Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

My dad owned a neighborhood drugstore in north Philadelphia, and on the nights he was able to make it home for dinner, most of the conversation centered around him telling us about the menagerie of characters who streamed through the store and gave him endless raw material. We sat and dutifully listened, but since there was no rule about equal air time, I grew up without having picked up even a smattering of skill to help me tell stories of my own.

In fact, I spent quite the next several decades story-less, feeling awkward about reporting on what happened to me. And though I didn’t realize it at first, I gradually noticed that my lack of storytelling was cutting me off from people. Stories are how we tell each other who we are, and so without stories, I felt isolated. Once I noticed how important it was to be able to tell stories, I set out to learn in adulthood what I had not learned as a child.

It turns out that with a little digging you can find storytellers who will teach you their craft. For example, Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, has been studying story telling for years. For him, storytelling is a performance art. He looks like Mark Twain, including the flowing mane of hair and bushy mustache, and when he dresses in period costume, it’s like listening to your own copy of Mark Twain. In addition to the performance and folklore aspects of storytelling, he’s also interested in creating them.

Here’s the simple, powerful lesson he shared with me, that he’ll be teaching in more detail at the Augusta Heritage Folkarts Festival in West Virginia, July 8-13, 2007. Say you’re sitting around at a family gathering, and the older adults start telling stories about Uncle Bob. The ones who knew Uncle Bob start laughing, and everyone else glazes over. They never met Uncle Bob, they didn’t know his pranks, or the sadness underneath his smile, so the story isn’t working for them. The problem is that so many family stories contain codes. The people who know the code can make sense of the story, and those who don’t know the code are left out.

It’s like that old joke about a newly convicted criminal in the penitentiary. Someone down the cellblock screams out the number “68″ and all the other prisoners crack up laughing. The newbie asks what is going on, and his cellmate says, “We’ve heard these jokes so many times, we just tell them by the number.” It’s the same with family stories. As storyteller Charles Kiernan, coordinator of the Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild, explains it, say you’re at the dinner table celebrating a holiday with your extended family. You start telling stories about Uncle Bob, and all the adults who knew Uncle Bob crack up, while the kids who don’t remember Uncle Bob glaze over. Why are they staring at the ceiling, waiting for an excuse to get away from the table?

Kiernan’s family-oriented workshop will teach students to slow down and instead of telling stories in code that only insiders understand, they’ll learn to tell the story in a way that can be understood by listeners who never met Uncle Bob. The trick is to describe him in more detail. What did he wear? What was his hair like? What room do you picture him in? Sit down with someone who didn’t know him and describe him in as much detail as possible, so your listener could pick Bob out of a crowd.

If you want to tell a story, look closely at your language, and “unpack” it, laying out its content for everyone to appreciate. With a little learning you can turn the joke known only to the old inmates into a joke you can share with kids and strangers.

While this advice sounds simple, I consider it to be brilliant. For one thing, it acknowledges an important fact. Just because we think we’re telling a good story doesn’t mean the listener is hearing a good story. That in itself is a powerful piece of information, because most of us think that when we tell about events, we are doing the best possible job sharing the story. It turns out, the storyteller plays a crucial role, shaping a bunch of events into something worth listening to. Once we realize this fact, we can start looking for tricks to give our stories more impact.

Secondly, the message is brilliant because it is extraordinarily fundamental, sweeping across all aspects of storytelling. For example, I was preparing to write a description of my years in college, and was hoping to explain how the music of the times influenced my feelings. I could hope that by simply mentioning that the Beatles were intense or important, I might be able to convey what I was feeling, since everyone really knows about the Beatles. But I remembered Kiernan’s advice about avoiding code words, and thought how that applies to those icons of the sixties. If I just mention the word, “sixties” or “Beatles” I might hope everyone understands what I mean. But they will only get what they think, not what I think. That’s like the prisoner saying “68.” I have to tell a story.

