tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24697624945455572082024-03-05T00:25:20.400-08:00Mostly MemoirA discussion of this emerging art formUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-21182664181908909252013-09-02T12:09:00.001-07:002013-09-02T12:09:17.169-07:00STICK TO THE WRITING<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the Authentic Writing workshops we always remind people and ourselves to “stick to the writing” when responding to something someone has just written. When hearing a personal story written candidly, spontaneously, with no attempts at camouflage, it can be very easy to respond with something along the lines of “oh, you poor dear,” or “how brave you were.” </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">No writer wants to hear that. That’s not why we write. Comments like that do not support the writing. They detract from it. They counteract it in the disguise of empathy.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s a hard line to define sometimes, but a real danger zone when it comes to writing and reading memoir. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I just this morning finished re-reading Ingrid’s Betancourt’s outstanding memoir, <i>Even Silence Has An End</i>. I’m not the crying type, but I had tears in my eyes in the closing pages. This is eloquent writing. Yes, I loved the adventure of the story and the rainforest environment, but it is Betancourt’s obvious integrity-filled effort to write down her inner experiences, self-examinations and observations of those tortuous years, and how carefully she describes those moments when freedom finally arrives that make this book stand high above the sea of standard memoir.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The writing is so intelligent and vulnerable. You can tell she is not seeking more than to tell her truth and she’s smart and capable and can do it artfully in words. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After turning the last page and taking a moment, I went to see what the reviewers had said. I started to read one that sounded in tune with my own sentiments. The reviewer wrote several paragraphs about how moving the book was etc., and then the reviewer’s voice changed direction, criticizing Betancourt for making money on the book and for charging high fees to speak, telling us that no one in Colombia can stand her. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What has that got to do with anything? </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am not at all convinced that Ingrid and I would fall in love should we ever sit down for a cup of tea together. I can imagine she might be very hard to get close to. She’s a tough cookie and she doesn’t take shit from anyone. (I’d like to see her and this reviewer in the ring together -- ha! I know where I’d put my money.)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But that has nothing to do with the masterful work Ingrid has done creating this memoir. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, yes, I loathe it when people think they are reviewing a memoir and really what they are reviewing are the decisions made in the narrative, the life choices willingly exposed.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Recently I heard Aaron Sorkin (the creator of West Wing and Newsroom) say that he doesn’t think anyone’s life could survive public scrutiny. I love that. I agree.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I guess that’s why many people are afraid to write probing memoir. They know the piranhas are out there. Piranhas don’t scare me though. And they certainly do not scare Ingrid Betancourt. That’s one reason why her book is so good. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-37779914211994678112013-08-23T03:01:00.000-07:002013-08-23T12:51:43.482-07:00FROM THE QUIET<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>When I was a kid I read a lot. In my house everyone did. It was a survival technique. We all went off and read alone somewhere. It was how you got away from everyone else. So, for better or worse, I am well read and I yearned early on to become a grown-up who could write a good book. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>That yearning was a solitary thing, growing like a sapling in the soil of other solitary things – the walking, the getting up early. These things are all part of my quiet inner self. They go together: the writing, the reading, the being alone and quiet.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>The rest of my life is as noisy as anyone else’s. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>I was on my standard 20-minute get-out-of-the-office afternoon walk yesterday and I was thinking about a writing competition I might do and of Twitter friends and of a press release I should do about my book – I am one of the legions of writers now tasked with getting the word out about our work. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Writing has become a double-job: you write and you sell. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>When I was a teenager and doing my yearning I didn’t imagine the second part, the selling part. Other people did that. But they don’t do it anymore. They have abdicated. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>And it’s okay – in many ways I enjoy the online life, the finding of people across the globe who respond in similar ways to the same 140 characters that I do and so on.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>But yesterday I did wonder. How will this affect my writing, our writing? I am writing this blog post, yes, because these are my thoughts and I want to write them down, but also because blogs exist as a way of letting the world know who you are and what you are up to. I am writing this post as a way of filling out my online identity.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>What would I be writing if I were still in solitary mode, if I were allowed to stay in that state of mind that thrives on walks and silence and other books? What would any of us be writing? </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>I thought these things with a sense of loss yesterday.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>And then acceptance. This is the world in which I write. In twenty years it may well be different again and that too will affect the way I and we write. And I may find myself looking back on these years with some kind of nostalgia. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Outside my window it is just beginning to get light. </b></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-32490068545537057142012-10-21T06:00:00.003-07:002012-10-21T06:47:08.796-07:00FIGHTING WORDS<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I finished a book-length manuscript 18 months ago. Then I spent a year re-reading it and fixing little things here and there. Not a full solid year, but it took me a year of finding hidden margins of time to re-read the book. When I got to the end of that second read I thought, “Okay, the end isn’t good enough and I have to fix that bit in the middle, make it better.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A couple more months went by before I could sit down and do this. I’d been looking forward to it. But within about 10 minutes, I thought, “You know, I could fiddle with this forever. This book is done.” Within 24 hours I had found someone to read it through and clean up any typo’s. I’m waiting for her to finish, have figured out who I’m going to ask to design the book and how I want the cover, and I’ve come to love what I had been thinking of as only a working title. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">When I told the woman who will be proofing the manuscript -- a good friend and a fine poet -- that I’d only read through the manuscript once, she more or less gasped. (I don’t know if people actually “gasp,” but she expressed shock). She’d just been telling me of the manual she’d been reading about how to write fiction and how she’s on the fifth read of her own novel. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Re-reading and re-writing is unquestioned wisdom when it comes to writing. It’s deemed part of the chore of it all – that and sitting alone for hours and hours and hours.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">During the summer I was talking with a writer who has been on one book project for a few years. I told him I was just completing my book, that I expected to be done in the fall, that I had a little re-writing to do. “Right,” he said. “And you’ll probably still be at it 3 years from now!” Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I disagree. I disagree with just about everything I read (or, actually don’t read) on how to write. I don’t want anyone – and I mean ANYone – telling me how to write. And I’m not telling you anything here. I’m writing down my experience and I am encouraging you to have some faith in your own experience as a writer and follow the uncharted course it prescribes.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I wrote with a woman the other day for the first time. She’s a successful professional woman who has done a lot of legal writing. She came to me because she wanted to write something more personal. We sat down and had a writing session together. “Wow,” she said afterwards, her eyes shining. “I have never ever written like that before.” She’d written something beautiful, something completely her own, a memory from forty years before, every sentence of it providing more detail so I could see the environment that she was seeing in her mind’s eye. And the next day we spoke of it again. “It was wonderful writing with you,” she said. “It demystified writing!” </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Yes! Take out the mystique that implies only some people have the key to the land of golden treasure – all these endless tracts on how to write, how to “create characters” – they do only harm, no good at all. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Not that writing is not mysterious. It is. And not that continuing to write doesn’t make you a better writer, that there is always more territory to discover. There is. And not that there isn’t joy and creativity in some re-writing. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But I have the feeling that if it weren’t for computers writing wouldn’t have become the land of endless rewrites. Think of all those writers who did it by hand or on a typewriter… </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Back to my manuscript. For the last two weeks I have been worried and thinking about it. Maybe I was too rash. I’m usually too rash. Maybe I should do what everyone else does, re-read that sucker, tweak every sentence, make it better.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But my other half won out. No reader is going to notice the changes I will make. If they don’t like the book the way it is now they are not going to eat it up because I’ve made some of the sentences more pleasing. And I believe in what comes out onto the page the first time – I don’t want to lose that. Maybe it’s no good. But no matter how long you work on these things that’s a chance you have to take. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-6376609004544781572012-10-18T08:33:00.002-07:002012-10-18T08:38:13.050-07:00MEMOIR AND FICTION<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My parents liked to read. There were tall, filled bookshelves in the living room. I got deeply involved with the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, then horse books. In boarding school bliss was weekend afternoons when every girl lay silently on her single bed, reading and eating candy freshly purchased from the tiny candy shop improvised by Sister Anthony on a card table. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By the time I was in my teens I had found home in books -- grown-up ones now, ones often purloined from the shelves in the living room. I read novels. I read fiction. That's where the art was then. And I promised myself that if I did anything with my life, I was going to find a way to become one of those magic people who could write fiction and create worlds that were more real to me than the ones presented anywhere else. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Forty years later, I don't read fiction anymore. At least, not contemporary fiction. The last novel I read was <i>The God of Small Things</i> back in the mid-nineties. And that was a helluva book to end on. I read it twice. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But I can't bear current fiction now. We have memoir now. We have broken through that barrier and someone can tell their story now directly and fully without the clothing of fiction. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When George Eliot was writing, or Jean Rhys, or Virginia -- the language of memoir that we have now did not exist. People had to put their memoir into fiction. And when you read good fiction from back then -- something I still do -- you can hear the writer's thinking bleeding through the story. I still read old fiction with enthusiasm. And I've been wondering why I like fiction in old books, but have no interest when it comes to the new fiction.</span><br />
