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Courage to Write, Passion to Read

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

by Jerry Waxler

Robert Waxler found his athletically active son, Jeremy, on the floor, unable to move his legs. Rushed, to a hospital, doctors first suspected a back injury. Tests revealed it to be more sinister, requiring emergency surgery. The memoir “Courage to Walk” by Robert Waxler starts like a medical thriller, but soon the lens of the book widens to include the family’s search for emotional survival. Jeremy’s medical crisis awakened echoes of a previous tragedy. Twelve years earlier, Jeremy’s older brother Jonathan died from a heroin overdose. Now, Robert and his wife Linda had to face a new trial.

The book blurb forms a contract with the reader

Before I even purchased the book, I knew from the blurb that the author was an English Literature professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. I knew that “Courage to Walk,” was about the crippling and potentially deadly illness of a second son, and I knew about the death of Robert and Linda’s oldest son, Jonathan.

This preliminary information not only motivated me to buy and read the book. It also set my expectations for what I would encounter inside. I was looking forward to learning about the relationship between this father and his son, and I wanted to learn more about the private emotions of a man who earned his living as an intellectual. Since Waxler had written two memoirs, I had the added incentive that if I liked one, I could also read the other.

Courage to Live, To Love, and To Write

The title “Courage to Walk” refers to the son’s courage to reclaim the use of his legs and return to his place in society. However, there are other forms of courage in evidence. Robert Waxler lived for twelve years under the burden of his previous loss and now he must cope with this new danger. While Jeremy was struggling to stand up physically, Robert Waxler struggled to stand up emotionally in a world that threatened to swallow the ones he loved.

Like any memoir writer, I imagine this author struggled with the dilemma of how much of his private life to share. And since college professors are being paid to tell students how the world works, I imagine he would have even more incentive to hide his vulnerability. The fact that Robert Waxler chose to reveal this family struggle makes his memoir an exquisite example not only in the courage to walk, but also the courage to write.

Professors and emotions

When I started reading “Courage to Walk” I assumed this professor would adhere to my stereotype that “intellectuals hide in their ivory tower.” Suspicious of his ability to express emotion, I was overly critical at first of his occasional literary references. For example, he inserted a poem by Emily Dickenson. “Hope is the thing with feathers, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune–without the words, and never stops at all.”

“Interesting,” I thought. “But what does Waxler think?”

To explore the suffering a parent must undergo, he quoted Simone Weil’s interpretation of the Bible. Weil said, “A mother, a wife, if they know the person they love is in distress will … suffer some equivalent distress.”

“Yes,” I thought. “I can appreciate this point that a parent would suffer, but why quote Simone Weil?” As I became accustomed to Waxler’s style my prejudice faded and I realized that the quotes were not creating distance between us at all. In fact, they invited me into his inner life. Upon reflection, it made perfect sense that Robert Waxler’s self-portrait ought to include a love of books, poetry, and plays. The references added depth to his character and through the course of the book, I saw how he used literature as a container large enough to include both passionate love and soul-crushing worry.

I thought of the poet William Blake, about whom Robert Waxler wrote his doctoral thesis. William Blake illustrated his poetry with etchings to offer readers an additional window into his soul. Robert Waxler achieved a similar purpose, showing me how other authors embellished his thoughts.

Waxler’s passion for books leaps around the world

While Jeremy Waxler was confined to his room, he read a pile of books. Robert listed the titles of the book, explaining their value for his son. “Like medicine on a shelf, these books need to be taken in and digested by a sensitive reader, and Jeremy is just that kind of reader, the kind that lets language seep deep through the skin and permeate the heart. Such reading gives him buoyancy, a lightness of being. Good books stir his blood and transport him to some other place.” Father and son shared this passion. Books were their common love.

I too am a lover of books. During my college years, I often saw the world in terms of the book in which I was currently immersed. After I graduated, few people in my life were interested in what I was reading, and my literary interest went into hiding. “Courage to Walk” reminds me that I’m not the only one with this impulse to turn toward books for sustenance.

This discovery comes at a perfect time for me. Thanks to blogging, I have been able to share my love for books with a larger crowd than at any time since I was a university student. With access to the purported billion plus people on the internet, bibliophiles everywhere can trade notes, enjoy each other’s company, and spread the word. Book lovers unite!

Writing Prompt for Memoir Readers
What memoirs make it onto your reading list? Look at the memoirs you recently read. What did you know about the author and his or her story that pulled you to read it? What similarities or differences with your own situation added to your curiosity? What questions did you hope to answer about the human condition in general or the author’s situation in particular?

Writing Prompt for Memoir Writers
In your own life or your memoir-in-progress, consider what your book blurb will tell potential readers about the journey they are about to embark on. What special audience might be interested in unique features in your story such as job, cultural or family background, geographical community, or some other special interest group? Brainstorm freely, and see which items would catch your eye if you came upon this book while browsing.

Note
While Robert Waxler’s last name interests me, we are not related.

Links

To read Part 1 of my interview with Robert Waxler, click here.
To read Part 2 of my interview with Robert Waxler, click here.
To read Part 3 of my interview with Robert Waxler, click here.

Amazon pages for Robert Waxler’s books

Losing Jonathan by Robert Waxler and Linda Waxler
Courage to Walk by Robert Waxler

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my short, step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

To learn about my 200 page workbook about overcoming psychological blocks to writing, click here.

Check out the programs and resources at the National Association of Memoir Writers

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Posted in Book Review, Family, Grief/Loss | 1 Comment »

Interview with Robert Waxler, English Professor and memoir author, Part 1

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

by Jerry Waxler

Robert Waxler and his wife Linda wrote the memoir “Losing Jonathan” about the death of their eldest son. Robert Waxler’s second memoir, “Courage to Walk” is about his younger son who suffered a paralyzing spinal infection. Both books explore the father’s love for his sons, informed by his lifelong love for literature. In addition to being an English Literature professor at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Waxler also co-founded the alternative sentencing program “Changing Lives Through Literature” which provides convicted criminals with the opportunity to read and write their way to a deeper understanding of social responsibility.

In this first of a three part interview, I ask Waxler about his process of writing the two memoirs.

Note: Robert Waxler and I are not related.

Jerry Waxler: You wrote two books involving your relationship to your sons. What was it like writing a second memoir? What was easier and what was harder the second time? What knowledge did you bring with you from the experience of writing the first?

