Memory Writers Network

By Jerry Waxler

I asked horror writer Jonathan Maberry why the characters in his Bram Stoker award winning supernatural thriller Ghost Road Blues, are so vivid, so horrible, and strong. He said because they were based on his experience. As he grew up, he struggled to overcome the helplessness and brutality of his abusive father. Then, even after the external abuse stopped, he still had to face the demons that had already become part of his memory.

Maberry’s frankness took me inside this battle waged in real life. To become a fully empowered human being he had to overcome the darkness implanted by his abusive father. He first assaulted evil through the advanced study of martial arts. He achieved black belt after black, and then as a world class martial artist, he began to teach self-defense, and helped kids and women deal with bullying. He has made a lifetime career not only of conquering the evil in his own life but helping others conquer it in theirs. His ultimate platform is of course writing. Through writing he can share the insides of this battle, and hundreds of thousands can see it for themselves and learn from it. Maberry’s personal struggle against the memories of a father bent on destroying the dignity of a small child is embedded in his novel, Ghost Road Blues.

Based on this interview I came to see horror writing with fresh eyes. Previously I thought horror stories were simply abstract battles with ghouls and vampires, in a senseless appeal to the darker side of human nature. Such an appeal had no interest for me. After speaking with Maberry, I realized horror is not some abstract force. Horror reaches into the roots of the human psyche, because for many people, that’s where it has been planted. Children look up to their parents as gods, and when those gods betray them, their budding personalities become clouded by the darkness of horror like some sort of demonic plot to hurt people from inside their own mind. From then on, the battle becomes an interior one.

After our talk, I realize for many people horror fiction is the battleground where good and evil can duke it out. And the reason they need to think about it in this symbolic way is because it is so difficult to talk about in terms of the actual memories. Even the recipients of such abuse bury their memories, afraid to remember at all, or afraid to hurt the perpetrator, or afraid to make themselves look like victims, or ashamed of having provoked it or given in to it. Abuse perpetrated against children defies our sense of fair play so profoundly, the only people who talk about it are politicians who defend us against the bogeymen who prowl our neighborhoods and prey on our children, predators so demonized they are not too dissimilar from the ghouls and werewolves of horror stories. See Maberry’s book, Cryptopedia, another Bram Stoker award winner, written with co-auther David Kramer, for an encyclopedic discussion of other creatures that fascinate and horrify us.

But child abuse perpetrated by someone who knows the child has been protected by a collective bargain with the devil. We keep it hidden so it can continue behind closed doors. Now that bargain seems to be breaking down. I believe that Maberry’s story hints at one of the first great sea changes of the twenty first century. In the internet age, people are speaking more openly in memoirs and blogs, and in this exposure to the vast variety of human experience, domestic child abuse is emerging as worthy of our collective discussion and consideration. We no longer need to couch it in terms of vampires and ghouls. We can uncover it in the very real struggle of ordinary people right here on earth, and finally begin to shed light into these darker places of human experience.

In part two of this article, I’ll review one of the best memoirs I’ve read, Ten Points by Bill Strickland in which, like Maberry, the author offers hope that while abuse is possible in real life, so is redemption.

by Jerry Waxler

When you cut your skin, you bleed, and if you don’t clean it, infection sets in. Human beings also have another type of skin, made not of flesh but of stories. This skin provides a sense of purpose, of safety, of place in the world. When it’s healthy it is resilient enough to shrug off an annoyance, or a small setback. But the slings and arrows of fortune occasionally break through this skin and then it no longer protects us. In our vulnerable state we must continue to live and make decisions designed to seal up the hole, to protect us from the insult ever happening again. The decisions we make in this state often affect us far longer than the original injury itself. Like broken flesh that develops a life threatening infection, a damaged story can be dangerous.

Take for example the crashing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. We watched in horror as our story of safety was penetrated, and then through that gaping wound poured two full fledged military invasions, and subsequently many more dead bodies and torn lives.

While that incident shows how the minds of millions of people can be damaged, we each have individual stories, and these can be damaged, too. Violence is the bluntest way, but there are others. A lover or business partner cheats, and the world becomes dark, no longer worth living in. Betrayal doesn’t even require another person. You can betray yourself. When addicts start wrecking their lives, they cling for dear life to the story that everything is fine. But at some point, the realization crashes in that they are letting themselves down. “I’m a rotten person” creates a dangerous hole in their story.

During this wounded period your decisions are not made in the clearest frame of reference. The urgent need to patch up the hole, might lead you to choices whose consequences continue to resonate years later. The cry for deliverance often rips people up more than the initial event. The jilted lover, the avenging family, the self-imploding addict, the litigious spouse, the almost athlete or artist, create even more wounds in the name of setting the story straight.