So how can I unpack my thoughts and feelings about the Beatles? I’ll talk more about that in my next blog entry, and put into a scene what I mean by the coded word “Beatles.”

 by Jerry Waxler

“I don’t know why I did it,” Tobias Wolff says to his guardian, in his memoir “This Boy’s Life.” The previous night, Wolff had stolen gasoline from a neighbor’s farm truck. Caught in the act, Wolff admitted it, and to atone for his sin, he was sent back to the farmer to apologize. But Wolff couldn’t force himself to utter the magic words, “I’m sorry.” Despite his guardian’s desperate plea, Wolff doesn’t apologize and doesn’t offer any reasons. His act of defiance just sits there, confusing to him, disappointing to his guardian, and not very clear to the reader, either.

It was a powerful choice for Wolff to not explain himself to the reader. Another writer might have invented some explanation, or speculated from today’s wisdom, looking back on his young self. But in letting his act stand unexplained, Wolff lets us see the way his mind worked at the time, a troubled teenager, not sure why he’s doing the things he does. His strange, impulsive acts remind me of times in my own teenage years when I acted without knowing why I was doing what I was doing, occasionally doing destructive, or even cruel things. It’s difficult to remember those times. It’s certainly uncomfortable. But reading Wolff’s memoir helps me once again stand in that fog and look around. I hate it, and yet it was part of my life.

I read an excellent book about how to raise a teenager called “Yes, Your Teen is Crazy!: Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind”. In offering insights about teenagers, the author provides a scientific background to what most of us already believe. Teenagers don’t always behave rationally. Wolff shows us through story.

The fact that teenage boys are willing to follow their impulses into dangerous and defiant territory says a lot about the human condition - it helps explain wars. For example read Tracy Kidder’s “My Detachment,” a tale of coming of age while he was an officer in Vietnam. This book also shows how the fog of youth fits in so well with war. Kidder just didn’t seem to be able to connect with life, letting readers of his memoir share his state of mind at the time he experienced it. In the documentary movie, “The Fog of War,” Robert S. McNamara talks about the bad choices that were made in Vietnam. It’s tragic to realize that in times when life and death hangs in the balance, so many decisions are made in this fog. From the coming of age memoirs of Kidder and Wolff, I wonder how much of that fog comes straight from the teenage mind.

As a reader, I did not find Kidder’s or Wolff’s lack of clarity to be a very pleasant experience. It’s more fun to read about clarity. Take the scene in Jeannette Walls’ “Glass Castle” when her father was whipping her - she was shocked, but as the beating continued, a light bulb went off. She realized that she did not need to accept this forever, and she started plotting her escape. I loved Jeanette Walls’ lightbulb. Her insight gave me a sense of hope, very different from Wolff who was swept along by his own cunning tactics for survival, but didn’t quite see where he was going, and even when he tried to escape, he failed and slipped back into the fog. Wolff’s memoir forced me to struggle with hopelessness. So what kept me turning the pages? Why didn’t I give up on him and throw down the book in disgust?

One of the attractions about coming of age stories is that the reader hopes that the protagonist is going to turn a corner, to open his eyes, and see beyond the fog. The suspense for me as a reader is my desire that they will grow out of their adolescent craziness, and escape into a saner world in which clear choices lead to positive outcomes.

by Jerry Waxler

I’m reading a book by journalism professor, Jack Lule about using myth to find story. I recommend his book Daily News, Eternal Stories to anyone who is looking to find a structure for their story. Lule wrote it to explain why some news stories jump into the headlines, while others don’t. My purpose in reading it is to pass along ideas that can help you structure your memoir.

His first myth is “The Victim.” In his example, a man on a cruise was murdered by terrorists, and elevated by the news media to the status of a hero. Since the man was in a wheelchair, the only reason the terrorists could possibly have for killing him was that he was an American. They used him as a symbol, killing him out of hatred for the nation. The news media accepted the terrorist’s symbolic message, allowing the man to stand in as proxy for all Americans. And once the victim became accepted as a symbol, he could be used for an additional purpose. The media and politicians used his story to send a message back to the terrorists. It’s as if the terrorists were saying “we hate you and we’re going to kill this guy to prove it,” and the American media responded by saying, “Oh yeah. Well we are strong anyway, and you don’t scare us, and we’re going to admire this man to prove it.” Many people who have been elevated throughout history from victim to hero were used in this symbolic way to represent their group. The murderers hated the group and used the victim as a symbol, and the admirers showed love for this victim, and rallied around in order to strengthen their identity and defy the murderers. For example, many of the Christian martyrs are remembered because of the way they were singled out.

