Memory Writers Network

by Jerry Waxler

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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 got 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 alreday 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, 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 chemotherapy patients who lose it as one of the demoralizing aspects of their illness. 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 importance of hair I spot another crucial period.

Before I turned forty, my prematurely gray hair made me look like an old guy, an outsider among the young people I walked past every day at the university where I worked. I decided to dye it back to its original color, to reclaim my membership in the younger generation. The first time I went to visit my friends Larry and Ivy for lunch, their eyes opened wide. “It’s like instant youth.” My membership restored, I have been dying my hair ever since, despite research that suggested prolonged hair dying might cause a deadly form of cancer. When I was knocked down and kicked because my hair was too long, it never occurred to me to cut it. Now, I am once again placing my acceptance into a group above my own safety. With my dark hair, I’ll signal my membership in the youthful American Melting pot, even if it kills me.

Writing Prompt
Write a story about times in your life when you liked your hair, or didn’t like your hair. What message was your hair broadcasting?

When have you changed your hair to try to redefine or accentuate your acceptance into a group?

When has some one else’s hair sent you a message you had a hard time accepting?

Have you ever had the experience of being an outsider because of your hair, like the time I came home with long hair and was outside my family’s comfort zone, or like the way my friend’s blond daughter provoked cat calls in Egypt, where she stuck out like a… blond in Egypt.

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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.)

When I was 17, my brother was in medical school and I intended to follow. I was getting A’s in advanced placement math and science, and after school I worked part-time in a research lab in one of the top medical schools in the country. Six years later, Ed had earned his credentials as a cardiologist, while I was living in a leaky garage, collecting food stamps, and going weeks without talking to anyone. Transforming from child to adult was horrifically difficult for me, and for a couple of desperate years, I teetered on the brink of failing altogether.

For most of my life, I buried these memories. First I was busy getting myself back together. Then, looking back towards what “might have been” seemed too disappointing to dwell on. But forgetting the past turns out to be a temporary state. As I try to explain my journey through life, those bad decisions and lost dreams keep coming back, fragmented, unkind, and confusing. Since I want to reveal an authentic tale of who I am, I might as well gather the broken bits of the past and figure out how to portray them. By shaping them into a tale that is interesting to others, I can share parts of myself that have been hidden, and learn more about myself in the process.

To learn how to tell a story of lost dreams, I turn once again to the vast repository of published memoirs. I’ve just finished reading three memoirs and a book of short stories by people who have tackled the daunting task of writing about a life that went down as they tried to grow up. Like me, they came close to ruination. Their tales from the brink show that even in the worst of times, there are glimpses into the richness and complexity of the human condition. By exhuming the remains, these storytellers revealed glimpses of wisdom and hope, buried along with the regrets.

“Slow Motion, a memoir of a life rescued through tragedy” by Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro at 18 had three markers of the top echelons of society: wealthy parents, beauty, and entry into a top college. By the time she was 20 she had dropped out of school to model and act. Instead of being discovered by a talent scout, she was recruited for a different kind of talent, becoming the kept woman of a married man, a lawyer who made her feel special by picking her up in limousines, supplying her with drugs, alcohol, and jewelry, and flying her around the world to keep himself entertained. Drinking and drugging heavily, she was falling rapidly into despair when her parents’ catastrophic car accident changed her life. Her parents’ suffering woke her out of her self-involved stupor and she began to get her life back on track.

“Native State” by Tony Cohan
Tony Cohan’s father, Phil, was a radio producer in the 1940’s who worked with stars like Jimmy Durante and Frank Sinatra, so big they were still household names a half a century later. So when Cohan, the son, started playing drums as a teenager, it was easy for him to rise into the company of movers and shakers. But unlike his father, who reveled in popular music, Cohan was drawn to the darker world of drugs, jazz, and the beat down ideas of the beat generation who dressed themselves in cynicism to cloak their despair. His fascination with that movement opened a trap door into degradation, homelessness, and addiction. Eventually his passion for writing helped him switch to a more sustainable approach, allowing him to clamber back to solid footing.