Robert Waxler: The love a father feels for a son is beyond the boundaries of language as is the loss of a son, but both books try to capture that sense of love and the sense of mortality that we all share. When I wrote about the loss of my oldest son, Jonathan, I started by sitting outside on my back porch and without any specific purpose or direction let language flow out of me into a notebook. It was about a week after Jonathan’s death, and I wanted to try to remember as much as possible about the battle he had fought the last year of his life. It was a compulsion, I suppose. I had never written this kind of narrative and was not thinking about publishing the story. That was the summer of 1995. I wrote about 50 pages, as I recall, in a very short time, and then didn’t look at it again for a couple of years. I couldn’t.

Finally, about five years later, I began to think that perhaps this story could help other families in similar distress, and so I returned to it, shaped it, tried to find the meaning in it, and published it in the Boston Globe Magazine on Father’s Day in 2001. The response to the story was overwhelming, and I realized that a book might make a difference to others. It was also one way of keeping the memory of Jonathan alive. It took me another couple of years to get the language and the story to a point where I felt satisfied with it, as close to the truth of the experience as I was capable of saying it, in other words. It was important to me to make sure that readers saw Jonathan as a complex human being in the midst of a difficult struggle, that they felt the sense of love and the sense of loss that all families could experience, that this story could be their story as well.

The writing of the second book about the sudden spinal trauma of my younger son, Jeremy, was easier in some ways and harder in other ways. I started writing in a notebook right away, not because I was thinking about publishing a book, but because I knew that writing itself would be helpful for me, and I wanted a record of the experience and my thoughts about the experience. I wrote as the events unfolded, and I had no clear idea, from day to day, how these experiences would work out, whether Jeremy would recover, the extent of his recovery, the daily impact on all of us in the family, and so on. In addition, Jeremy’s suffering was compounded for me by the haunting memories of what had happened to Jonathan.

Jeremy’s recovery is a miracle to me now, but it took a while for that to become clear to me. Compared to “Losing Jonathan,” “Courage to Walk” was written over a relatively short period of time, and it captures the curve of the family experience as it unfolds over a relatively short period of time as well. In many ways, though, I think it is a more complex and probing story and meditation. It is written with a great deal of care. I hope people will find it helpful.

I did make extensive journal notes for “Courage to Walk,” which I suppose is somewhat unorthodox, in this context. It takes shape through my consciousness, my imagination, my reading, my reflection on the journal material, etc. It is, as a couple of people have suggested, a mix of medical thriller and meditation. That’s part of its uniqueness, I believe. It is very real, at times, but it has its surrealistic dimension as well. I hope it has a spiritual quality too.

JW: After reading your two memoirs, I could almost visualize you as a character in a novel. Did you ever think about your portrayal of yourself in that way?

RW: I take that as a compliment. I hope that readers get to know the characters in these memoirs as well as they get to know the characters in a novel. I have an old-fashioned sense that we can learn a lot from the characters in stories if we can visualize them, even identify with them, feel what they feel. The protagonist (me) in “Losing Jonathan” is the same person that appears in “Courage to Walk,” a father agonizing over a son, a college professor in love with his family (wife and children) and with great literature, a man who wants to be helpful but at times seems obsessed and at times is clearly powerless, a person who is mortal and vulnerable, as we all are. In “Courage to Walk,” though, I think I am perhaps more weighted down and obsessed, in an ironic way, at times, less hopeful than I was in “Losing Jonathan” –probably because of what happened to Jonathan. The irony of course is that “Courage to Walk” is much more upbeat in the end than “Losing Jonathan,” although both books, I hope, celebrate the human spirit. I think that my son Jeremy is the real hero of “Courage to Walk.”

To read Part 2 of my interview with Robert Waxler, click here.

To read Part 3 of my interview with Robert Waxler, click here.

Amazon pages for Robert Waxler’s books

Losing Jonathan by Robert Waxler and Linda Waxler
Courage to Walk by Robert Waxler
To read an essay about Robert Waxler’s memoir, “Courage to Walk” click here.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on this blog, click here.

To order my short, step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

To learn about my 200 page workbook about overcoming psychological blocks to writing, click here.

Check out the programs and resources at the National Association of Memoir Writers

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Posted in Author Interview, Family, Journaling | 2 Comments »

A memoir of mourning helps make sense of loss

Monday, May 17th, 2010

By Jerry Waxler

The first half of the memoir “Losing Jonathan” by Robert and Linda Waxler is about their attempt to stop their son’s fall into heroin addiction. At the center of the story was a good kid, loved by his family and friends, a college grad bursting with potential and a desire to change the world. By the time his parents discovered his problem, all of that was tearing apart. Horrified to learn that Jonathan was in trouble, his parents were torn out of their ordinary lives and hurled into pleading and research, therapists and rehab.

They felt caught in the cruel undertow of drug addiction. Something was stealing their son and they couldn’t stop it. After a stint in rehab, they hoped he had returned to them. And then the call came. A tainted dose of heroin had ended his life. The second half of the book recounts the following years of their grieving. The book is told from both their points of view with Robert’s passages written in straight font and Linda’s in italics.

The father’s journey

During the year they knew about Jonathan’s addiction, Robert struggled to hold on to his own emotional center, relying on his family, friends, and his Jewish faith. After his son’s death, he turned even more desperately towards these supports. Meanwhile, his mind was churning, second-guessing what more he could have done, and struggling to make sense of a world in which such things could happen. Amidst his thoughts are wonderful images of the young boy in his earlier life, full of hope and promise.

Robert Waxler, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, has devoted his life to teaching literature as well as finding the wisdom within it. He believed so deeply in the power of writing that he founded a program called “Changing Lives Through Literature,” to help convicted criminals find their way to social responsibility.

So when he tried to cope with his own loss, he looked towards literature for help. In “Losing Jonathan,” he writes, “Literature helped me keep my anger in check. It gave me a sense of proportions, of tolerance. But it didn’t foreclose on passion, nor did it serve as an escape from Jonathan’s death. Sometimes standing in an empty room, I will yell out loud at Jonathan, even now, and wonder why this tragedy happened.”

The mother’s journey

Linda was so overwhelmed, she didn’t know what to say. Neither did her neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances. So they avoided her. At the time when she needed the most support, she felt most alone.

“Losing Jonathan” revealed the effects of the passage of time, showing grieving as a sequence of inner adjustments. After a few years, Linda began to reclaim her poise enough to greet people and look them in the eye. Robert writes, “Near the end of the fourth year, Linda wrote her own article about grief, a stunning composite of her feelings and her knowledge. It was published in several places including the Providence Journal Sunday Magazine. She was stretching, touching others, rejoining a community, becoming a writer of her own life.”