<br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I pick up a new novel now, open it, and as soon as I read the first sentence -- about someone who does not exist -- I lose interest. There is nothing at stake. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I want the writer to be willing to show themselves as blatantly as possible on the page. I look hard for good contemporary memoir. When I am lucky and I come across it then I hardly put the book down until I am finished. I can't. The pleasure is too great. </span><br />
<br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But good memoir is hard to come by, and to fill the gap I have been returning to fiction from the 1940s and further back into the 19th century. I would still rather read a good current memoir. But these old books keep me going. I am grateful for them, rich and deep, the soil I came from.</span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-27883877243534056072011-09-05T13:12:00.000-07:002011-11-16T12:29:56.096-08:00BEST MEMOIRS, 2011<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So far, here in November 2011, I have named five books as my favorite memoirs of the year. Two were published this year and two published in other years.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">TWIN by Allen Shawn<br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">TOWNIE by Andre Dubus III</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME by Janice Galloway<br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">GONVILLE by Peter Birkenhead<br />
<br />
THIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS by Melissa Coleman </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Read and enjoy.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-60002130058614362722010-12-19T08:55:00.001-08:002010-12-19T08:57:22.808-08:00SUNDAY WRITING THOUGHT<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">t's a strange feeling to write like this. Like I am writing badly on purpose. Because I do not want to write “well.” If I write “well” I will miss something, I will not discover the part of me that I don't know. And so I on purpose ignore, refute the part of my brain that knows how to do it, the part I would use if I were trying to get a writing job or impress someone. I don't want to write with that part of myself. I want to write without protection.</span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-74882337792345543742010-12-05T08:27:00.000-08:002010-12-19T09:15:46.803-08:00Perfection Is Not<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">If you ask me, perfection and art don't go together. Maybe they do for some people, but the quest for perfection – i.e. compulsion – is an art killer. A writing killer. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So many writers I have known (including myself at times) can't sit down to write because of the fear of not doing it well enough. It might disguise itself as “I have no time,” but I think if you look more closely fear of not writing well enough might be the actual reason. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And if they do get as far as chair, paper, pen then whatever words make it through are erased or torn up. It happened just yesterday in the workshop. A young woman, after reading one of the most powerful paragraphs I had ever heard, announced that it was the only part of what she had written that morning that she had allowed to survive. The rest she had erased. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Destroying your writing is a form of suicide. Not writing at all is a sort of pre-emptive suicide. It's not easy to insist on life, on writing. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I resist my own impulse to self-destroy by publishing online as soon as I write. I like this art form of writing and publishing instantly. It came to me of its own accord. I didn't copy it from anyone. It works for me. I write this way. In the beginning I wanted to be Virginia Woolf, at my desk every morning – it has morphed into this: writing mostly in the Authentic Writing workshops, writing in pen because the subsequent typing is a chance to make a few light changes. And then posting it. There's no time to destroy.</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I've got a good sharp brain. I could criticize my writing. I'd make a great English professor if I wanted to go in that direction. But I do not. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So I encourage all art-writers – people who write to discover something about themselves, to walk on new turf, people whose life goal is not to just mimic what others have done and been praised for – I encourage you to stop thinking. Thinking and writing do not go together. </span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-8953194567037828012010-04-04T12:35:00.000-07:002010-04-04T12:35:15.097-07:00For inspirationI made a friend online about a year ago. I came across her blog, Art on the Run, and we have corresponded ever since. I share today's post, which I found, as a writer, hugely inspiring. Often I find my writing to be a close relation of Heather's art. I like her approach.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://art-heather.blogspot.com/">Heather's Art </a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-23567313299168239852010-03-09T12:25:00.000-08:002010-03-09T12:25:27.643-08:00Loren Eiseley quote<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I find this perfectly attuned to my experience of writing memoir.</div><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><i>In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind. </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-4064916735217606512009-12-31T07:27:00.001-08:002010-01-01T10:10:51.367-08:00Memoir, Art and What It's Good For<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLELIiNjnwGCtZlYkA7K0vB3RWPXhgwc8kZvy5Fn9g90b_VHDl3-UMn6g122ZTw66TBu_ocSakiHqwx-lw4QlnekliMrAVU5oKdTcfaHC43-JUPFENZfNagvV2olx1JD-WCAoMhW7kHS8b/s1600-h/desk.