“A Temporary Sort of Peace” by Jim McGarrah
When Jim McGarrah was a teenager, he was a baseball player, lined up for an athletic scholarship. After his girl friend dumped him, McGarrah rebelled against the college route his family expected him to follow. Defying his father’s vehement protests, he enlisted, knowing he would be sent to Vietnam. He thought his decision would make a man out of him, bring glory, defend his country, and all the other positive reasons young soldiers go to war. Within a few months of his arrival he began to unravel. All those good intentions could not protect him from war’s massive assault on his sanity. By the time he got back to the states, he was a wreck, suffering from PTSD, so now to achieve a satisfactory life meant overcoming a profound psychological injury, perhaps a topic for another memoir.

“Apologies Forthcoming” by Xujun Eberlein
If things go wrong while growing up, we often look back and blame ourselves. But some lives go off course due to forces outside our control. Take for example, Xujun Eberlein, who grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Education was a central element of her ambition. When Chinese society turned against education, her parents were denounced, and schools closed. Armed teenagers with essentially identical ideas fought each other with deadly force, simply to prove their superior idealism, tearing apart Xujun’s life along with millions of others. She has written about her experiences in a book of fiction short stories, called “Apologies Forthcoming,” and is currently working on a memoir.

In these examples, each author spent thousands of hours organizing their experience into a readable tale. The product of that effort is a book, not just a work that sits silently on a shelf, but one that speaks to me. While I strive to shape my own life into a story, I consider their lives. They experienced despair and returned. Then after some period of gestation, they strive to understand what happened, to explain it, and above all to share it. And through the magic of story writing and story reading, the authors and I have entered into an intimate relationship.

In a future essay, I’ll draw from these stories cautionary observations about the risks of growing up. By understanding the pitfalls of youth, we can learn more not only about telling our own hopes, but also gain insights into the journey children in every generation travel on their way to becoming adults.

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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?

by Jerry Waxler

(Listen to the podcast using the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

During one fateful day in ninth grade, I discreetly positioned a science fiction book on my desk and was reading it while the English teacher droned on. I was so absorbed in the exploration of the galaxy that Mr. Disharoon walked up behind me, caught me red handed and confiscated the book. I always assumed the ‘C’ I received in that class, my only ‘C’ in high school, was based more on revenge than poor performance.

The first version of that story, the one that automatically comes to mind, looks at Mr. Disharoon as the villain, a self-righteous jerk who busted me for reading in his English class. How ironic! Later when I was rejected from a highly competitive college, I blamed Mr. Disharoon’s mean spirit.

Now that I write about that incident, I look deeper, and I immediately see flaws in my original version. For one thing, I was the one who was breaking the rules, and he was doing his job by enforcing them. It would be self-serving of me to forgive myself for the crime, while blaming him for the punishment. I shift to his point of view. Through his eyes I see a bratty kid who doesn’t seem interested in learning.

I spot another problem with the proposition that Mr. Disharoon ruined my life. This was not the only English class I struggled with. The following year, in a rare visit to a teacher’s office, I went to ask my tenth grade English teacher Mr. Barsky for help. I wasn’t doing well in his class, either. The final blow to my interpretation of events came a few weeks ago, when I was corresponding with a fellow writer. I was telling her I sprinkle commas or semi-colons wherever the mood strikes me. She seemed surprised, pointing out the pleasures and virtues of correct punctuation. The conversation sounded familiar. I realized I’ve often defended myself as a “free spirit” amidst the rules of English. Ah-ha! I was reading the science fiction book because I didn’t care about my teacher’s stupid rules. I deserved the ‘C’.

I am fascinated to discover that I have permitted this important story of my past to remain in its original form for decades. To learn more, I look more closely at the characters. As a young man, I was almost obsessed with obedience, so when I was caught in such a defiant act, I was not only breaking rules. I was undermining my own self image. It was overwhelming to think I’d blown it so badly, so instead of taking the blame myself I shifted it over to Mr. Disharoon. He was the jerk, not me. This “logic” made sense when I was 14 years old. Once I had developed this explanation, it took on a logic of its own. The thousandth time I remembered the episode, I saw it the same way I did when it first happened.

But wasn’t there any truth at all to my original interpretation? How could I have been so far off the mark? I look for evidence to prove Mr. Disharoon was a spiteful man, but I can’t find any. In fact, his office provided a hang out for a coterie of adoring students. I stick myself back into the scene, and try to understand what I was thinking. At that time in my life, I had fallen so deeply in love with science fiction books that when I read one, I became lost in its world and couldn’t let it go. Robert Heinlein’s “Tunnels in the Sky” had seduced me into joining a band of explorers stranded on a remote planet, facing the dangers of the mysterious stobors and that was preferable to being in an English class. When Disharoon snatched my book he ripped me away from that world. I felt violated. I see his face, ordinarily pale, now flushed under snow white hair. In addition to being disgusted with myself, I realize I was angry with him.