In the fifth year, Robert writes, “We were like the wedding guest who listens to the tale of the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem, disturbed by the spell cast by his turbulent journey, but wiser now. At the end of the poem, the Mariner is gone, leaving the wedding guest to stand alone, forlorn, stunned into wonder at the vision:

And now the Wedding Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn;
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.”

Many layers of grieving

Memoirs of grieving have a special place in my library, since they take me on the author’s spiritual journey, trying to reclaim the meaning of life after its loss. In another memoir, “Here if you need me,” Kate Braestrup wrote about losing her husband in a freak accident. Then, she had to get on with her life. In the end, she arrived at a lovely conclusion, summarizing her feelings about death in a compelling and uplifting chapter on good and evil. When I’m asked which memoir is my favorite, this is usually the one that comes to mind.

Now I realize after reading “Losing Jonathan” that I loved the Waxlers’ memoir for similar reasons. Like Kate Braestrup they were on a quest to wrest their sanity back from the abyss. At first they were thirsty for support from their community. Then, after five years, Linda suggested, “We should try to write a book. It would be a way of honoring Jonathan’s life. Sustaining it.” The suggestion reflected Linda’s desire to give back to the community some of the strength they had given her. And the vehicle for their gift was a book.

Publishing the book was a social act, a generous gift to each other and the world. I feel encouraged by the willingness of these authors to share their inner process with the rest of us, to give us insights, tips, and guidance to help us stay strong and wise during our own recovery from loss.

Click here for the Amazon page for Losing Jonathan by Robert Waxler and Linda Waxler

Click here for the Amazon page for Waxler’s second memoir, Courage to Walk by Robert Waxler

—

Writing prompt
If you suffered a loss, describe the situation. Show the external signs of your suffering (tears, blank staring, incoherent cries, or inappropriate silences, pounding the wall). Show the impact on relationships (arguments, withdrawal). Write about how you tried to find meaning, (discussions, readings). Where did you turn to help you make sense? Describe the ideas that helped you patch together the universe. Write a scene that shows you emerging from the valley.

Notes about multiple voices in a memoir
I have read several memoirs that speak from more than one point of view. “Color of Water” by James McBride includes extensive passages taken from interviews with his mother. “The Kids Are All Right” is told by all four Welch siblings. In “My Father’s House” the author Miranda Seymour occasionally steps outside the narrative of the book to discuss its assertions with her mother. “Picking Cotton” is written in the voices of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino who was brutally raped, and Ronald Cotton, the man who served seven years in jail for the crime he didn’t commit.

Writing Prompt about multiple voices
Consider giving prominent characters in your story their own voice. If practical, interview these people. Observe the interplay between their perspective and yours and try to imagine how a memoir might include their observations or even their voice.

Another memoir that fast-forwards at the end
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg in “The Sky Begins at your Feet” continues with an epilog that shares the years of survival after her surgery. Coincidentally, Mirriam-Goldberg also believes in the power of literature to change lives and community. See her organization for literature and social change, Transformative Language Arts Network

Writing Prompt for epilogs
If you need to explain how life kept going after the presumed end of your memoir, consider tacking on a postscript that shows what happens after the main or central story is over.

Read an interview with Robert Waxler

To read an essay about Robert Waxler’s memoir, “Courage to Walk” click here.

Note

For another view of a son’s fall into addiction see the pair of memoirs: “Beautiful Boy” by David Sheff  and “Tweak” by Nic Sheff  see my essay, Matched pair of memoirs show both sides of addiction

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on this blog, click here.

To order my short, step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

To learn about my 200 page workbook about overcoming psychological blocks to writing, click here.

Check out the programs and resources at the National Association of Memoir Writers

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Posted in Family, Grief/Loss, Spirituality/Transcendence | 2 Comments »

The Birth of an Adult Storyteller

Friday, April 17th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

When I see wrinkles, around my own eyes or someone else’s, I think of all the experiences hidden behind them, decades of life now strewn throughout the vast tundra of the mind. If only I could know those memories, they might teach me important lessons and they certainly would bring deeper appreciation for the journey. What had those eyes seen? But memories are unknowable in their scattered and disorganized state, and until recently, I was one of the multitudes who had no inkling of how to convert a lifetime of memories into a story. Now, as I scan my life, I think I see the reason.

During my childhood, every Wednesday my dad came home from his drugstore to join us for dinner. Using the table as a pulpit, Dad’s voice swelled with excitement. “This guy walked in and showed me a half empty tube of ointment. He said it wasn’t working.” Then Dad laughed. “He wanted to return it. Can you believe it?” He slapped the table. My mother, sister, and I ate quietly, and when Dad paused we said “Umm,” giving him the desired reassurance that it was the other guy who was crazy. Then he plowed on to another story and another. I barely thought about those dinners for most of my life. But now that I’m writing a memoir, I replay the scenes, and learn about my family and myself.

If Dad had been a real storyteller, he would have been attentive to his audience’s reaction, providing us with enough information to enter the scene. As a storyteller Dad would have been tuning into our response, watching our body language, and steering his story in a way that would capture and move our imagination. But Dad’s anecdotes lacked detail. And even more important, he dominated the room with his feelings, rather than giving us the psychic space to get in touch with our own. The narratives had a few elements of storytelling, but not enough to be entertaining.

Of course, I can’t just blame Dad. Storytelling is not taken very seriously in our culture, and I doubt he was taught much about it. I know I wasn’t. After 18 years of education, I can’t remember a single course about how to shape a story of myself. As a result, whenever I tried to tell about my experiences, memories tumbled and tangled and I grew accustomed to evading the subject altogether.

In my forties, I began to wish I had grown up learning this skill. At first, it was just a sadness, a gripe. I complained to the Fates, “Why didn’t I learn?” And then, when no good answer followed, I shrugged, unable to see a path beyond my limited ability.

An adult can learn to tell stories

Finally, after years of whining about not being a born story teller, I began to read books about it. For example, I read Robert McKee’s book called “Story,” and Chris Vogler’s book, “The Writer’s Journey.” Gradually I gained confidence that storytelling can be learned, and like Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I was prepared to demand it as my inalienable right.

But I found a new problem. Trying to improve my ability to construct a story made me feel vulnerable. What if my initial attempts were laughable, amateurish, and made me look stupid? The thought of being criticized actually frightened me. Fortunately, I had already experienced and conquered a similar fear. A few years earlier, I wanted to speak in public. My initial attempts indeed made me feel stupid, moronic, and incompetent. I kept pushing. I joined Toastmasters International, attended their meetings and followed their system. After a couple of years, I was no longer afraid, and could speak in front of an audience.

