

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By Lisa Marie Brodsky

Dedicated to my mother, Sheila (1954-2006) and Aislyn, Gabrielle, and Atrus – most definitely, my kids

I didn’t notice until it was already happening: such a simple gesture which had such monumental meaning. She had no idea what it meant to me and I don’t know if she ever will. Perhaps if she ever experiences a huge loss she can understand. Today, though, she is eight years old and she merely fingers my bracelet, the one I’ve worn for years.

It is not a fancy bracelet; it doesn’t sparkle or catch a jeweler’s eye, but it is so simple in its beauty that I get generous comments: “Oh, what a beautiful bracelet,” someone will say. “Is that tiger eye?”

And I answer, “It was my mother’s.”

Besides her wedding band, this is the only piece of my mother’s jewelry I own. I wear it every day; I never take it off. My three stepchildren look at me, their mother-figure for the past three years, and they don’t see my much-missed mother who passed away two years before I met them. No matter how much of a lost child I may feel like inside, they see an adult mother-figure and I just hope that they love me half as much as I loved my mother.

A stepmother’s role can be very confusing. Do you step in or let Dad take care of it? If “Mom” is in the picture, how much mothering do you do for the children? In my case, we find ourselves having to unparent a lot of damaged parenting that went on. There are fights, crying, yelling, struggle, but the thing I try to remember is this:

There are moments like that above, where my 8-year-old girl (yes, I call her my girl) lovingly touches and discovers my mother’s bracelet. She sits on my lap and snuggles close. I can smell the fruity shampoo scent wafting from her hair. I kiss her on the top of her head and watch her intently investigate this bracelet – so nondescript and ordinary, yet something intrigues her. What is it? I wonder. Can she sense the generations behind this bracelet? Can she sense the love that my mother had for me and the love I had for my mother? I imagine she does.

I feel comforted imaging that.

So on days when kids cry and scream and we yell and grunt, I picture again and again my kids touching generations of love wrapped around my wrist. I imagine my mother touching her grandchildren, never meeting them in the flesh, but definitely, most definitely, loving them through me.

***

Born in Chicago, Lisa Marie Brodsky is a published poet with several books of published poetry and one about her mother’s death forthcoming from Salmon Publishing. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, always focusing on the semi-autobiographical, has been nationally and internationally recognized and published. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Loyola University of Chicago and her M.F.A. in Poetry from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lisa forgetfully blogs at http://memoryspeaksintongues.blogspot.com, but you can also find her a bit more regularly at her faith blog, http://dovechronicles.blogspot.com. Lisa is the Wisconsin Director of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (http://alzpoetry.com) and works as a Job Coach for disabled adults, a true honor. In 2009, she married and became an insta-Mom to three stepchildren, ages 13, 8, and 5. She and her family live in Evansville, Wisconsin, the first small-town Lisa has ever lived in. The holiday parades down Main Street amaze her.

Check out more Fourth Monday action with flash fiction by Jillian Kuhlmann in Roadside Attractions and original music by The Kate Morrissey Band, now playing on the Music Stage. Also, remember to keep updated on all Fourth Monday activity by subscribing to V’s Place or submit your own work to e.victoriaflynn@gmail.com.


No Man’s Land

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photo by foto 76

This is important. I don’t want you to talk me down. This book I am writing, day by day, word after word, is not going anywhere. It is coming out of me and that is all I need from it.

I am not in love with the memoir, though I did only last week bring home a stack to lean against my bed for safekeeping. And I opened and am reading Eat, Pray, Love and have found I want to be Elizabeth Gilbert’s new friend. I find her engaging and humble in a way I hadn’t expected. To be honest, I thought this book would compare to the last memoir I finished and I was terrified to break into it, which is why I started Gilbert’s book before Naked; I was working backward.

The ineffable They say to read the books you want to write. I read a lot of fiction; I’m an escapist at heart. With the exception of Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Stephen King (I honestly don’t know if On Writing counts here), and Natalie Goldberg (in a manner of speaking) memoir writers haven’t held my attention. Elizabeth Gilbert has grabbed me in the sense that I have been in her berserk world of self sacrifice and holy hell and I want to know how she manages to break out of it. Also, as I said before, I think she’s a friendly.

(Here’s a side note: NOT to downplay women writers, but I just realized that every memoir I have read written by a woman puts a certain amount of attention on one or another form of God. This can’t always be the case, but maybe my list is shorter than I think.)

So anyway. What am I trying to accomplish if not some amazing work of literary brilliance with which to stun and electrify millions of unknowing readers?

Focus.

Every day I sit down to write. Every day this word focus lights up, blinking frantically across the page like midnight neon in a Tom Waits’ song. Focus. Focus. I need it bad. The only way to get it is to do. Enter: the memoir. Easy peasy. Or not quite. Whatever. We’re in this for the long haul and I’m not going to bore you with every highlight and lowlight that comes along; I just want you to know, no pressure. We’re taking this one word at a time.

Before you go there’s something that has been nagging me about memoirs and I really would love to hear some opinions on this. All along I’ve had it in my mind that memoirs are written currently about past events, but now I’m noticing a trend in writing events as they occur. Somewhere I read an explanation of a diary as opposed to a memoir, being that a diary is recorded as events unfold. What do you think? Am I being too nit-picky? For the record, what I am writing crosses over from present to past and back again, though I call it memoir for lack of a better word. Hit me up.