All these years, I’ve been focused on my belief that he didn’t like me, but now I recognize my own feelings of dislike. This realization shocks me. As a “good boy” I took great pride in my obedience to teachers. They were the gods of my world, and in order to succeed, I needed to serve them, even worship them when possible. Now as I hear his bass voice and his exaggerated elocution as if he was some kind of damned radio announcer, he seems full of himself. Pompous. What did he know? Screw him and his damned rules. I was such an obedient robot-like teen, this memory stands out as the only example of defiance from those years. That’s kind of cool! I had guts in a nerdy sort of way.

All of these lessons about myself come from the simple act of trying to tell a proper story. When I tried writing it in the form it has always presented itself in my mind, it didn’t sound right. To turn it into a readable story I had to strip away the layers of self-righteousness and expose the actual events. In the process, I feel lighter. I’ve released my load of blame and I learned more about the events that shaped me.

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Writing Prompt: Select a memory in which you felt hurt or wronged. (Be sure it’s a safe one. Don’t jump into a memory unless you are ready.) Step back from your own feelings, and especially from your sense of outrage, and describe the situation the way an observer would who was not partial to either party.

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Note: The book I was reading in high school was Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky about a group of young people who were exploring the universe through “tunnels” or “wormholes.” The warning they were given to beware of the “Stobors” turned out to be a meta-warning, which really meant “Beware of some unknown danger which you don’t know about now but it’s out there.” “Beware of the stobors” has become one of those classic Robert Heinlein phrases that has passed down through generations of his readers.

by Jerry Waxler

(Listen to the podcast using the player control at the bottom of this post or download it with iTunes.)

While searching the internet for my own last name, I found an article by a Caroline Waxler, about a television show “Mad Men” that shows office workers in the sixties. Caroline, who happens to be my niece, knew abstractly that women had come a long way but didn’t comprehend how far. Could it have really been that bad just a few decades ago? To find out she asked her mother. The discussion not only gave her deeper insight into the history of feminism. It also provided mother and daughter an opportunity to share their stories.

The article was interesting to me, not only because Caroline is on the web. She’s always up to something. Her latest adventure is launching the website mainstreet.com, which manages to combine the seemingly unrelated world of celebrities and personal finance. The more interesting aspect of the article for me was that it challenged one of my basic assumptions about the transmission of human knowledge. Until I read the article, I assumed Caroline would have known exactly what life was like in the sixties. I had some vague notion that the information would ooze over to her through the media, discussions with older people, and her extensive education and reading. Now that I’ve thought it through more clearly, I recognize my folly. By the time she entered the business world, the behavior that shocked her on “Mad Men” was no longer just obsolete. It was illegal. Most of the upheaval took place before Caroline was born and was over by the time she was a little girl.

As I thought about Caroline’s revelation that times have changed, I had a revelation of my own. Many powerful culture trends are obscure only a generation later. This simple observation offers me a new way to look at my past. Instead of seeing events through my own eyes, I gain fresh perspective by seeing my world from the point of view of a younger person who didn’t know my world. I brainstormed this notion and turned up a few scenes that I can add to my stack of vignettes.

• After a day at my all-boys high school, I took the subway to work at my father’s neighborhood drugstore in North Philadelphia. Family-owned drugstores and all-boys public high schools are nearly extinct.
• Occasionally I took the subway by myself into center city, and sat in the balcony of the Philadelphia Academy of Music to hear orchestra rehearsals, or went to the listening room of the main branch of the Public Library to hear classical music on scratchy 78 RPM records.
• On summer evenings, before we had air conditioners, our family sat on the patio of our row home and talked to the neighbors. One summer, when my brother Ed was home from college, we sat out on the porch and played chess every day. He was a nerd, too.
• While waiting for dinner I sprawled on the living room floor, reading the comic section of the newspaper. Our television was in the basement, which is also where Ed assembled a high fidelity amplifier he was going to take with him to his college dorm. I helped him by following the diagram and soldering transistors.
• I was a freshman in college when I first heard the word “marijuana.” I had no idea what it meant, and didn’t even know the concept of recreational drugs.