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLELIiNjnwGCtZlYkA7K0vB3RWPXhgwc8kZvy5Fn9g90b_VHDl3-UMn6g122ZTw66TBu_ocSakiHqwx-lw4QlnekliMrAVU5oKdTcfaHC43-JUPFENZfNagvV2olx1JD-WCAoMhW7kHS8b/s320/desk.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421818534812887442" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:verdana;">I hear it a lot in our memoir-writing groups. “This is better than therapy!” </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Yes, it is. Which, to my mind, is not saying much. I think “therapy” is way overrated and I can't wait for it to be thrown on the historical pile of things-that-didn't-work. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">But my response when people talk to me about the therapeutic wonders of writing real memoir is a response I got from Fred when I first brought it up with him many years ago when I was brand new to the Authentic Writing workshops. “Is this art, or is this therapy?” I asked him, suspiciously, looking, as always, for something to be wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">“Making art is therapeutic,” he answered calmly. Of course it is. How could it not be? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">But a lot of people claim art therapy. They have theater groups and painting groups that claim to be therapeutic and I bet many of them help. But they are different from what we do in the Authentic Writing workshops and I want to see if I can distinguish how that is. I want to talk about the relationship between the type of writing that we do, its healing effects, and what art is. Because these are all big words and everyone uses them and means something a little different by them. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Take the word “memoir.” When people ask what type of writing I do and what type of writing the workshops focus on, that's the shortest answer: memoir. But I don't like that word much. I wish I could come up with something better because “memoir” covers all sorts of things that we are not. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">At the extreme end of the scale there's memoir “as told to” -- you know, when the celebrity sits down with a writer, has a few long chats over drinks, etc., and the professional writer gets their story down on paper. That's called memoir. Let's get that off the table quickly. We all know this discussion isn't about that kind of memoir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Then there's the broad swath of pedestrian memoirs in between the two extremes. And for the most part they are only boring because the people who write them aren't that interesting. You know, you can only write good memoir to the extent that you are plowed and irrigated as a person. If you haven't dared much, if you haven't looked inside much – no amount of “instruction” is going to make your writing – your expression of yourself – very complicated or unique. So the memoirs in this category all kind of sound like they were written by the same person even though the stories are different. One way to quickly identify them is that they depend on what they are about, rather than the voice of the writer telling the story. Let's get these off the table too – though where you draw the line is up to you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">So now I'm at the small group at the far end of the spectrum – those of us who are simply daring to write without thinking about it too much, writing as a means of discovering something about ourselves, writing without a model in mind – except maybe Van Gogh. Now we're talking about what I mean by art. Ahhh. I'm feeling better already. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I want to stand amongst the Van Gogh's of this world – those who are creating for its own sake, creating to forge new territory that – for the artist – is desperately needed to survive. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">That's where healing lies. What is this word “healing” anyway? So prevalent it makes me a little carsick to hear it – like too much sugar. I prefer the word “strengthening.” Writing memoir – discovering and saying distinctly your version of the facts – not through the disguise of metaphor, but in unmistakable scenes and concrete details -- makes you strong. To choose the stories that are important, not have someone tell you what they are. To write without obligation to family, schoolteachers, grammarians, or bestseller lists. And in that list, family is by far the most powerful. The loyalty to family is at the root of all other loyalties that restrict a person, rather than permitting them to blossom. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">As I write we've just come through the Christmas season. Almost everyone I know spoke of family obligations they had to abide by, and how exhausting those were. I saw adults – people with not that many years left in their lives -- still enslaved by family. I saw people not allowed by their so-called loving families to do as they wished, sometimes to even know what they wished. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Writing is a powerful tool that can loosen this knot of love, oppression, obligation that keeps people trapped and unable to blossom. To write your own stories in your own voice, to choose them and recreate them in a way that appears exquisitely accurate to you, is invigorating. It gives you independence. Frightening but life-giving. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I can't offer this as a system, as a one-two-three process. You write: you become liberated. It doesn't work like that. But if something here in what I have written inspires you to write that's all that's needed. Writing will take care of the rest. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-58952651769661573002009-12-07T07:43:00.000-08:002009-12-31T07:45:08.237-08:00Another Recommendation<span style="font-family:verdana;">A wonderful memoir, <a href="http://jeffreykoterba.com/">INKLINGS</a>, by Jeffrey Koterba, just published this year. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-20128191450078184642009-12-06T09:10:00.000-08:002009-12-06T09:15:03.364-08:00A Very Good Read<span style="font-family:verdana;">If you have an interest in good memoir </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:verdana;" >and</span><span style="font-family:verdana;"> finding out more about the invisible world of Afghanistan, I suggest this great book, </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:verdana;" >East of New York, West of Kabul</span><span style="font-family:verdana;"> by <a href="http://mirtamimansary.com">Tamim Ansary</a>. Ansary was born in Afghanistan with an Afghan father and an American mother. He left to live in the States when he was about 10. He is anchored in Afghanistan, understands it, can convey its mystery, and yet he does not come across as a "foreigner." He's an American. It is very good reading from both a literary point of view and an educational one. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-70431209376244296212009-11-10T12:12:00.000-08:002009-11-10T12:13:49.862-08:00A Worthy Quote by Mary Karr<span style="font-family: verdana;">And you have to make a distinction between literature and sound-byte memoirs. The sound-byte memoir is only worth reading in an airport. I want to create a whole world, like a novel.<br />-- Mary Karr. Author of the memoirs, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Liar's Club</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cherry </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Lit</span>.<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-32841640243157501682009-10-30T05:45:00.000-07:002009-10-30T05:46:44.513-07:00Words on Memoir by Susanna Sonnenberg<span class="plogBodyText">"I felt a sense of frustration and outrage that people started to look for newspaper reporting when they picked up a memoir. The form has never been that -- it's deeply impressionistic. And isn't that what we look to artists for? A new rendering, a unique voice in a common conversation. Art should always give us something to see that we couldn't have defined before. At the beginning of <i>Speak, Memory</i> Nabokov describes his "awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold." He acknowledges that each consciousness is acute and unique, in possession of its own "bright blocks." And he's going to write them down. I also love memory's fallibility implied in Dylan Thomas's <i>A Child's Christmas in Wales</i>, which is memoir: He writes, "I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six." Thus, the two versions are both true and untrue at the same time. I guess I felt that I needed to make absolutely clear how deeply I revered the form of memoir, what a fascinating, personal expression it is. By definition, memoir is eccentric, to use your word." -- Susanna Sonnenberg, author of <span style="font-style: italic;">Her Last Death</span><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-67360059798583536682009-10-27T08:07:00.000-07:002009-10-27T08:09:26.913-07:00Inspiration<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cbonnies%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:lucida grande;" class="MsoNormal">“<span style="font-style: italic;">There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defense. ‘Look how absurd I was when I was young’ forestalls cruel criticism, but it falsifies history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony.</span>” – Graham Greene, from his introduction to his memoir, <span style="font-weight: bold;">A Sort Of Life</span></p> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-22902036710023362592009-10-26T07:55:00.000-07:002009-10-26T08:56:30.592-07:00When Is It Done?<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cbonnies%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><i style="">I don’t like that word, “finish.” When something is finished that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting. I just stop working on it for awhile.</i> – Arshile Gorky</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Fred wrote this quote down from the exhibition we just attended in <st1:city st="on">Philadelphia</st1:city>, a full retrospective of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Gorky</st1:city></st1:place>’s paintings.* “Here,” he said later, bringing out his notebook, “you’ll like this.” And I do. Very much. It echoes what I have said about writing.
<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">When I was in my teens and first awakening to literature and how a writer could speak through writing in a way you can’t speak any other way, I thought that the words I was reading in Virginia Woolf’s book or Jean Rhys’s book or Kurt Vonnegut’s book were the chiseled words they had firmly and finally decided upon and that in no way could they be changed or improved upon. When you wrote, I thought, your job was to line up the best words and get it right.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">I have submitted <i style="">The Guru Looked Good</i> to many people under different circumstances, and each time I polish it up, and each time I think that’s the best it can be. I think it’s done.<span style=""> </span>And then the next submission time or performance comes around and I see many places where I can sharpen the focus, and I make changes.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">I came to realize that when something is published it’s a snapshot of something in motion – you’re catching the work at a particular moment. Writers don’t usually return to something once it’s published, but that doesn’t mean it’s “done.” Nothing’s ever done. The writing – the art -- is alive.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Which could bring me to the subject of getting someone to edit your work. A sore subject with some.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Recently, I was on a panel of mostly memoir writers and someone from the audience – a well meaning writer -- asked us if we recommended having someone edit your work. Two people on the panel, in unison, answered immediately, “Yes.”
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">I had to chime in. I had to fight this automatic yes.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">There is a place – somewhere – for outside editing, but it is a relatively small and insignificant place when we’re talking about writing and especially about memoir which is the most personally demanding form of writing. So much of writing – and the pleasure and effort of writing -- when you’re thinking about putting your work out in the world – is about revisiting your creation and seeing what occurs to you as you read it through again. So I sometimes do plenty of editing when I’m preparing something for presentation.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">But editing is the easy part. Kind of like coasting after you've biked to the top of the hill.