Despite this messy process, eventually we do stand up, ready to move on. And then, when we are calmer and wiser we can regain some of the ground we lost during the throes of pain. Look past at the initial pain, and from the place of safety you feel right now, approach this as a valuable opportunity for review and deeper understanding. How did you regain your sense of self? What decisions did you make, and how did they affect you later? By reviewing the decisions and actions you made during trauma, you can learn about yourself, reduce the pain and backwards suction of those memories, make amends, and find new and higher ground.

When you come upon traumatic moments in your own story, you will probably realize that you have not applied much retrospective wisdom to that time in your life, having naturally fallen into a longstanding habit of pretending it never happened. And this is one of the vast, profound, unsung benefits of writing about your life. By organizing your thoughts and putting them in order, you regain control and understanding over your own story. It’s one of my favorite things about memoir work. The best repair for a damaged story is to tell stories.

However, there are many challenges in retelling the story of old wounds. Foremost is breaking the pact of forgetfulness you had made with yourself. Remembering might feel dangerous. In my next blog, I’ll tell about a trauma I experienced, and how revisiting it has helped me revise and heal my original view.

by Jerry Waxler

After listening to the audio version of Alice Sebold’s memoir, “Lucky,” I’m exhausted. She does a spectacular job of bringing me right into her experience, starting from the details of the attack, the numbing and disorienting results of the trauma, the eventual identification of the perpetrator, a detailed, harrowing account of the trial, and along the way, I felt disturbed. If I didn’t know it already, I am now convinced rape is a form of torture every bit as real as the horrors of war.

And it happens without the military ceremonies, the awards of valor, the training, weapons, or body armor. A college girl innocently walks to her dorm, and two hours later, she’s a prisoner of post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma does not sit comfortably in the mind, so when we’re not in it we try to forget it. And yet, whether we want to think about it or not, it’s real and it’s awful. By sharing her experience, Sebold reminds us of its reality.

So what would make such a book worth reading? Like any story of another human being, such an authentic, well-crafted tale might be your best chance to see life from that other side. If you know anyone who has suffered this trauma, ever expect to be strong enough to help such a person, or want to switch the word rape from an abstract news item to a deeper understanding of the human condition, this book will do it for you. And while the focus is on her own rape-induced PTSD, late in the book, she realizes that war ravaged veterans suffer from many of the same psychological problems as rape victims.

When looking through this book for lessons about your own memoir, take into account that this is the culmination of decades of self-examination, teaching, and writing. Despite all of the power Sebold brings to the project, or perhaps because of it, her writing is exquisitely simple and accessible. Not once in the whole book, not a single sentence, does she pull away into her own world and leave me out of it. She never hides behind fancy, or even pretty words. Through all that training she has learned to be simple and direct. She tells the story. I am so impressed by the simplicity and rawness of her telling, and think it offers a valuable example for any writer.

If you have ever suffered a violent trauma, and you have never been sure how to write about it, or if you feel it’s too raw to put in a memoir, “Lucky” can perhaps offer some insights. Not only is the storytelling simple. It’s also open. I recently interviewed horror writer Jonathan Maberry, author of Bram Stoker award winning novel “Ghost Road Blues.” He explained that the emotional basis for his horror writing is his own actual memory of violent physical abuse. By sharing his real emotions, he injects his writing with the real power of life. He used the word “authentic” and I think it’s a quality that readers have a sixth sense about. If a writer shares real emotion, we feel it.

It is this sixth sense for authenticity that pulls me in so deeply to Sebold’s Lucky. If you can find the authenticity of your own experience, and harness it into a story, you will not only capture your reader, but will also capture the essence of your experience. It’s this combination of real shared experience, real to you and shared in an authentic way with the reader that makes memoirs so exciting, a window into our individual universes.

When our experiences are so raw, our initial attempts to describe them usually spill out in an unpleasant, disorganized way. We say the same things over and over. We hide. We don’t have words to describe our complex feelings. The trauma breaks down all the sense that has come before, and even turns sense upside down. How can you describe a life that itself no longer feels safe or reasonable. After violent trauma, victims feel isolated inside this strange senseless world. As they try to regain order, they want to reconnect with people. Humans live together in a shared experience. We like to believe our world has the same rules that other people have. In fact, one definition of insanity is that you think your world works differently than everyone else’s.

So to regain sanity, trauma victims try to convince other people that their story makes sense. But how? The people they are trying to tell also feel disturbed by the trauma and shrink away from hearing it. Perhaps the only way to find that connection with others is through writing. People accept terrible things in movies and books. Writing seems to bypass our natural abhorrence, and we can let in some of the horror. It bridges the gap between trauma and normalcy.
Sebold has spent much of her life processing on her attack, starting with her first rage filled poem about the rape shortly after the event. She has taken years to turn the emotional upheaval and horror into a story that is readable by others. And finally, by creating this story, she is able to share it with others who have suffered, or those who give care to sufferers, or anyone looking to understand the dark side of human experience in a way that allows them to hang on to their hope.