I wanted to repeat this learning process, finding groups to help me overcome my fear of writing. Writing groups are harder to find than Toastmasters was, but gradually, through persistent networking and internet research, I located and joined a variety of writing groups… Some at my local library… some listed on the internet… Some monthly meetings and some annual conferences.

The more I connected with other writers, the more I realized writing was not that much different from public speaking. In both media, it was up to me to tune into the audience and make sure they were with me. Gradually, I was able to increase my confidence and improve my skill.

Pass it on

Later in his life, my father worked on his skills, too. He attended a public speaking class and I suspect one of the lessons he learned was to speak with greater awareness of his audience. It would be wonderful to talk it all over with him, but that won’t be possible. He’s moved on. And I can’t teach this information to my kids, since I don’t have any.

And that raises another challenge. Without an audience, my story does not exist, like a tree unheard, falling in a forest. So now I research further and find memoir, senior, and other groups where people share their lives. The effort has ignited my imagination, and propelled me on a fascinating journey. Speaking and writing with them opens me to a new way of relating to people. Now, I can reveal the stories behind my own wrinkles. And by listening and reading, I am discovering how other people earned theirs.

—

Notes:

Online critique groups: Internet Writers Workshop,
National Association of Memoir Writers, NAMW,

Toastmasters International

Ronni Bennett’s elder story telling site
Sharon Lippincott’s Memory Writing Blog

Yahoo group discussion for aspiring memoir writers. To subscribe send an empty email to:

lifewritersforum-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on this blog, click here.

To order my short, step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

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Yin and Yang of Storytelling – Dramatic Tension of Opposites

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

An author’s job is to tie us in knots, forcing us to search for relief on the next page. Thrillers easily generate tension when the hero races to find and defuse a bomb. But how do writers create tension from ordinary life? To find out how one writer achieves this creative task, I peered into the collection of short stories, “Inheritance of Exile” by Susan Muaddi Darraj.

Each story shows characters caught in the emotions and circumstances of ordinary life, and yet despite their ordinariness, I feel engaged in their struggles, turning the page to learn more. As I seek to understand how Susan Muaddi Darraj has accomplished her hold on me, I notice a particular feature of the writing. She has superbly tapped the power of opposites.

Opposites generate texture in every aspect of ordinary life: sad and happy, rich and poor, young and old, hope and despair. It’s the yin-yang of nature, that oriental principle that claims each polarity contains its opposite. I knew about the principle, but I never noticed it as a tool for storytelling. Now I discover the secret hidden in plain sight.

Opposites, by their nature, create tension, like the sparks that jump across the two terminals of a battery. The tension pulls together when opposites attract, or pushes apart when we want to maintain our distance from the other. By juxtaposing the two sides and allowing us to feel the contrast, the writer generates energy, creating an intellectual and artistic feast. Here are examples of the opposites I noticed in these stories:

Girl and boy romance

While describing a relationship, the author maintains her protagonist’s feminine needs, and at the same time, she shows a deep empathy and understanding of the boy’s perspective.

Child and parent have two very different views

She shows characters at different stages of Coming of Age, wanting to grow up, and at odds with their parents. This universal tension can be confusing and polarized. And yet, somehow, Inheritance of Exile brings enormous compassion to these situations by giving us deeper understanding of the parents’ point of view.

Tension between rich and poor

To earn a few dollars, she sells hand-made baskets at a craft fair. People with lots of money stop by to look. The contrast between their economic situation and hers crackles with tension.

Hoodlums and law abiding working people

A working man is robbed at gun point, showing the stark contrast between these two lifestyles. The man works hard, pushing himself through the daily grind to support his family. The hoodlums break the law and steal what he built up. The scene creates an intense contrast of these opposing life choices.

Relationships with Father vs. Mother

The protagonist’s relationship with her mother and with her father are each formidable, each rich in emotion, tension, and love. The real power, though, comes from the juxtaposition of the child’s relationship with each. The difference in her connection with each of these two parents creates enormous tension that the character must sort through, and which drag me deep into their family dynamic. Mother-love and father-love, so different and so authentic, create dramatic tension that drives me not only to turn pages, but to ponder these truths of the human condition after I have closed the book.

Palestinian (immigrant) culture and American (dominant) culture

Of course, every immigrant copes with these two opposing forces – the confining boundaries of the culture-of-origin, and the inexorable crucible of the melting pot that demands escape from that confinement. Susan does an artful job of showing her characters moving sometimes easily and sometimes awkwardly between these two different states.

Life as a balance of opposites

All of life is caught in the pincers of endless pairs of opposites. Opposites create revolutions, hatreds, and passionate love. We live day by day, constantly striving to resolve these opposites, and so, as readers, they hold us in their spell, adding tension and texture that pulls us to the next page and the next, hoping for relief. As we strive for the relief of this tension, it turns out that the tension that sometimes threatens to tear us apart is the same force that holds together these compelling stories of ordinary life.

—

Writing Prompt

To accentuate dramatic tension in your own story, look for the opposites. Use the same ones I list from Inheritance of Exile or look for others: educated and not, healthy and sick, and so on.

Notes

The famous graphic symbol of yin and yang is a circle with the two black and white interlocking shapes. It is called Taijitu. Here’s a link to a wiki page.

Visit Susan Muaddi Darraj’s home page

Visit Amazon’s page for Inheritance of Exile

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Posted in Coming of age, Family, Immigration Experience, Writing Workshop | 3 Comments »

The powerful story of an ordinary woman

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

I first met Linda Wisniewski seven years ago at a critique group in Doylestown, PA. Within a few months she announced that one of her essays was going to be broadcast on her local public radio station. I was impressed by her accomplishment, proud to know the author of one of these radio essays. She left the group, and later I heard from a friend that Linda was teaching a course in memoir writing at the Bucks County Community College. Recently, I saw her again, at the Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania autographing copies of her memoir, “Off Kilter.” Thanks to her persistent passion for telling her story, I can read her book and ponder the gifts her life has now offered me.

The crisis that drives the book is the author’s relationship to her mother. As Mom slipped towards dementia, their relationship became strained. Mom struggled inconsistently, sometimes accepting her fate and other times bitterly afraid of going into a nursing home. During this disturbing reversal of roles, when a child must care for her parent, problems that have been buried for a lifetime bubble to the surface.

Naturally, Mom raised Linda to be a good girl. The problem was that Mom’s idea of a “good girl” was fashioned from an older world, when girls were supposed to stay invisible and do what they were told. Linda didn’t want to follow this training. She wanted to expand towards the freedom of an American woman in the Twentieth Century. These two opposing views of a woman’s role played out in a million homes, as daughters tried to find their identity in a world drastically different from the one their mothers were trying to teach. The resulting schisms were buried for decades under layers of politeness and other charades.

