http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog 200 Essays and Interviews to Help You Read and Write Memoirs Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:38:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Copyright © 2010 Memory Writers Network jerrywaxler@yahoo.com (Jerry Waxler) jerrywaxler@yahoo.com (Jerry Waxler) Self-help 1440 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/LearnMemoirCoverFront-small.jpg http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog 144 144 Reading and writing memoirs. Record the Stories of Your Life, tips, how-to, memoir book reviews, by Jerry Waxler memoir, writers, self-help, book-reviews, essays Jerry Waxler Jerry Waxler jerrywaxler@yahoo.com no no http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/boys-to-men/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/boys-to-men/#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:25:01 +0000 jerrywaxler http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/?p=877 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/boys-to-men/feed/ 1 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/fugitive-days-memoir-vietnam/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/fugitive-days-memoir-vietnam/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:46:52 +0000 jerrywaxler http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/?p=435 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/fugitive-days-memoir-vietnam/feed/ 2 9:09 by Jerry Waxler In the 60's, I vigorously protested the Vietnam War, but like most Americans I thought the organization called the Weather Underground had gone ... by Jerry Waxler In the 60's, I vigorously protested the Vietnam War, but like most Americans I thought the organization called the Weather Underground had gone too far. Without knowing many details, I associated them with violent, irrational extremism. So I was surprised to hear that one of the founders of that organization was not only a free man. He was an acclaimed educator. I first heard about Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential campaign when television ads implied that Ayers' criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam somehow tainted Barack Obama. The publicity intrigued me. I wanted to know more. After hearing an excellent radio interview with Bill Ayers, I decided to read his memoir "Fugitive Days." Reading the book prodded me to review rusty old parts of my own beliefs. When Ayers was a young man, his outrage against the war drove him to the brink of anarchy. In his memoir, "Fugitive Days," he chronicles his violent thoughts and actions in almost poetic detail. Even after reading the memoir, it's hard for me to decide if he was a hero who risked his life to save the world from the insanity of war, or a mad child, a criminal, bent on imposing his will on society. And therein lays the power of the memoir. It shows his world as it was, not as it ought to have been, allowing me to see for myself and ask my own questions. The description of life through his eyes provided a deeper understanding of the world than I could gain from sound bites and stereotypes. Are young people idealistic or simple minded? When I was young, adults taught me that people are supposed to be kind, generous, and empathetic. I desperately wanted to live in a world driven by these ideals. Too often, the difference between the world they preached and the one they actually offered made me angry. So I protested, trying to badger them into following their own principles. However, demanding change turned out to be far more complex than I first had hoped. After I participated in my first riot, I realized I was contributing to the very chaos that I wanted to stop. The protest movement became increasingly strident at my alma mater, University of Wisconsin in Madison, until a climax in the1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center. At 3 AM, when the bombers expected the building to be empty, a young physics researcher unrelated to the Army or the war was killed by the blast, exposing the dark side of extreme protest. More disturbing still, moral outrage against government policies can be used to justify all sorts of violent protest. For example, the Oklahoma City bombers claimed they were obeying higher principles, a justification that comes all too close to the reasoning of the Weather Underground. According to Ayers, his group never took part in an action that resulted in a death, so the book does not justify murder. In fact, the book does very little justifying at all. Rather than analyzing his actions, or even looking back at them with the hindsight of an older man, Ayers offers an immersion experience in that period. Just as you wouldn't expect to see cell phones in a movie about the Vietnam War, Ayers also tries to keep his thoughts appropriate for a young man during the height of the Vietnam war protests. Feminism was still in the future In Bill Ayers' time the feminist movement had not yet been born, so during his story, men were freely using women and justifying it with all sorts of theoretical excuses. Women were starting to complain, and in a rare nod to the future development of the feminist movement, Ayers hints at the tensions coming to the surface. Structure is interesting: In Medias Res The organizational structure of the book is interesting. The opening scene pulls me in with a bang. Ayers and his cronies are on the run, and they hear about the death of a comrade, letting me know they are all in mortal danger. This technique of "in medias res," or starting in the midst of the action, is as old as storytelling itself. Onc 60's, Book Review, Madison Wisconsin, Vietnam War Jerry Waxler no no http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/anecdotes-story-beliefs/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/anecdotes-story-beliefs/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:02:04 +0000 jerrywaxler http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/?p=359 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/anecdotes-story-beliefs/feed/ 1 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/how-awakening-pain-can-heal-it/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/how-awakening-pain-can-heal-it/#comments Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:00:48 +0000 jerrywaxler http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/how-awakening-pain-can-heal-it/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/how-awakening-pain-can-heal-it/feed/ 3 00:01:01 Story moves you to the next step Instead of keeping memories trapped in their original form, free them up with story. 