As I look back through my life, I realize that culture is not a steady thing. The world around me has changed in small ways that gradually accumulate. Only when I look across a few decades do I see how the small changes added up to profound differences. A memoir is a perfect place to highlight these changes, explore them, turn them into stories, and share them with others. By striving to explain these differences more clearly, I can add depth that will help people learn about the past, while sharing the authentic world in which I lived.

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Writing Prompt
In the period of your memoir, what lifestyle “givens” that seem so obvious inside one period might seem foreign to people a generation later?

Writing Prompt
Remember a situation when you were telling a younger person about your life and you realized that they didn’t know what you were talking about. Fundamental differences are hard to explain, which makes them excellent writing exercises. Take such a situation, slow it down, and write it in richer detail that will provide some of the background that will make it more understandable to someone who wasn’t there.

Note: Some people could accuse me of narcissism for looking at the internet for my name, like looking in the mirror too long. Others call it smart marketing. I have written an essay on the question of whether a memoir is narcissistic. I still need to write one about the blurry line between narcissism and self-marketing.

Note: Here’s Caroline Waxler’s article if you want to read her thoughts and her mom’s response.

Note: I’m reading a remarkably simple and powerful memoir, Colored People: A Memoir by Henry Louis Gates Jr. about growing up in the fifties in West Virginia. He wrote it for his kids, who didn’t know his world. And I get to watch, and share his observations, learning about a slice of life I did not see for myself.

by Jerry Waxler

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When I was 12 years old, I used to sneak out by myself and set fire to autumn leaves. The excitement of the flames blinded me to the danger. Fortunately I never did any damage and was never caught, but now I look back on my actions with horror. I hate the way these memories make me feel, and generally avoid talking about things that make me sound like a criminal. As I work on my memoir, such memories confuse me. Should I include them or leave them out?

Of course I could pretend they never happened. But that solution perpetuates a problem I’ve been trying to overcome since I was a child. I used to believe that people weren’t supposed to have emotions, and I did my best to pretend I had none. The earliest example of this belief comes from seventh grade. I was scandalized when my fellow classmates burst into laughter over some sexual innuendo. How childish! To distance myself from humiliating feelings, I spent my teenage years doing homework or working at my dad’s drugstore. When I wanted a break, I read science fiction novels. This tendency to separate myself from emotions made me seem distant and aloof. I was in a sort of self-imposed exile from the human condition. It took years to break through my own walls.

Gradually with the help of therapy, a graduate program in counseling, and the support of compassionate friends, I learned that emotions are as necessary for a satisfying life as eating. I knew I was making progress when, in my fifties, I walked into the office at Villanova University’s graduate program in counseling psychology. Two of my tenured professors were experimenting with a remote controlled whoopee cushion. They roared with laughter every time the device let loose a simulated fart. I laughed along with them, perhaps not with their childlike glee, but at least I wasn’t horrified, the way I would have been when I was 12.

Now that I’m writing my memoir, I wrestle with every detail that was illegal, immoral, or embarrassing. It all seems so private, and yet it’s all part of my life. How do I decide? To do this right, I remember that the end product of my disclosure is not an encyclopedia. It’s a story. When Michelangelo was sculpting David, he started with a block of granite, and tossed away the rubble to expose the beauty hidden within. By writing a memoir I must discover the real me in a pleasing form.

I dredge through memories, not certain yet what to put in. At this stage, I’m just looking for the raw material. The most dramatic period was during my college years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the Vietnam War protests. My adult years are less colorful. I reminisce about my visit to the Great Pyramids on my 30th birthday, and then feel the frustration on my 31st birthday when my boss ordered me to help clean out the septic system.

I slip again into the turmoil of my adolescent years, and as I muse I notice a powerful connection. Around the same time I was in junior high school glowering at classmates for laughing at sexual references, I was sneaking out at night on secret missions to start fires. Wow. Freud claimed that if repressed emotions don’t come out one way they’ll come out another. My adolescence would have made a terrific demonstration of his point.

That’s interesting but must I write it in a memoir for all to see? My childhood preference tells me to skip the whole mess. But to sanitize my story means overriding decades of effort to break out of this shell. Without edgy moments, my memoir will be about a boring person. If I include them, I will be able to show the tension between what is and what can be. By acknowledging the messiness of the journey, I not only make myself appear more human. I discover some of the most exhilarating aspects of my experience. My imperfections are exactly what forced me to grow. Over the years I’ve been weak, confused, afraid. And it’s okay! That’s what drives me to become stronger, more accepting, smarter, and braver.