While this myth is powerful in news and history, it is not an easy myth to apply in memoir. I believe one reason this is difficult to use in memoir is because to be elevated from victim to hero, your story must be told by others. If the news media declares that you have been singled out as a representative, then you can be elevated. It doesn’t work as well if you declare yourself a victim. On the contrary, you look like a complainer if you come forward and say “I’m a victim.” It loses its mythological power. In fact, “I’m a victim” can deflate a story, taking the energy out of it.

In scanning my experience with memoirs, I can think of one effective tale of a victim, Nien Chang’s “Life and Death in Shanghai.“ Her daughter was “arrested” or more accurately “disappeared” by the Red Guard during the infamous Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s. It’s a beautiful tale, carried not so much by tragedy of the daughter’s victimization but by the mom’s strength, and her struggle to hold up and maintain her poise despite persecution. The crime that Chang’s family was being persecuted for was their western education. As western readers, we can identify with their victimization. In the same manner as Lule’s mythical victim, the hatred that was being directed at that family was symbolically directed at us!

In most memoirs, even if the author has undergone horrific suffering, the energy that moves the reader is not the suffering but the courage required to cope with it. For example, in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, he never complains about being the victim of his father’s abandonment. On the contrary the whole book is a sort of celebration of survival. The reading public didn’t canonize McCourt for being a victim, but rather placed him on their shoulders for surviving.

For memoirists, the victim myth is a cautionary tale. Be careful about declaring yourself a victim. It probably won’t help your heroic image. Consider the dynamics of Tommie Smith’s memoir, a Silent Gesture. The reason I went to see Smith at a book signing this year, and bought his book, was because I wanted to understand the greatness of a man. He came from a poor black family in the segregated south, went on to set world records as a runner, won Olympic Gold in 1968. Then on live television in front of millions of people, he raised his fist in the Silent Gesture. In the tumultuous 60’s this was seen by blacks as courageous. From the media’s standpoint, it was defiant. Smith was blacklisted. He went on to teach and coach, but without the fanfare or success he deserved. See my previous post about Smith on this blog.

As a reader, and a student of history, I ought to be loving every minute of this memoir. But it doesn’t turn out to be a page turner. I think one problem with the telling of this powerful story is that he became entangled in the dark side of the myth making process. Instead of being adored by the media as a Gold Medalist, Smith was turned into an ingrate who abused his privileged position. No advertising contracts, television spots, or fancy coaching jobs resulted from his spectacular athletic achievement. He should have been singled out as a hero, but because of one wildly audacious act, from the glory of victory he slid away into anonymity, or perhaps more accurately like Nien Chang’s daughter, he “disappeared.”

His story is messier than the one Lule singled out in his section on the Victim. Smith was not a guy in a wheel chair, murdered outright. He was at the time, the fastest man alive, and then after he stepped off the podium, he was just a guy, trying to raise a family. It becomes a difficult story to tell. If you are stripped of your glory by the media, who then will tell the story of your courage and survival? It’s a fascinating question. Probably the only credible answer is in a memoir.

I recommend Smith’s memoir for anyone who wants to get inside his experience, whether you are curious about those events and the man behind them, want to learn more about memoirs, or are curious about the workings of the myths that drive our public stories. The book offers lessons for memoirists. How fame doesn’t guarantee success. How the public is fickle, and seems to have a mind of its own. And how myths of heroes and victims play out in Smith’s life.

As you read it, embrace what you like, and consider what you would do differently. From such an interesting life, he ought to be able to shape a compelling story that would again grab the attention of the world. He had the podium, and used it for a silent gesture. A memoir gives him a chance to tell it in words.

What approach would you use? Leave a comment here and let me know.

by Jerry Waxler

I finished Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my father.” I had been concerned earlier in the book that his emphasis on ideas might dull the edge of his memoir. So it was with some surprise when I got to the last third of the book, and found him shifting away from ideas, and switching into pure storytelling mode. That is a fascinating literary device. I wonder sometimes how conscious an author is of such stylistic development, transforming from his style in the beginning, a memoir mixed with an essay, into a strictly story telling style at the end. In any case, it worked, and I found that the ending was quite satisfying.