With Mom’s strength failing, and Linda thinking it was time for a nursing home, the stress reaches a crescendo, and Mom explodes, “You’ve made a mess of my life.” This attack jumped out at me. What a hurtful thing to say! I wondered what the “mess” was. My first interpretation was that Mom was looking for a handy target to blame for the downward slide of old age. Then I realized that Linda’s development as a proud, independent woman did create a mess. It messed up her mother’s goal of raising a submissive daughter.

Mom’s outburst makes me wonder what other hurtful things she said to her daughter through the years. Since Mom has been teaching her daughter the importance of being passive, it seems surprising that she would use such an aggressive outburst. And again, putting myself in Linda’s shoes, I saw another lesson embedded in Mom’s behavior. That is, if you want to manipulate another person, then cause them pain.

Psychology lessons from Off Kilter

When I was in graduate school, I took a course called “Assertiveness.” I had always assumed the assertiveness meant “pushy,” so I was surprised by how much insight the word contained. The professor explained it this way.

When you need something from another person, such as love, or privacy, you must communicate. Consider these two approaches. One option is to express your needs in words, using simple statements to help the other person understand what you are feeling. This style of communication called “assertiveness” leaves people feeling good about themselves and draws them closer to each other. The other option is to convey your displeasure by causing the other person pain, in effect punishing them for not giving you what you wanted. The pain causes the other person to pull away, resulting in isolation. Or else the hurt one fights back, creating a sickening embrace of attack and counter-attack.

Through the years since I took the class, I have often seen this dynamic play out in the behavior of individuals and nations, sometimes using aggression to cause pain, and other times using clear communication to reduce pain and enhance mutual understanding. But seldom have I seen it represented with more exquisite insight than in Linda Wisniewski’s tale of trying to help her mother.

I am not my mother

When Mom lashes out, it would be tempting for Linda to draw on her childhood training and respond in the way her mother taught her. Her choices were limited. She could either become aggressive, like her mother, and lash back. Or she could remain quiet, becoming the victim. Of course, neither course is desirable. The high road was to break away and strive towards clear, patient communication. Linda beautifully portrays the power of these difficult choices, as she tries to respect and love her mother, while not “becoming” her mother.

Lifelong process in this adult Coming of Age story

Using flashbacks, Linda shows her journey from child to adult, striking upward like a climber on a hard scrabble mountain. During the climb she was too young and too caught up in the process of growing to be able to step back and understand her family dynamics. As a result, she entered adulthood with unresolved issues. Now, as Mom is growing old, they struggle for warmth amidst their interpersonal tensions. At first, a cloud of doubt descends upon me, making me feel pessimistic about the possibility of love in such a situation.

As I ponder the memoir Off Kilter, I find another dimension that offers me uplifting hope and optimism. By writing her story, Linda has performed a remarkable service to herself and her readers. She has broken the code of silence, and exposed her family dynamics to the world, where we can all compare notes. In a sense, she has taken the high road of assertiveness, not only in her relationship to her mother, but more broadly, as a responsible neighbor and friend. This assertive book can help readers understand her, and by sharing her experience, she helps us understand ourselves.

—

Links

“Off Kilter: A Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage”  by Linda Wisniewski
Linda Wisniewski’s Home Page
Amazon Link for Off Kilter
For another book about a daughter caring for her mother, see Carol O’Dell’s Mothering Mother
To read my essay about Mothering Mother, click here.

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Give Thanks for Your Family Stories

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

Thanksgiving is a banquet for the senses, with a table overflowing with food, and the room overflowing with relatives, now a year older and hopefully wiser. And yet family gatherings often arouse tension. We fear arguments with some visitors or feel a hole where we wish we could see a loved one, or wonder about a new potential spouse. Our anxiety seems ungrateful. This feast ought to be a time of joy. To shift attention to the positive aspects of such meetings look at them as opportunities to learn and share each other’s stories.

Listening, as the saying goes, is an act of love, and your willingness to open up and let their stories in will create a lovely, kind, and energetic atmosphere. But the old conversation patterns have a mind of their own. Instead of hoping the energy will shift, take a leadership role. To steer the conversation in a new direction, you need to prepare.

When you are in a safe, healthy space, right now for example, list a few things you wish you knew about each person. Then, in the press of food and family, if you feel a wave of annoyance coming on, switch it to curiosity. Look at your list, take a deep breath, and ask a question. You might at first feel a moment’s hesitation, like you are being rude for breaking into the old pattern. But the surprise will last just a moment, as the other person adjusts his thinking to focus on your question. By asking them to talk about a specific time in their lives, your curiosity will arouse memories. If you press forward, asserting your real interest, you have a good chance of shifting their attention into a reverie about the good, or strange, or formative times. Their story telling will (hopefully) arouse more interesting emotions than the ones you interrupted.

It’s easier if you get this storytelling focus started early in the day, before the old patterns set in. Broadcast the message that you expect them to tell at least one story that you haven’t heard before. And for best results, make suggestions. It’s almost like pitching them some of the writing prompts you would use to develop your memoir. “Tell us about your first day at your first apartment.” “Tell us about where you were when you saw a beautiful sunset.” If you don’t have time to arrange this before the holiday, do it when you first walk in. Write something up. Claim you need these stories for a writing project you’re working on. (And if you write the stories afterwards, then this claim will be true.)

Once you get the ball rolling, if you feel people steering towards boring territory, say, “The rule today is a story we’ve never heard,” or, “I already knew about that situation. But I can’t picture it. Tell me who else was there, what the walls looked like, what did you smell?” You can lead people away from negative feelings by pushing the clock forward. What happened afterwards? Where did you go next?

And if they get stuck in a story you know, listen to it with fresh ears. See if you can imagine being there with them during their original experience. Your curiosity will instigate new questions that will pop you into a fresh perspective. You could think or blurt out, “Hey, wait a minute. That sounds similar to another time in your life.” Or, “Oh. I didn’t realize that happened so soon after you moved.”

In addition to gaining material for your family storybook, you will achieve immediate benefits. Speakers will feel the unusual sensation that people are actually listening to parts of their lives. This is a warm and disarming sensation, that draws everyone closer and reaches across boundaries. For example, if an old-timer tells you about a youthful experience, it puts them on a level playing field with younger family members. And then, when you give a younger person the floor, they will feel empowered by an audience of adults who are suddenly interested, not in finding fault, but in finding entertainment. And for new couples, visitors, and distant relatives, it will give everyone an opportunity to appreciate this whole person.