<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">I am much more interested in those first grabs for material, when you really have to take risks and reach into yourself and choose what images you are going to go with and what trail of crumbs you are going to follow. That’s what we do in our workshops and it is the most difficult part of writing.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Back to editing since those two writers who said, “Yes!” so effortlessly later took such umbrage with my contrasting point of view.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Very very <i style="">very</i> few people are capable of editing your work. Certainly not some random professional. A good professional will most likely, at best, tell you how to get your work to conform to some standard. And if that’s your goal, well good-bye and good luck.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Writing and art are about escaping standards. So if you have someone who knows you and your writing deeply, someone who you think is also a good writer – they’d be a good choice to read and respond to your work and make suggestions if they have them. Suggestions. That’s all an editor can make. Writers must always have the last word.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">The last thing a person in the process of or beginning to write needs to hear about is getting someone to edit their work. Because beginning writers will be tempted to get their work to Point A and then submit it to a professional for the supposed “fixing.” Then, like a butterfly, the professional will pin the thing to a board and the vulnerable, unsupported artist will assume that that’s the end product.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">No. Don’t give your work to a professional editor unless you know them very well and you have a clear vision for what you are going for in your writing. Hold onto your work. Revisit it. Let it mature. Don’t race to have someone else deem your work publishable. Remember, Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-style: italic;font-family:verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">*Go see the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Gorky</st1:place></st1:city> exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art. You will see the work of an artist giving himself over to his inner vision, voice, mystery.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-14530939344622003132009-10-21T10:00:00.000-07:002009-10-21T11:57:57.267-07:00Favorite 2009 Memoirs<span style="font-family:verdana;">I have two favorites and I just finished the second.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;"><span style="font-style: italic;">When Skateboards Will Be Free</span> by </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://sayrafiezadeh.com/">Said Sayrafiezadeh</a><span style="font-family:verdana;"> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Her Last Death</span> by </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://susannasonnenberg.com/">Susanna Sonnenberg</a><span style="font-family:verdana;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">For anyone who has a real interest in current memoir -- or memoir at all -- these two are musts.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-50049321125169342612009-10-18T17:15:00.001-07:002009-10-18T17:17:07.030-07:00Writer's Block & Other ThingsLast Saturday I was in Soho, waiting to meet for the first time the memoirist <a href="http://sayrafiezadeh.com">Said Sayrafiezadeh</a>. He wrote my favorite memoir of ’09, “When Skateboards Will Be Free” and he had suggested we meet at McNally Jackson on Prince Street, a bookstore I had never heard of. Walking down from the Bleeker Street subway stop, I realized that it must have been a long time since I'd been down this way. I didn't recognize the blaze of new stores and all the pretty people filling the sidewalks. One place that claimed to be a “deli” had an open-air swath of tables, filled on this warm-enough day, and I swear we could have almost been on Rodeo Drivc.<br /><br />I arrived at the bookstore first and went straight for “New Nonfiction” and within minutes had found a new<a href="http://alice-miller.com"> Alice Miller</a>, reason to celebrate.<br /><br />Alice Miller first came to prominence in the eighties with her first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child. I wasn't in the States then and missed it, and missed all her books until just a few years ago when I discovered “The Body Never Lies” and “Pictures From a Childhood.” Now I think of her as someone doing absolutely individual work. I find her work immeasurably supportive and it is the only thing that makes any sense to me, that helps at all, when I find myself down in the depths of depression when nothing looks good or hopeful.<br /><br />Someone asked me about writer's block yesterday. I think of writer's block as a form of depression, the form that hits writers when they want to write and can't. I advise anyone who wants to write real memoir, hard-hitting, no-holds-barred memoir to read Alice Miller if you want some support. And you're crazy if you don't want support.<br /><br />Alice Miller is a true ally of a person's individuality. She doesn't give a flying fuck for your parents. And that's unique.<br /><br />Everywhere I turn I see people doing more or less what they want, but reserving a corner of themselves for their family, especially for their parents. When it comes to family they give in and follow the rules. I see it all the time. People out there supposedly having their own lives, but as soon as a parent gets sick, or a parent has a birthday, or a child is coming home for Thanksgiving – everything is overturned. Real life is put on hold, because, after all, “it's family.”<br /><br />You can't write memoir if you're going to hold onto that stuff. Or you can, but your writing will be compromised to the degree that you are willing to bend it to fit family values.