What impressed me about this story was that it was a Homecoming. Homecomings are the classic ending of the Hero’s Journey. This idea of homecoming turns up a lot in stories, but each story has its own spin on what Homecoming means. In the Odyssey, Ulysses really returned to his ancestral home. In the first Star Wars, Luke Skywalker came “home” to Princess Leah, who later turned out to be his sister. So it was a return to his “true home.” Obama’s homecoming also has an interesting twist. It was not the home he was born in, but the place his African father was born. When you have roots in more than one place, where is your home? It’s a question all travelers and transplants face. I think Obama raised this question beautifully, and without answering it, let the story do his work for him, by showing us what it was like for him to visit his African family, and let us feel it, see it, hear it ourselves through the art of storytelling.

In Alex Haley’s famous novel and mini-series, Roots, the author went back to Africa to look for his own roots buried in history, highlighting the longing and the frustration to see backwards through time, through layers of generations, and lost history. This attempt to find deep, ancestral roots has universal elements, as many of us wonder where we came from, and can’t ever quite scratch that itch. Take me for example. My grandparents fled Russia during the pogroms, a horrible period in Jewish history, in which Russian thugs and militia pillaged Jewish towns, a sort of state-sanctioned vigilante movement to terrorize Jews. When my grandparents came over to this country, they went through the Ellis Island immigration process, and some clerk on Ellis Island gave them an English spelling for their Cyrillic name. In their case it was Waxler, in others Wexler, Wachsler, Wechsler. Who knows what the original name was? Over time, the area where they left was subjected to the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s and Hitler’s massacres, and the German invasion, shrouding my ancestry deep in the fog of history. But I still wish I knew what it was like, who those people were, how they lived.

In Obama’s case, unlike the vast majority of African Americans, he had a chance to actually visit the land of his African father. That is fascinating! Obama’s life represents the cross roads of black and white, African and American. What a GREAT story. When he meets his own extended biological family, he acts as a sort of representative to explore the tragedy of black ancestors being kidnapped from African villages, forcibly resettled, and then put in forced labor for a couple of hundred years to help other people succeed. We can’t change the past, but hopefully through the telling and sharing of the story, we can empathize, learn, grow together and heal.

I don’t know Obama’s future as a politician. But I do know that by opening a window into his own experience, he has helped me grow richer in understanding. By sharing his story, he has already fulfilled one of the roles of a leader.

—

Click here to read the first part of my review of Dreams from My Father.

By Jerry Waxler

When I was a teenager, I started pulling away from my parents. I didn’t understand who these people were, and didn’t think we had much in common. Ignoring all the support mom and dad had given me, the safe and sane home, I longed to escape their influence. When I moved out of my childhood home in Pennsylvania, I tried to put many miles behind me, first moving 1,000 miles to go to school in Wisconsin, and then moving 2,000 more miles to Berkeley, California. The geographical separation was only an external symptom of what I was feeling in my heart. I was trying to shake them off. Sometimes I didn’t speak to them for a year, and never reached out for support. All of this distance was accompanied by enormous pain. I had cut myself off from my family, and wondered why I felt so alone.

But I couldn’t figure out how to break through this wall, and see them as real people. Somehow I had built up such profound edginess I simply couldn’t approach them. So I stayed away, hurting them and myself in the process. While my situation sounds extreme, I have spoken to many adults who hold on to complex, painful resentments about their parents, and would greatly benefit by finding a way back home.

For example, when memoirist Gretchen Gunn first decided to write about her childhood, she knew she had lots of interesting material. She grew up in a hippie commune. And as a tiny child, she witnessed first hand the culture of the early seventies, where people, including her parents valued their own desires above common sense or standards of decency. But Gretchen felt unable to tell the story because she was so angry with her dad’s irresponsibility and abandonment. She thought her anger would get her in trouble, so she decided to write it as fiction. That turned out to be a great choice, because the more she tried to tell the story, the better she understood it.

To write a good story, the goal is to not describe characters like they belong in a cartoon. If they look empty, or the same as every other character you have read about, they will not be interesting to read. Instead of a superficial gloss, you have to look more closely for signs they are human. If your vision is clouded by strong feelings of resentment, disappointment, or other confusing emotions, getting to the human story beneath the cloud of emotions might happen in layers rather than all at once.