Prepared to follow your own rules. Dig up a story you’ve never told before. There’s a good chance you never told it because you feel a little embarrassed. This is good. It’s an opportunity to tell people things about yourself that will give them a more intimate and less formulaic impression. Your willingness to share parts of yourself in a room full of people is a good way to flap your memoir wings. So as you look forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, or any time when extended families get together, use stories to create intimacy, defuse tension, and develop a deeper sense of gratitude for the people in your life.

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Who protects the children? Memoir by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

Monday, September 29th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

When parents and extended family are unable to take care of a child, “society” is supposed to pick up the burden. I hope that happens, but I didn’t know the details until I read Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s beautifully written memoir, “Three Little Words.” Ashley is qualified to speak authoritatively about the fate of kids without caregivers because she was in the system from the time she was 2-years-old until she was 12. Shuffled from home to home, she was subjected to a variety of parenting skills, some compassionate, others incompetent, while some were outright mean.

Click here for Ashley’s Home Page
Click here for the Amazon page for her book Three Little Words

After running out of in-home placements, she reached the end of the road, an orphanage, where families came by to shop for an adopted child. She found herself literally auditioning for prospective parents. When she was finally adopted at the age of 12, it was such a relief, my eyes leaked for a whole chapter. But the journey was not over yet.

Opposite of tough-love
When Gay and Phil Courter adopted Ashley, they didn’t see her as a reject. They saw her as their daughter. However, to become part of their family, she had to make significant inner changes, and it wasn’t easy. After years of being arbitrarily moved, punished, and robbed by adults, it seems healthy that she would turn defiant, relying on her own willfulness rather than trusting their love.

For example, Ashley was raised on cheap foods like macaroni and cheese so her new family’s sushi and sprouts seemed too weird. She refused to eat what they served. What started as a food preference escalated to a battle of wills, and Ashley assumed the Courters were going to “send her back.” Instead, Gay Courter found a loving way to steer through it, bending her own will to accommodate Ashley.

Gay and Phil told her, over and over, “We love you no matter what.” The unconditional love these two people showered on their daughter, despite her rebellion take parental forgiveness to new levels, enough to drive a tough-love advocate to the nearest therapist. Apparently forgiving worked. Ashley vowed to do better next time, and lo and behold, she did.

The transition from rebellious kid to loving daughter makes the memoir “Three Little Words” not just about the foster system. By revealing her own thoughts and emotions, Ashley has created one of the most psychologically insightful, frank, and revealing Coming of Age stories I have read.

Insight into a child’s mind
Memoirs take the reader deep into the mystery of another person’s mind. For example, Temple Grandin’s breakthrough book, “Thinking in Pictures” provided an inside view of growing up with autism and John Robison’s memoir “Look me in the eye” shows what it was like to have Asperger’s. Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s book provides a similar service, taking us not just into her circumstances but into her mind, where she reveals rebellion and fear, outrage and hope.

Ashley isn’t just any foster kid. She is a unique person with an interesting twist. Despite her frequent changes in schools, and inconsistent parental guidance, she is placed in classrooms for gifted students, writes prize-winning essays, and performs in school plays. Now she is an author and public speaker with a remarkable list of credits, including keynote speeches at large conferences.

How can a child be surrounded by poverty and rise to remarkable success? It’s a puzzle that I find delicious, with every example leading to a counterexample, always implying some underlying truth without ever promising a satisfying answer. Consider Oprah Winfrey’s journey from a dirt poor background, or the four boys who grew up in the gang-infested streets of New Jersey, became doctors and wrote a memoir called “The Pact.” Ashley’s chaotic childhood in the foster care system adds another example of this mysterious transformation.

Secrets – what happens behind these walls
We all grow up with an insider’s view of our particular household, and whether we are conscious of it or not, our own house is unique. We generally don’t appreciate that uniqueness though because we are so immersed in it. The very things we don’t like to talk about as children, later turn out  to add an enormous amount of interesting color.

I’ve rarely described the Jewish traditions we followed in my home. Because bread products were not allowed during Passover, we performed a prayer ritual to cleanse the bread crumbs from the house and switch to a special set of dishes. During Yom Kippur each year, there was always the nervous energy of feeling hungry during the 24 hour fast. Cheating created a weird mix of bodily relief and ethical guilt.

As long as they remain hidden, such details make us feel slightly separate from other people. Once we share them, they become an opportunity for others to get to know us. Popular storytellers have created entire careers out of turning ordinary childhood into compelling tales. When I was a child, trying to fall asleep, my brother who was seven years older came into our bedroom and tuned the radio in to a talk show on WOR. I lay in bed laughing, as radio personality Jean Shepherd made life seem so interesting by simply sharing the experiences of childhood.

Other secrets are dark and sinister. Take Ashley’s experiences in one particularly harsh foster home. As punishment she was starved, forced to stoop in an awkward position, and her brother was forced to eat Tabasco sauce. When she tried to tell adults about her treatment, they accused her of lying, and she got into even worse trouble. She learned the hard way to stay silent about what happens inside her home. Later, by writing about it in her memoir, she finally relieves the pressure of isolation.

Writing Prompt
What sort of family behaviors did you naturally hide from your friends?  As you organize thoughts about your own life, what special insights into religion, family relationships, mental conditions, parts of the world, types of families, can you bring into the open by writing about them?

Writing Prompt
Sometimes the private, unique parts of your life aren’t secret events but characters at home are different than the ones you expect to see or talk about out in the world. A cousin had a psychotic break, for example, or disfiguring acne, or grandmom lived at home and never got out of bed. If you can describe the people you grew up around, you will bridge the gap between your private memories and your public memoir. List a few quirky characteristics about the people in your family that might add vivid detail to your childhood or the period you want to write about.

Memoir is a calling card for advocacy
“Three Little Words” has become Ashley’s calling card, supporting her authority as a nationally recognized speaker about the foster care system. She even provides a valuable resource to legislators and other public policy makers, who look to her for information about the theory of foster care as well as the actual practice.

By publishing her memoir, Ashley brought her audience another turn around the cultural spiral, offering them the opportunity to learn from her experience. When writing your own memoir, see what you can learn from Ashley. What sort of message could you share that would provide greater connection with your audience, offering them your hard earned wisdom in return for their empathy. What can your readers learn by walking arm in arm with you through the pages of your life?