<br /><br />Okay, well a bunch of people have stopped reading by now, so now I'm just talking to my fellow hardcore writers. Here's Alice: “Many impressive rituals have been devised to make children ignore their true feelings and accept the cruelties of their parents without demur. They are forced to suppress their anger, their true feelings, and honor parents who do not deserve such reverential treatment, otherwise they will be doomed to intolerable feelings of guilt all their lives. Luckily, there are now individuals who are beginning to desist from such self-mutilation and to resist the attempt to instill guilt feelings into them. These people are standing up against a practice that its proponents have always considered ethical. In fact, however, it is profoundly unethical because it produces illness and hinders healing. It flies in the face of the laws of life.”<br /><br />Strong stuff. I love it.<br /><br />I didn't mention Alice when I answered the man yesterday about writer's block, though I could have. Instead, I talked about what works for me in the moment, and Alice has much to do with this. When I am not writing – when I am driving to work, or in a meeting, or out in the woods – when I am thinking about the writing I will do, and then when the moment comes – finally, I am in a workshop or here at the local coffee shop with my new laptop bought for a song – and instead of the release I’ve been looking forward to I feel resistance, suddenly there is nothing to write, no story to tell – in other words, when writer's block rises up, this is what I do.<br /><br />I rebel. I fight back. I can't see my enemy. Can't see the force that does not want me to speak, that wants me to feel small and insignificant and ridiculous. I know that's what's at stake. It has nothing to do with my true value or abilities. It may take a moment or two of hesitation, of capitulation, but I pick up the pen, I will not be deterred or convinced that there is no point to writing. I know there is. Because I’ve been through this many times. I know I must overcome this. And I get the first sentence down and then the second and then the third. And I damn well keep going.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-45547402865967152292009-09-18T04:28:00.000-07:002009-09-18T04:29:03.429-07:00Saturday workshops in Manhattan<span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">I will be offering three </span><a style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);" href="http://authenticwriting.com/">Authentic Writing</a><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);"> workshops in Manhattan on Saturday mornings -- if you want to do some writing, this is the place to be. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">All the writing will be from life -- spontaneous and personal. The workshops are for people who have written for years, people who have wished they were writing, people who write in their heads but don't manage to get it down on paper and everyone in between. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">These are studios more than workshops, a place for artists to come together and practice their art -- without competition or comparison. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">I do almost all my writing in these workshops. </span><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">The Guru Looked Good </span><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">was almost all written in workshops. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">You may take one or more workshops, or you can sign up for the series of three.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0); font-weight: bold;">We will meet at:</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0); font-weight: bold;">TRS, 44 E. 32 Street (between Park and Madison), 11th floor</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0); font-weight: bold;">Dates and Times:</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0); font-weight: bold;">October 10, November 14, December 12.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0); font-weight: bold;">10am - 1pm. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">Rates:</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">$75/workshop (please specify which date)</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">or</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">$180 for all three workshops</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">To register:</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">You can use PayPal</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">or</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">email me at: martaszabo@yahoo.com</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">or</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);">call me at: (845) 679-0306</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-30376493131299369872009-09-17T02:56:00.000-07:002009-09-17T02:57:14.829-07:00I just like bringing this one to the top of the pile every now & then...<span style="font-family:verdana;">I think that writing memoir is the most potent action I can take in this world. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">When I sit down to write – not an easy place to get to – I feel all my energies and abilities come into one focus, one laser point – I feel like a bird, pausing in mid-air, then plummeting down into the waves, intent on that one fish that will save it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I write, then come up for air, then look at what I have unearthed. It usually looks like just a handful of dust, not worth much. I could easily toss it out and forget about it. But I don’t. Not anymore. I add it to the pile. I am not sure what I am building, but this is all I have. For some reason, it is my most precious thing, the one thing that feels purely my own.<br /><br />(from Experiments In Memoir ~ but relevant here)<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-67791123899882286032009-09-13T09:19:00.000-07:002009-09-13T17:01:56.504-07:00After Seeing Natalie Merchant<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cbonnies%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:browserlevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="font-family: verdana;font-family:verdana;" class="MsoNormal">I came to Natalie Merchant late. I missed 10,000 Maniacs, for instance. But once I got out of the cloister of ashram life, I picked up on her pretty quick and even bought Motherland (I say “even bought” because I have an age-old poverty-related tic that makes it hard to buy records/tapes/CD's) – an album that I have consistently loved now for years.