So when Gretchen wrote her early drafts, she expressed her disgust, but when approaching the story in this way, it didn’t seem interesting. So she shifted her image of him from a bad person to simply a dead person. By killing off her father, she was able to see the whole situation more clearly. He was out of the picture, and out of her life, and instead of hanging on to her fury, she let him go. This shift in perspective was so profound that she lost her grip on her gripes. There was no more point in being angry, and she felt like she released a huge weight, allowing her to see events more clearly than ever. Even though she had been writing fiction, the act of turning her life into a story had set her free from the demons of the past, and gave her deeper insight into her childhood and her parents.

After my self-imposed exile in California, I moved back to Pennsylvania in 1971. But moving closer geographically did not bring me closer in my heart. I went months at a time without calling home, and skipped most holiday gatherings. After decades of therapy, I went to graduate school and got my Master’s degree in counseling, and started to see the secret everyone else seemed to know better than me, about the ever-present intimacy between a parent and child. My interest in mom increased, and I spoke with her every week, trying to understand how to relate to this person who not only gave birth to me, but taught me how to be a human being. Week by week, year by year, our conversations cleared away whatever issues had kept us separate. Fortunately, my mom lived to 87, which gave me plenty of time to transform my attitude. Finally, I got it! She was a person! A good person. She longed to make the most of her life. She strived to stay fit. And I finally noticed she had many devoted friends who looked up to her. I became one of her admirers. We became friends! At the end of an aerobics class, she wasn’t feeling well, and a neighbor took her to the hospital. When she lay in bed, a few days before the end, she turned to me and said, “I lived a good life.” And so she had, and together, we were at peace with that.

by Jerry Waxler

When the blogging craze first started it looked “self indulgent” - who wants to hear people talking about themselves? But this craze had legs. It turns out people love to talk about themselves, and to hear about each other. There is something oddly soothing about hearing another person’s tale, whether it’s about a daytrip or romance or hobby. And so, blogs continue to be popular, giving people a chance to come out from behind their barriers and share more than ever. It is a modern form of intimacy.

I suppose people who lived in a small village might have had more intimate connections, where everyone grew up together and knew everything about each other. We don’t live in those villages anymore. But we do have the internet, and this is letting us create our own customized community, a really big one, just like that crazy visionary Marshall McLuhan said. When I first read Marshall McLuhan in the 60’s I thought his ideas about a global village were cool, but unrealistic. That was the era of television, when you sat back on your sofa, and passively watched slick, over-produced shows. Television created a passive, almost zombie-like public. But now the internet is taking over. A recent study found that college kids are online 3 hours a day! Inside their dorms they are getting to know each other around the campus and around the world. As we settle in to the twenty-first century, the world is starting to take on some of the qualities of McLuhan’s vision of a village.

The internet has given our voice a global reach. Free blogging, forums, email, podcasts, video posts, photos, online communities, and yes even those old tried and true websites. We have so many more ways of touching each other. Much of the communication through these media focus on the tales of the day. Blogs often resemble diaries. That’s a start, but you can push that intimacy much further by writing a memoir. Instead of dashing off snips of thoughts from a day, share your whole story.

I love face to face writing workshops, opportunities to meet and teach and learn with real people, seeing their expression, feeling their presence. But it’s hard to gather people together in one place. They are busier than ever. It’s expensive and time consuming to go across town, let alone across a region, and we are all juggling obligations, including the desire to just stay home. But on the internet - Ahhh. You can dance and bob, jump and swirl, through the pages, like lightening, looking for images, ideas, people, places. It sets the mind free.

While I continue to enjoy personal contact, with each passing year I can see that the wave of the twenty first century is moving the village out of the face to face realm, a loss of one kind of intimacy, but in exchange it reveals a new kind of village at a distance. That’s okay. We’re people and we need each other. We’ll take what we can get. And when we look at these changes as opportunities, it turns out that by by applying the ideas of memoir to reveal your own experiences and turn them into narrative, you can get to know other people, not as faceless conversations, but as fully engaged actors sharing the stage of life. My goal is to provide a cross roads, and encouragement and insight that lets people share their story.