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Note
Here are some of the memoirs that contribute to advocacy or deliver a message:

Jim McGarrah “A Temporary Sort of Peace” — Combat vets and PTSD
Doreen Orion, “I know you really love me” — Stalking
Brooke Shields, “Down came the rain” — Postpartum Depression
A.M. Homes, “Mistress’s Daughter” — Genealogy, adoption, family roots
Greg Mortenson, “Three Cups of Tea” — international understanding, world peace
Carol O’Dell, “Mothering Mother” — Caregiving, Alzheimer’s
Dee Dee Phelps, “Vinyl Highway” — 60′s nostalgia
David Sheff, “Beautiful Boy” — Addiction
Jon Robison, Look me in the eye — Asperger’s
Jamie Blyth and Jenna Glatzer, “Fear is no longer my enemy” — social anxiety

Writing Prompt
If you have a topic or area that you want to publicize, whether abuse, or special insider information of any kind, writing a book about your experience is an excellent way to build a connection to your audience. What group might be interested in your story?

Note: Excerpt from an interview with Ashley
http://people.howstuffworks.com/do-something-brick-awards-winner-ashley-rhodes-courter.htm

I spent 10 years in the foster care system. I had 14 different placements before being adopted at the age of 12. Many of them were very abusive, and later we found out that 25 percent of my foster parents became convicted felons.

The National CASA, which are court appointed special advocates, or guardian ad litems in some states, asked me to speak at their national conference when I was 14. So that was my first big kind of motivational speech. Since then I’ve spoken personally to over 15,000 people and shared my story with them.

Note: Tough versus Unconditional Love
There are many conflicting notions of how and when to discipline kids. For example, once drugs and alcohol enter the picture, most experts agree that hard consequences seem to be the only valid course. However, even in that extreme case, tough love doesn’t provide perfect answers. Ashley’s experience with her adopted family might not apply to everyone, but it offers one experience worth considering in the mix of this complex debate.

For another, more complex example of this painful dilemma between tough and unconditional love, see David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, about a father’s journey through his son’s addiction.

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Memoirs as a journey from blindness to sight

Monday, August 4th, 2008

By Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

David Sheff’s memoir “Beautiful Boy” oscillates between the uplifting joy of his son’s Coming of Age, and the tragedy of his son’s tragic fall into addiction to crystal meth. All the ugly stuff is there, how Nic lied, broke in and stole from his own parents and neighbors, slept in alleys and drug houses but refused help. And then there were the drug-free periods when this beautiful boy was back, a delightful human being, full of creative spirit and enormous promise.

Sheff, a professional journalist, recounted his son’s self-destructive journey, starting with the first suspicions. Then came the confrontations, the efforts to control his son’s behavior, and the gut wrenching worry. The horrible fact is that millions of parents ask themselves every day or even every hour, “Where is my child?” “Will this be the call from the police?” “What must I do to stop the downward slide?” “Should I pay for another round of rehab, or is that last relapse a sign that I must write this child out of my life?”

The book has all the elements of a compelling drama. There is the author’s loving second wife, and their two sweet younger children. There is the constant anxiety, and the play by play experience of watching the son grow up, and then fall apart. Sheff applies his journalism skills to report on the special hazards of methamphetamine addiction: the high rate of relapse after rehab; the irrational behavior of the addict when craving the drug or under its influence; the denial and lying. And then, the experience begins to take a toll on David Sheff himself.

It’s no secret that stress undermine health, and sure enough, the author’s extended periods of frantic worry almost kill him. About two thirds of the way through the book David has a life threatening brain hemorrhage. Until then, Nic’s father and step-mother had been going to Al-Anon meetings and hearing that they cannot change the addict. The addict himself is the only one who can do that. Al-Anon’s message is that the people around the addict need to figure out how to take care of themselves. But a parent’s job is to take care of a child. Right? So while hearing the Al-Anon messages they had not yet embraced them. Now, after the hemorrhage, they have no choice. At last, we remember this memoir is by the father, and now the story shifts inward to his own introspective journey.

Nic’s biological mother had played only a minor role through the course of the book. David rarely spoke to her, except to make arrangements to hand Nic back and forth between the two homes, one with dad in northern California during summer and the other with mom in southern California during the school year. When Nic started disappearing, they called each other to get information about where he might be.

Three pages from the end of the book, Nic’s biological parents have their first therapy session together. It turns out that they went through a bitter divorce when Nic was little more than a toddler. I try to understand what it felt like to be Nic, raised by parents who resented each other and who lived hundreds of miles apart.

I don’t know whether to laugh in relief or cry in rage that it has taken this much anguish to force these two people into a therapy session with their son. I, as do most therapists, believe that all the members of a family influence each other. With his two parents split apart, I picture Nic split apart inside himself, too. It must have taken a superhuman effort to hold these warring parts of himself together.

For most of the book, I was sucked into the premise that it was all about Nic. When will he come back? Will he completely resolve the addiction? But that’s the son’s journey. I finally realize this is David Sheff’s’ memoir. I want to understand more about his inner world. Will he awaken psychologically and spiritually, so he can offer his love to his two younger children and his wife, and stay centered, healthy, and supportive himself? David Sheff’s inner journey begins close to the end of the book and runs out of room. After finishing Beautiful Boy, I could see that dad was just getting started.

I felt a little cheated that it took the author so long to start looking within himself. Then I look at my pile of memoirs and realize that most of the authors continue through the darkness for a really long time. Dani Shapiro in “Slow Motion” took forever to realize she was destroying herself. Jeanette Walls in “Glass Castle” took forever to grow up and get away from the clutches of her weird parents. Frank McCourt had to grow up and get away from his destructive father in “Angela’s Ashes.” Jim McGarrah had to fight in a war, and then go home to figure out how to heal in “A Temporary Sort of Peace.” William Manchester in his World War II battle memoir “Goodbye Darkness” first had to show us his demons, before finally coming to terms with them in the final chapters.

Despite the fact that David Sheff’s knowledge of himself remained hidden for so long, it did finally force itself to the surface. This long climb, known as the Character Arc, creates hope, letting me know that through the circumstances of life, the character is becoming a better, smarter, deeper person. This journey the author has taken through the course of his memoir fulfills my faith in the human experience – that if we keep hacking at it we will end up smarter by the time we die than when we started. This faith is one of the unspoken agreements we have with the authors of our books. We conspire together to promote this lovely truth about life, that in living we learn and grow, or as stated more poetically in the lyrics of Amazing Grace, “I once was blind but now I see.”

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Writing Prompt – Character Arc
As you look for a structure for your life story, your job is to find a meaningful segment or point of view that will provide the reader with a compelling experience. One way to look for this segment or point of view is to find the lessons contained within it. Of course, your end result does not need to beat the reader over the head with such a lesson but if you can find this Character Arc, and hold it in mind, it can help develop a compelling time frame and structure for your memoir. Name the life lessons you think you have drawn from your experiences. For each one, brainstorm how it might fit as a template for your memoir.