By releasing myself from my habit of secrecy, I learn about my own human nature, and can apply my learning to understand others. For example, my teenage misadventures help me appreciate the complexity of that period for other people as well. It turns out that sharing the authentic story can also forge intimate connections between people. When readers and writers share tales, we connect sublime parts of ourselves: our desire to learn, grow, love, and be loved.

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By Jerry Waxler

When I explore my memories of adolescence, one of two things happens. Either I draw a blank or I land on a random bit of my past that contributes little to my memoir. Darn that mind. Why can’t I just sit down and develop the story of me? To move past this impasse and extract relevant information from the confusing cloud of memories, I rely on a series of writing prompts.

Writing Prompt 1: To learn about a scene, pick a detail and stretch
I want to remember high school which is hard for me because that whole period is foggy. I’ve found that if I have one fact, I can start from there and extend my memory from one fact to the next. So I stir the pot and a single image floats by - home room, where a teacher took attendance, made announcements, and then sent us on our way. I remember nothing. Then I see one person. I sat next to a guy named Wanenchak. But I don’t remember anything about him. Well, I do remember a little. He was trim, had light hair, and was a nice guy. Bit by bit, one fact leads to another, putting words and descriptions on hazy times. Wanenchak was Greek Orthodox. I didn’t know what that meant so I asked him. That’s one more fact about him, and it also divulges an interesting fact about me. I was terribly withdrawn, so the fact that I remember his religion tells me that despite my lack of attention to fellow classmates, I was interested in this dimension. While the exercise has not yet burst open the doors to an unforgettable scene, it did yield some raw material I didn’t have when I started.

Writing prompt 2: List key events, transitions, and influences
Even though high school feels vague, if I step back and scan those four years, highlights emerge from the haze. These noteworthy facts don’t in themselves tell a story, but they add to my understanding and perhaps will provide valuable raw material. Here’s a list I developed by looking for major events.

• Influential teachers: Mr. Warshaw, my ninth grade math teacher started me on a path of love for math, and Mr. Hofkin, the science teacher in my senior year, established my curiosity about physics.
• Sports: I never played any ball sports, but since I was an incessant walker, I hoped I could survive the rigors of track. I was wrong. A few weeks of waking up before dawn to train for track and field I had to drop out with excruciating shin splints.
• My failure to stick with the English honors program: Despite my passion for reading, I never really understood what English teachers were trying to get me to do, so while I remained in the math and science honors class I was excluded from English. This always made me feel like an outsider.
• Crash! I went on two dates in four years. One of my two dates ended in a car crash when I was so distracted I ran a red light.

Writing Prompt 3: To find the framework, look for desire
To create a story worth reading, I’m going to need emotions. I can’t write about romance. I didn’t have any. It was an all-boys high school and I worked every weekend at my dad’s drugstore. Where else can I look for drama? I ask myself, “What did I want?” and in answer, I see my two friends, Joe and Ed. I desperately wanted to be accepted by these guys. So I try to find scenes that represent my desire.

Joe was a strikingly handsome soccer player, and second in our all academic school. His dad was a steelworker, and the large family lived in a small row home, three kids to a room. One day in the lunch room, without provocation or warning, Joe threw a glass of chocolate milk on my clean white shirt. Standing there feeling defiled, with the brown liquid soaking into my chest, I searched his face for some clue that might explain why he had done it. Instead of apologizing, he seemed amused and curious, as if he was studying my response.

In another scene, I was in my kitchen at home talking to my friend Ed on the phone. We all lived pretty far away from each other because Central High in Philadelphia was a citywide school, and kids commuted there from all over the city. Ed was a Jewish intellectual who was becoming increasingly committed to his religion. He had asked me what I believed in, and I didn’t offer a clear enough answer. He told me I was worthless because I don’t believe in something enough to die for it. I started to cry.

These scenes are more than interesting moments. They build the framework of a story about three 16 year old boys trying to use their developing intellect to understand the morality of life. I’m ahead of Joe. At least I don’t need to experiment to find out what it feels like to hurt a friend. But I’m not yet up to Ed. Even though his delivery is cruel, he’s right. I haven’t yet figured out what I believe.