From the simple space of my desk, at 5:00 AM, a cup of coffee by my side, in front of a bank of fluorescent lights to jumpstart my morning, I am ready to communicate with the world. To do so, I need to find what works. What do people want to know? What do I have to offer? I can experiment, and learn by blogging. Blogs are good practice, to help me learn the art of talking about myself in a way that is useful and interesting to others.

When I’m near home in my physical “village” if you can use this term on a modern, automobile driven neighborhood where most people are strangers, I want to look normal and bland. But on the internet I can show how I am unique. By sharing my own journey, and encouraging you to share yours, we can individually and together, story by story, reverse the falling apart into isolation, and turn this world into a global village. I think when people get to know more about the person inside the shell, we’ll start appreciating each other more, and learn how to help each other in new ways we have yet to imagine.

 by Jerry Waxler

After finishing the memoir, Shades of Darkness, I felt I had learned a lot about the author, George Brummell, as a person, his cultural experience growing up in the segregated south. His ticket out to the larger world was the United States Army. I could feel him growing up in Korea. It was a nicely told coming of age story, and then, just when it looked like he was turning into a real adult, his life exploded in a landmine in Vietnam. He was blinded and maimed, and then when he returned, he had to invent himself again. Through the magic of memoir he took me on his journey, as he kept growing. He graduated from college, became director of the Blinded Veterans Association, and wrote this memoir.

I knew he was lecturing and outreach to encourage others to tell their story. To find out more about his experience writing the memoir I set up an interview. He has a melodic voice, and as he was speaking each sentence, I could almost hear him lining up the next, so his thoughts flowed together in a lovely, somewhat unusual sort of continuum. Here is what he said when I asked him to tell me about writing his memoir.

GB: “When I came back from Vietnam I wasn’t doing too well, and writing the memoir helped me organize my thoughts. Putting my thoughts on paper was elevating for me. It was quite therapeutic. I needed it at the time, especially those times that were not the best for me. When I began to write it had a tendency to take away my thoughts, and I could drift back to my childhood days and think of things that I could probably have done a little bit better. It was just exciting to be able to see what I have accomplished in writing.

When I first started writing I often thought how difficult it would be to organize my thoughts and not repeat myself. I thought that would be a real challenge. I like challenges, and that was a challenge to me to do that. I was in college at the time, I felt it was a way to improve my life. Writing is like driving or a lot of other things that we do. In most cases, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Writing the book prepared me for the career that I had with the Blinded veterans association which required me to do a lot of writing.

After so much practice I found myself in a position to be able to write a little bit better than a lot of my peers. It also helped me in terms of promotion, because a couple of times they asked the applicants to write what they could do for the organization, and I was able to express myself fairly well.

I knew as a blind person a lot of what I was going to do in my life would require me to speak, because as a blind person a lot of things you cannot do with your hands, other than a lot of manual labor, and I wasn’t interested in that. I found that in order for me to improve my speech, I had to read. And of course writing was an adjunct to that. The more I wrote, the more I was able to organize my thoughts and to be able to speak.

JW: “Did you get much training in story writing?”

GB: Not really. As a youngster, living with my grandmother, she was illiterate, and I wrote letters to her daughter and sisters. They were in Philadelphia and she didn’t have a telephone. Otherwise, my only writing class was a remedial writing course, which I took because I was a high school dropout and then in college I took English 101 and 102.

When I took the remedial writing course, I was recording my memoirs at the time, and I asked the instructor to let me use those recordings as my English assignment. My instructor thought my writing was quite interesting. Then in English 101 and 102, the instructor let me use recordings as well.

After that, I took a non-credit course in creative writing. Again, I was able to submit papers for that class from my own material. By that time I was hooked. And as a social work major, I had to do a lot of writing, and a lot of editing. I really enjoyed editing. I worked with my writing person to get my coursework on paper. I went through it with her, and she retyped it, and I edited and she retyped it. So I had a lot of editing experience while I was in school.