60's, Coming of age, Madison Wisconsin, Trauma, Vietnam War Jerry Waxler no no http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/hair-in-the-melting-pot/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/hair-in-the-melting-pot/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:15:21 +0000 jerrywaxler http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/?p=137 http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/hair-in-the-melting-pot/feed/ 14 00:01:01 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.) During ... 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.) During the cultural rebellion of the sixties, like many white kids, I tried to reach across the racial divide by emulating black slang and embracing soul music. My dark brown hair grew longer, and by the time I returned home from the University of Wisconsin that first summer of 1966 it had curled into a tangle that looked vaguely like an Afro. My great-uncle Ben, with whom I had always got along, said "I didn't know we had anything like that in the family." We never spoke civilly to each other again. In Madison, Wisconsin the following year, some boys drove to campus to beat up kids who looked like me. They jumped out of their car, threw me to the ground and kicked me for a while to let me know that long hair was against the American way. A memoir by Henry Louis Gates called "Colored People" made me think more about that incident. After all, this is the Melting Pot. We're supposed to be able to absorb all kinds of people -- the northern Europeans with their blond hair, Irish with their red hair, Mediterraneans, with their jet black hair. My own ancestors, eastern European Jews, inherited dark curly hair from our Semitic ancestors. Blending hasn't always been easy. As each group arrived, a cry went throughout the land "We already know who we are and you are not us." After a couple of generations, the children lost their accents and adopted clothes and customs that helped us blend. We intermarried. Voila. We're in the mix. But the resistance to blacks has persisted longer than for most other groups. I've thought about the reasons and the problems of that lack of mixture my whole life, but I've never thought about it as clearly as I did when I read Gates' memoir, in which he explains what it was like growing up in the segregated south. As I listen to Gates, the magic of story reading takes over and I'm with him in the 1950's and 60's. At home he saw people of one color, and on television he saw another. As he ponders this contrast, and tries to sort out his place in the mix, one of the most revealing insights is the chapter on hair. As a child, Gates' barber complimented him on having a "good grade of hair," or "good hair" meaning it wasn't too curly. His good grade came with his genes, while others had to work for the desired straightness by greasing hair down and flattening it with a tight stocking cap. They ironed their hair. They used home chemical concoctions of potatoes and lye to defeat the curls. Or they spent big money on a chemical procedure call "processing." Through Gates' story, I begin to see that hair has deep significance, and the more I think about how it fits into our emotional lives, the more of its power I see. Absence of hair is important to men who lose it at middle age, and the loss of hair during chemotherapy is one of the demoralizing marks of cancer. Prison camp inmates and new military recruits often have their hair shaved to reduce their individuality. Older people hide their gray to look young, while young people enhance sexual charisma by primping, extending, dying, or spiking. So I shouldn't be surprised that black people, to improve their image, would like to manage the impression their hair conveys. Working in my dad's drugstore in the early 60's I often saw black guys wearing these tight caps, or "do rags" as they were called. And my dad stocked a whole section of specialized hair products. Looking at it from the outside it seemed mysterious. Now I see they were trying to do the same thing Americans had been doing for centuries, trying to achieve entry into the Melting Pot, so they could participate in the American dream. Hair defines the group a person is in. That simple, yet profound observation sends me searching. Surely something so important must insinuate itself in other aspects of my life. As I look for more evidence of the im Aging, Black Culture, Madison Wisconsin, My own life, Writing Prompt Jerry Waxler no no http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/beatles-and-other-loaded-words-in-your-memoir/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/beatles-and-other-loaded-words-in-your-memoir/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2007 11:37:01 +0000 jerrywaxler http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/beatles-and-other-loaded-words-in-your-memoir/ http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/beatles-and-other-loaded-words-in-your-memoir/feed/ 2