***

Out my hazy memories of high school I unearth more and more raw material, and begin to see a structure. This is the power of writing prompts. They stimulate thoughts along a particular line, and shake loose a variety of memories and ideas I didn’t even realize were in there. I brainstorm at the detail level to describe characters and settings. I brainstorm highlights, the main events that provide substance. And to find the emotion that propels me through those events I look for desire. Gradually I begin to gather the pieces of a compelling story.

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By Jerry Waxler

Look at the sky. Then look again. Nothing changed, and yet everything changed. Ticks of the clock add up and after enough of them, the earth turns again. Day by day, you brush your teeth, wash dishes, watch the news. As the days gather into years, kids grow, you learn skills, achieve goals, and your character evolves. To discover the richness of detail within these moments, look back at the landscape as the years rolled by. To bring the features into focus, ask questions.

For example, I ask myself, “How did creativity enter my life?” On my computer file, I list the decades and then peer into my life journey by answering this question for each decade.

Age: 0-19
I sewed costumes in cub scouts for a dress up performance. Sometimes we dressed up as Indians but this time we were Robin Hood’s Merry Men. I still can sew the saddle stitch.

In junior high, I assembled models of warships. In the fifties, the armaments of World War II were an important part of my fantasy life. I wished I had the knack to paint the trim more realistically, but didn’t feel confident about my color sense. (Ah-ha! An old regret lurking in an innocent childhood activity.)

In high school biology, our teacher showed us how to embed objects in clear, solid acrylic. I ordered the kit and went to work like an aspiring chemist, pouring half the concoction into a mold, and letting it harden. Then I placed a shiny penny on top and poured in the rest of the goo. My bedroom reeked but I didn’t mind. I was creating!

Age: 20-29
In college I was a dancing maniac. I practiced moves in my room in front of the mirror, and then showed them off at parties. It felt like magic. As the music flowed through my body I converted it into motion. I also loved to sit and listen. I felt lifted by The Beatles, Joan Baez, John Coltrane. Classical music sent me to the stars, from Beethoven’s symphonies, to Bach’s choirs. I drank in operas, quartets, and soloists. Many of my friends in college were jazz musicians. I know spectating is different than creating, but my appreciation for other people’s music touches such a deep chord I consider it to be part of my own relationship with creativity.

Age: 30-39
Two decades after I wanted to paint those model battleship, I finally tried my hand at painting, in oils and acrylics on canvas. I had never learned to artistically represent objects, so I stuck with abstractions. My passion was exploring the colors on the palette and on the canvas. That encounter with painting amplified my understanding of color by a hundred fold. I still have the paintings, and I love them.

My computer programming jobs involved graphics and images. I instructed the computer to create and analyze pictures one pixel at a time. I wasn’t an artist, but my work brought me inside the technology of images. And the actual coding was a creative challenge in its own right.

I took singing lessons, first in a little neighborhood music school, and then at my voice teacher’s home. I knew from her compulsive yawning how bored she was with me. She was a frustrated opera singer, and my puny attempts must have seemed so insignificant in comparison. But she gave me enough confidence and skill to join my first choir, where I’ve been singing ever since.

Age: 50 and beyond
Many music teachers thought if you didn’t know a musical instrument by the time you were five years old, it was too late. Fortunately in the 1990’s scientists discovered that neurons can grow at any age. So I started taking piano lessons. Unlike my singing teacher, my piano teacher was interested in my adult learning. I could see in her eyes an admiration for my growing neurons.

I started to write a memoir, a process which is teaching me how writing can organize life. And the best teaching tools I can find are the stories everyone else tells. Using the lessons I learn from all other writers, I create my own story. Culture begets culture. I joined writing classes, and gathered together decades of miscellaneous writing experience into a form that will let me share my life with strangers.

Writing Prompt
On a sheet of paper or computer file list the decades of your life. Then write notes about how creativity entered your life during that period. Brainstorm connections with the arts, crafts, music, hobbies, activities with kids, or the creativity you expressed in your career.

This writing prompt reveals a broad overview. After you’ve gone through the list a few times, you may find entry points into specific scenes. For example, I could write the scene of standing at the piano next to my voice teacher, then another one in my car singing scales along with my audio taped lesson on my way to work. The scenes of creativity could be sprinkled throughout other events in my life to offer readers a connection with my inner world. Just as important as looking back, I see the tenacious place creativity has held in my life and look forward to decades of satisfaction ahead.