And again while I was at work, we did a brochure. And I went along with the person who was writing the brochure, and she would read and ask the directors what changes we wanted to make, and I saw that I stood a little bit taller than my peers in terms of editing. All of them had more education than I did, their vocabulary was greater, but once it was put on paper, I could make it sound better.

JW: And that skill shows in your book.

GB: That’s the only training I had, other than what I got from my own experience. I thought I could write a book better than the ones I had read, such as, “If you can see what I hear” - hell, I could write my own experiences. Why not do it from the point of view of an African American?

See www.georgebrummell.com for more information and excerpts from his book.

by Jerry Waxler

I’ve been listening to Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. My reason for picking it up was because I wanted to know more about this person who has become a political celebrity in the last year. What I was really looking for was a genuine insight into his life that would help me learn more about him than I could learn through the marketing hyperbole, superficial glosses, and spin doctors.

The central purpose of memoirs is to share a view of the protagonist’s life experience. That’s a minimum requirement. But in addition to this central purpose, almost all memoirs try to accomplish other tasks as well. Travel memoirs show us a foreign country. Tell-all books turn into public confessions. Memoirs often are used as platforms to explain part of history or even teach a lesson. For example, Foster Winans’ memoir shows us the workings of stock brokers. Tracy Kidder’s memoir shows us the workings of a particular section of the army in Vietnam. Shirley Maclaine used her life experience to teach her ideas about how people should relate to the cosmos. Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” uses his experience in a death camp as a teaching tool to show readers how to live a better life. If the memoir does its central job of sharing personal experience, it can make a good read, despite the other purpose. But if the other purpose takes center stage, it sometimes drains too much energy away from the personal experience and the book falls flat. I wondered if Obama would let me know his experience, or would his experience be drowned in his message?

The audio book starts out with a preface from his current situation as a politician. I became concerned that it was going to be more a political lecture than a memoir. His speaking voice is clipped and not as good as the professional readers I had become accustomed to on other audio books, and his vocabulary uses a few more college words which slows down the narrative a bit. As he got into the actual story of growing up I was still distracted by his non-dramatic reading voice and the occasional sense that he was lecturing or making too many sociological points, but I continued listening, and as he told more about what it was like growing up, I found myself drawn into his experience. That’s the job of any memoir, to help me get into the protagonist’s shoes and see the world from inside his experience. I think he does a decent job of sharing his experience.

Obama is in a position to share a fascinating insight into being black because he was raised by his white mother and her parents, and so he really has seen this issue from both sides. I have heard glimpses of what it is like for black people who as children are innocent of race, and as they come of age start to realize that American culture still struggles with this ugly scar. What a disturbing insight for any young person to realize they are in a group that is disliked by another group, and that other group has power over them. This experience reminded me of when as a teenager I read about the capture of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Reading the horrific accounts of Nazis hating groups and wanting to kill them made me realize that being Jewish is dangerous. As I’ve grown older, every few years another instance of group prejudice breaks into violence and murder; the civil war in northern Ireland, the Serbs and Croates, Tutsis and Hutus. And in the shocking aftermath of 9/11, hundreds of millions of people realized they could be hated and killed for being part of western civilization. To stop the outrage, we turned to the old standby. Find the cultural identity of those who hate us, and kill them first.

Perhaps the only antidote to this human problem of groups hating each other is to understand other people as individuals. And I can think of few better ways than through writing and reading memoirs. Obama’s coming of age tale helps me understand what it is like to be black in America. He tells me not from the point of view of a sociologist but from inside one person’s experience. Through the magic of memoir, he lets me inside his thoughts, his revelation, his own real life. By reading, I enter the life of a black teenager, trying to evolve from an innocent and protected child into an adult, trying to understand from inside his own life experience our complex attitudes about being black and white in America, or in his case both.

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Click here to read the second part of my review of Dreams from My Father.

I’ve been hard at work making memories this week, and helping others make their own, or more accurately record their own. In one week, I’ve given three workshops, one on telling the story of your life at the Writers Corner, one on getting started writing at the Quakertown Library, and one on finding meaning on your memories at GreenshireArts. I’m also taking a workshop on memoir writing at West Laurel Hill Cemetery. I learn so much from workshops, whether I’m giving them or taking them. People in a room, all sharing the introspective project of writing, stirs up lessons and insights, like how passionate people are about writing, and sharing their story. I love that. At every step there is something to learn, and I keep learning more so I’ll have more to share. I’m having fun, and in my surveys, people say “Inspirational, and motivational” so my students are having fun, too.