<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal">I was excited to see her perform in person last night at the women’s conference at Omega.
<br /></p><p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal">Natalie is a small woman in person, petite, dressed in black, long dark hair and I’d be surprised if there was any make-up.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" face="verdana" class="MsoNormal">She opened up her book of music murmuring something offhand like, “I write them and then I forget them,” then something like “Not sure if I can get through this one without crying.” <span style=""> </span>She began with “Tell Yourself” – perhaps my favorite of the songs I know -- a version of the song perhaps slower than I am used to, every word clear and aching. The tears did not come until perhaps the last line “And there’s just no gettin’ round the fact that you’re thirteen right now” -- when I heard her voice crack just a little. The tears came right into my eyes too. In that moment especially I was the girl in that song.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">Then came about 3 more songs, all of them pensive, exploring, searching for meaning. They didn’t have regular rhythms of verse-verse-chorus. None of that. All of them moving like rivers of piano and lyrics. You knew, listening to this music, that Natalie was singing about herself every minute, that this was an inner exploration of a life.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">One song she began and then quickly stopped and laughed and said, “Oh, I know this one,” and she took down the book and played by memory.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">“It’s wonderful and terrible to be here,” she said at one point. “Wonderful because of this great gathering, and terrible because it has been a long time since I have been out.” She noticed someone holding up a camera <span style=""> </span>– “Oh,” she pleaded. “Are you filming me? Please don’t film me. This is just for us.” And went back to playing.</p><p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">She played a new song, one of those meanderings of words and music and when it ended at perhaps an uncertain point she said, “That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”</p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">“It’s good to come out of the forest sometimes,” she said later almost as if talking to herself.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">And after the final song she simply, gracefully, walked out. There was no standing before the audience either when she came in or when she departed, no standing and taking in what would have been a long standing ovation, a great wave of appreciation.
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<br /></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="MsoNormal">I am left with the belief that Natalie is even more complicated and interesting than I already suspected. I said to my husband later that night (he’d been there too), “I felt that Natalie was so completely herself tonight on stage.” She wasn’t trying to please anyone. She was living her life. Unexpected and wonderful. She didn’t make it look easy.</p> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2469762494545557208.post-90557410561646663292009-09-07T11:52:00.000-07:002009-09-12T14:01:43.928-07:00Ice Breaker<span style="font-family:verdana;">So many people use the word memoir, especially these days, and I wish there was another word for what I mean when I say memoir. I am determined to find a new word and am sure that I will, but it may take a long time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I say I’m a writer and people ask, what do you write, and I say memoir, and then they think I’ve written a memoir and that's it. Why would anyone write more than one memoir, right? Or they think that I <span style="font-style: italic;">want </span>to write a memoir because I’ve done something interesting like climbed Mt. Everest, or lived with a smart animal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">In the same vein, I hate it when, in response to hearing that someone has done something unusual, people say, "Now <span style="font-style: italic;">he</span> should write a memoir!" As if that's what memoir were about. As if a good memoir is about something interesting that someone has done. That's a mistake that's easy to make: writing memoir that assumes what has happened in a person's life is more interesting than the person themselves. It's as wrong as someone saying, "Why should I write memoir? Who'd be interested in what I've done?"</span> <span style="font-family:verdana;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">I was walking with a friend a few days ago, someone I like a lot. He had just finished his manuscript about a very intense period of his life with a dying parent. “But who needs another book about a dying parent?” he laughed, even though I knew this was one of the saddest, darkest, most definitive times of his life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">“I don’t read a memoir for what it’s about,” I answered. “I read a memoir for what it tells me about the writer.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Every memoir – every good one – is a self-portrait, and the more blatant and honest it is the better. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">Yeah, but what about the quality of the writing, I hear my critical friends asking. It’s not enough to be blatant and honest. Actually, it is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">There are other memoirs that claim to be blatant and honest just because they spatter blood and guts all over the page. I'm not talking about that, though it works sometimes. I have found from writing that honesty is a pretty slithery thing. It is subtle. You have to really find ways to look at yourself, your past, where and what you came from to really start to draw a self-portrait that has any meaning. This is much scarier than revealing the simple fact that your father fucked you, which is scary enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:verdana;">My favorite memoir I’ve found this year? </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:verdana;" >When Skateboards Will Be Free</span><span style="font-family:verdana;"> by Said Sayrafiezadeh. We have invited him to present at the Woodstock Memoir Festival this year and we are thrilled that he has said yes.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4