Writing Prompt – Drugs and alcohol
While the horrific downward slide of David Sheff’s son is hopefully a minority experience, millions of people are affected by substances. Often the abuser creates a wall of denial, convincing him or her self that they can handle it and it doesn’t affect anyone else. Write an anecdote about how you or people in your life have been affected by substances. If you have a romantic notion of your own use when you were younger, write the experience from your parents’ or partner’s eyes. If you were deeply affected by someone else’s abuse, write a story seeing what that experience might have looked like from their eyes.

Note

David Sheff’s son Nic also wrote a memoir, called “Tweak” about his experience as an addict. I am just getting started on it. “Tweaked” is the slang term that describes the frantic mental state of a methamphetamine high. From what I have read so far, the book is quite explicit and should be eye opening about the other side of the drama.

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Follow that car! How drama reveals the inner story

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

Six mornings a week, my dad commuted to his drugstore in North Philadelphia. By closing time, he had been there for almost 14 hours, but I never heard him complain. He enjoyed his work, and it may never have occurred to him that there was anything to complain about. When I was in high school, I started working with my dad at the store. Every Friday afternoon I took the subway, and on Saturday afternoon drove with my mom. My job was stocking shelves, serving customers, occasionally counting pills to help fill prescriptions, and eating lots of candy bars. Sometimes mom packed dinner, and sometimes I walked down to the Horn and Hardarts cafeteria at Broad and Erie and brought back a hot meal to eat at the store. By the end of the day, we were all ready to go home. Around 9:30 I mopped the floor, then descended rickety stairs to check the cellar door. Finally we positioned bars across the windows, set the alarm, and went outside.

One Saturday, we drove south on 17th Street, turned left on to Ontario, and started east towards Broad Street, when a large man ran out between two cars and flagged us down. He knocked on the window, yelling at us to open up, gesturing down the street towards some unseen quarry. It was a cop, fiddling with his holster, preparing to draw his gun. As my mother reached over her shoulder to unlock the door, the strangest thing happened. Her hands grabbed wildly at the latch as if she was pulling up, but time after time her fingers missed and the door remained locked. I watched in growing horror as precious time slipped away.

This is exactly what always bothered me about my mother, and here was yet another proof. She was a klutz, and just in the most urgent moment, she failed to come through. I cursed the luck that gave me such an incompetent mother. Losing patience, the cop ran to a taxi that pulled up behind us. The driver of that vehicle knew how to open his door. The cop jumped in and they pulled around us and drove off in pursuit. Meanwhile, I was filled with wonder at how my mother who had been opening car doors her whole life could have failed at such a simple task, and fumed the whole way home.

At first glance, such intense moments appear to be excellent material for a memoir. Jeanette Walls’ wildly successful memoir, “Glass Castle,” seems like a collection of such experiences. But taken as a whole, her book is more than a compilation of zany moments. Each episode contributes to an intimate, compassionate portrayal of real human beings. Memories are simply the raw material for memoirs, like pigments for a painter or clay for a sculptor, and shaping them into the story is not an exhaustive collection but an artistic synthesis. So no matter how many high powered incidents come to mind, I still don’t necessarily end up with a readable book that authentically portrays my life. To turn anecdotes into a life story, there is much creative work to do.

For one thing, I must place the experience in context. We didn’t just appear on that street. We arrived there through the natural course of our daily lives. So I back up and explain what we were doing there in the first place. That episode with the cop makes the whole night come to life — the drugstore, the neighborhood, and my relationship with my parents. As this anecdote falls onto paper, I begin to see the world of that teenage boy, broadening my insight into the night and also expanding my understanding of how it fit into my whole life.

For example, I’m not very well coordinated myself, and during my teenage years I was especially disappointed by my lack of agility. Feeling my frustration with my mom that night awakens the recognition that neither of my parents nor any of us three kids were athletic. I have recently been reading about hereditary factors that cluster together the characteristics of nerdiness and lack of physical coordination. (see my Asperger’s article). The incident with the car lock suggests that this might help explain the Waxler family. I file that observation for future consideration.

The incident stirs up an observation about my relationship with my dad. He was a loving man, and always treated me with kindness and respect, but we never talked much. I don’t remember having had a single conversation with him, which made him seem distant. Now that I am reading about us as two characters in a story, a fact jumps out. Working in the drugstore with my father, gave me an opportunity to spend large swaths of time shoulder to shoulder with him, helping him in the store that supported the family. Now I realize we were partners, in a manly sort of way. I’ve envied other boys who worked with their dad on the farm or the family business, and now I realized until I was 18, I was one of those boys.

The fact that we had to put bars on the window and set the alarm, and that a cop was running around chasing criminals, foreshadows the fact that a few years later, corner drugstores would become targets for violent crime. When I went away to college, dad’s good friend, Sam Dreidink, who owned a drugstore a few miles away, was held up at gunpoint. On the way out, the robbery completed, his assailant shot Sam in the stomach. He lived, but in terrific pain for the rest of his life. A few months later, my dad was held up. During the robbery, he was forced to his knees with a shotgun pointed at his head. They stole his money and whatever narcotics he had in stock. When they left, he was still whole in body, but that incident ended his years in the drugstore.

My mom lived 70 more years, during which I discovered her apparent lapses in “common sense” often moved conversations in unexpected directions, offering the people in her life zest and interest, cleverness and fun. Her lack of predictability turned out to be one of her endearing traits, and instead of feeling manipulated or confused by her approach, I became one of her many admirers. Forty years after that night in the car, I knew that behind a thin facade of silliness, she was an authentic, fascinating person. Which makes me wonder as I read my story if she knew exactly what she was doing, and in her own klutzy way she was protecting her family from a man with a gun.

Writing Prompt: Write an anecdote from your life that has dramatic intensity. Using that anecdote as a core, backtrack and describe what lead up to it. Also, go forward and see what happens afterward. Try it a few times, or with a few anecdotes, to see if you can find a beginning, middle, and end. Could this be a chapter in your memoir? Could it become a standalone short story?

—

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Writing Prompt
Take one of your written dramatic anecdotes. You now have three different points of view about the same event. One is the memory of what it felt to be back there. Another is a reader, reading a written story about characters in the incident. The third is an adult, with a much broader understanding not only of the incident but who the people are, where they’ve been, and where they are going. Dance amidst these three points of view find new thoughts and connections that help put it in place. Consider what the people wanted. What were they thinking when they performed this particular action? What other episode does this story remind you of? How did your or their flaws influence the course of events? How have you or they changed since then?

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