The amazing thing about all of this is that as I teach about writing memories, and seek to find the stories in my own life, I can’t help but notice that I’m making more memories every day. Take last night for example. As many times as I speak in public, preparing for talks often makes me nervous. Sometimes I was nervous there could be a large crowd, and other times that no one would show up. I was nervous because this was my first talk at a Library, and my first talk since I published “Learn to Write your Memoir in 4 Weeks.” The library talk means that I’m going to be talking about writing to a general audience, and I know there will be a huge range of experience.

Once you get used to it, being nervous isn’t too bad. The adrenaline was actually making everything sharper. My perceptions were more acute, and my thoughts were more intense. To get through the day I worked on a series of calming strategies, such as seeing the audience as dear friends with whom I was having a chat. But my favorite strategy arises from the storytelling work I’ve been doing. I looked at the evening’s performance as a chapter in my life. Yesterday, when I woke up, I thought, “In 12 hours, I will be giving the talk. That’s a little scary. In 24 hours, I will be looking back on the evening, and it will be over.” Based on previous experiences, I expect it will have gone fairly well. Of course I didn’t know the details in advance, like how many people would show up and how the conversations would proceed. But as I was telling myself this story about past, present, and future, I was calming myself with the passage of time, and more importantly the passage of story.

It turns out that every minute is tomorrow’s memory. That might seem obvious or cosmic, but in either case it is an inescapable fact that I might as well try to take advantage of. While I’m working through the stories of my life, why not work on the story I’m living right now? I can craft my actions to lead me in the direction I want to go, to achieve the goals I want to achieve. It helps me skate on the surface of obstacles, which I know will soon be past, and it helps me retain a sense of purpose.

The first time I heard the concept of making memories was years ago, in Victoria Island in British Columbia staying at a Bed and Breakfast run by a retired couple. The sun was shining brightly through picture windows that opened down a hill towards the docked boats in the harbor. Someone at one of the tables said something about vacations making memories, and the whole idea of time popped free from its moorings and yesterday, today, and tomorrow ran together in a delicious blur. Having fun in the blur was my job that day. Teasing it apart and writing about it gives me an opportunity for pleasure for the rest of my life.

I attended a memoir class at a cemetery yesterday. There were about 25 people who walked through the gates of the cemetery for a happy reason, to participate in a community outreach program hosted by West Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Bala Cynwyd, outside of Philadelphia. Thank you for hosting this event,West Laurel Hills! I love community outreach in any form, and while this comes from a surprising direction, I’ll take it. And I love writing classes. The writing teacher, Mary Beth Simmons was also reaching out to the community. And there we were, enjoying the company of physical people, rather than electrons on a computer screen, which seems to be where much of the socializing is taking place these days. One of the participants is my sister, which adds an additional dimension to my memoir writing. The experience was so much fun, I thought I’d list some of the benefits. Perhaps this will help motivate you to take a memoir writing class at your local cemetery or wherever you can find one,

• When listening to people introduce themselves, and hear their writing, it confirms that everyone has a story.
• Free writing in groups is fun, and opens mysterious parts of your mind.
• The desire to write has lots of power. Many people seem both drawn to and intimidated by it, like a tall mountain.
• The history is in there, waiting to get out. Every time I think about my past, it gets easier to think about it.
• Meet writing teachers like Mary Beth Simmons, the director of Villanova University’s Writing Center, who like a midwife, helps people give birth to their story.
• It makes cemeteries less creepy and more like real places.
• I learned about how someone’s grandmother or great aunt (I’m not sure which) from a small town really ran away and married the trapeze artist from the traveling circus . Life is at least as strange as fiction.
• It’s okay to share with strangers - things I did when I was 10. In fact, sharing bits of ourselves made me feel closer to everyone in the room.
• It’s a good excuse to hang out with your sister. Comparing and hearing memories with a sibling adds texture to the past as well as enriches my relationship with her today.
• I made another memory. What was yesterday’s memoir class is tomorrow’s memoir material.