 

 

Fact or Fiction

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In a strange sort of way things have been intense. I gathered all my eggs from a novel-laying chicken and out popped the first lines of a memoir, the memoir I’ve been working on for nearly three years and all but abandoned come last fall. There were no more tricks left to avoid the project; the owners of my childhood home had come back into the country and opened their doors to me. I spent two hours in August juxtaposed between past and present and came away cloudy. Then I started writing fiction.

Like a new love affair I fell passionately for fiction. I dreamed it backwards and forwards. I kicked the memoir out of the house. “Enough with you, you old, boring life,” I said. “I’m the one creating worlds now.”

The thing is, good lovers know how to be patient. They recognize phases and can tap at an inner core when you feel hollow. Then they come back and they bring gifts.

Today I don’t know the whole story that is being written, but I have found an organic structure underneath a series of events that is slowly reveling itself to me as it tap-tap-taps out its chords, leaving me to record its moody rhythm.

 

 

Maybe it just took this long to process events.

Examining Walker Evans

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by Fred Osuna

An asymptomatic condition of some concern to my primary physician found me sitting in a specialist’s examining room on a recent morning. Pushed up alongside one wall was the examination table: a well-worn piece of equipment with cracking leather corners, faded paint on its legs forcing a resemblance to an abandoned pommel horse base circa 1977 – a crackling, long sheet of tissue paper strategically placed in an apparent effort to conceal those details. The table occupied the length of the wall, and led my eyes, upon entering the room, to the plate glass window that occupied its perpendicular neighbor. The window was adorned with aluminum blinds, half-opened to afford a panoramic view of the hospital campus from the room’s fifth-floor perch. After spending a few minutes taking in the sights, watching the green lights at the intersection turn to red a number of times while three shuttles performed their drop-off-pick-up duties at the adjacent building’s entrance, I turned around to face the door – now closed – through which I had entered. I sat down in a stiff chair with my back to the window.

Centered on the wall opposite the examining table, to the right of a small sink and above a rolling stool that, I assumed, the specialist would soon be occupying, was a large framed photograph.

Peeking out from the bottom of the print, almost obscured by the frame, was the photo credit: Walker Evans Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama 1936. I leaned back on my heels, in front of the picture, and soaked in the details: the hand-painted signs, the telegraph poles, the onlookers in the background, the weight of the melons in the boys’ hands, the price of eel, the fish face frown, the outdated phone number configuration, the oddly-placed apostrophes, the stacked fruit orbs in the window.

Presently, the physician entered and sat squarely where I thought he might. He rolled to the center of the small room and faced me. The Walker Evans photograph was between us, off to the side of our avenue of communication. We discussed his concerns. I mentioned my asymptomatic state. He proposed a plan of discovery to rule out his concerns. I gave my consent to go forward. During the discussion, I occasionally glanced to my left, toward the Walker Evans photograph. When we finished this stage of my visit, I gently detoured with an observation.

“That’s a fascinating photograph.”

He turned toward it and lit up. “A Walker Evans, yes. That’s an exhibition print. It’s a rather famous photograph.” He seemed to hold this particular picture in high esteem and had obviously spent some quality time admiring it. “You know, for that exhibition – in the 1980s, I think – they went to all of the sites of the original Evans photographs and recaptured them in the present day. That fish stand is just right outside of town,” meaning Birmingham, the largest “town” in the state of Alabama, where we were meeting. “The updated version of this photo has two boys holding fish, not melons. And that building is gone now.”

I asked if he had been the one who had selected this print to adorn the walls of the exam room.

“No, this is my partner’s print,” he said, referring to the other physician whose name was on the office door. He then paused, anticipating an explanation of my initial observation.

I turned my eyes to the print. “I was wondering if you thought that there was something maybe a little odd about the picture.”

He turned and made a cursory scan of the picture he’d glanced at hundreds of times before. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but, mm, it’s oddly fitting that in the center of that photograph is a pretty obvious representation of, you know, for this being a urology practice.”

Puzzled, he took another look. It took him no more than a couple of seconds to see the central image – the watermelon phallus – and he laughed. “I’d never noticed that,” he said, to my disbelief and his quiet amusement. Then he swiveled back toward me. “So. Now. Stand up, facing me, and let your pants drop to your ankles.”

***

A native of the paradise that is the San Diego County coastline, Fred Osuna lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where ceiling fans provide scant relief from the relentless heat and humidity. He writes not nearly as much as he would like, though constantly generates tweet-length vignettes in his head, throughout the day; some of these have landed in the pages of Creative Nonfiction under both his real name and a pseudonym. He struggles to maintain three websites: Spitball Army (www.spitballarmy.com), Cryptich (www.cryptich.com) and Laser’s Edge Leftovers (www.leleftovers.wordpress.com). You should ask him sometime about his collection of World War II letters, but now you’re probably more interested in figuring out his other name.

***

For more Fourth Monday posts check out flash fiction by Jane Hammons in Roadside Attractions, Camille Swift’s sublime fantasy portraits in the Gallery, or participate in a mini blog tour of The Dead Shoe Society author readings, beginning at the Open Mic. And if you haven’t seen them yet, don’t forget to check out past contributors on the Music Stage, Rumors, and elsewhere on the Blog.