While writing doesn’t convert horror into amiable pleasantries, it does transform it into something that makes a sort of sense. In fact, much of life is an accumulation of stories, and we turn to these stories to find sense. Look at the very core of religion, much of which is communicated in stories. And we try to make sense about all kinds of things by telling stories. Writing breaks down the walls that isolate you from others and it also breaks down the walls that separate you from your own experience. So by telling your story, even about something that makes no sense, in a way the story itself makes it feel more organized, more like it fits in with the way the world works. Look to the storytelling to incorporate these events into your life and keep going.

While I, and most of the world, saw the 9/11 disaster on television, Artie Van Why saw it standing on the street outside the World Trade Center where the day before he had eaten lunch, and watched people laughing in the noonday sun. The shattering of 9/11 was a national, or international trauma. For Van Why, it was much more personal, immersed as he was in the smoke, the screams, the blood, and seeing almost within reach, the sky raining people who had jumped out of their windows.

The world was smashed apart that day, and while seeing it on television filled me with horror, oddly, meeting Van Why gave me hope. By telling his story, I believe he has started to rebuild his life. After the great Yellowstone Fire in 1988 that devastated hundreds of thousands of acres, news photos the following year showed spring flowers emerging from the charcoal black landscape. In a similar vein, I see Van Why’s book, “That day in September, a personal remembrance of 9/11″ as a flower emerging from the rubble. While his book is an attempt to describe and make sense of the past, the result is an understanding that will carry him, and us into the present and the future. See my previous post on meeting Van Why.

The problem with trauma is that it shatters our story of the world. We don’t want to live in a world in which people fly planes into buildings, or stand up in front of a group of passengers and slit a stewardess’ throat so they can go to paradise. It’s too crazy, and the world breaks apart.

We need a sensible story in order to live sensibly, and when that story shatters, we feel broken. One way we can regain a sense of poise is to regain the story. I’m not saying it’s easy or a sure thing, but I believe that memoir writing is one of the important tools that can help people return from trauma.

While this is my belief about the healing properties of storytelling, I intend to gather more instances to show how this process has worked for real people. In interviews, workshops, and reading, I will look for people who have used story to heal from pain and regain their balance. Passing along the healing value of story is my contribution to the world, as we strive together towards hope.

Naomi Gal’s novel, Daphne’s Seasons, is about an Israeli woman who loses her husband in a suicide bomb attack. She moves to rural Pennsylvania where grief plays out against the protagonist’s first experience of four seasons. Daphne’s Seasons is Gal’s 16th book, and the 5th novel. This is the first one available in English. Gal is a Creative Writing professor at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.

JW: Could you tell me about how your life experience as an Israeli informed your novel, Daphne’s Seasons?

NG: The first part of the book is immersed in pain. Having lived most of my life in Israel, I know about pain. I have seen time and again parents bury their children who paid with their lives for the ongoing war. Since Israel is a small country, there is one - sometimes zero - degrees of separation. So pain was always close and I could express it in my novel.

JW: Give me an example of a scene in the book that reflected your own life.

NG: My favorite chapter in the book really happened to me. Very much like Daphne, I was sipping my morning espresso at my window seat gazing at the green lush meadow, counting my blessings. Then, at leisure I went up to my computer and the news was screaming at me from the screen: there was a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and all the beauty around me disappeared, I was back on the traumatic scene of death, carnage, destruction, agony and pain. In the novel, Daphne lost her husband in a pretty much similar kind of blast, and she, like me, realizes that no matter how far away you run, and how glorious nature is, you cannot escape the horror of terror.

JW: How did it feel to write about that pain?

NG: When I started writing Daphne’s Seasons (my own title for it was Changing Seasons) my life was better than Daphne’s. But when she was recuperating, my life was falling apart so I went back to review the parts of my manuscript that described pain, and added, and added. It was so strange that it was almost funny, the way life was imitating fiction.

JW: Did this writing about Daphne help you deal with the pain of your memories?

NG: I did feel catharsis. Writing is an amazing way to let go of pent up feelings and turn suffering into a story. Weaving my threads of agony freed me in a way only art can.

JW: How does your real-life move to Pennsylvania enter into the experience of your fictional character?

NG: She moves to rural PA and slowly starts a process of healing with the generous help of lush mother nature. Daphne, very much like me, is a daughter of the desert. Israel is an arid country and except summer there aren’t really other seasons. So I could easily write about the solace Mother Nature bestows on Daphne.

JW: That’s funny. I grew up in Pennsylvania and I know a lot of people who want to move away get away from the seasons. Your perspective might help them come to peace with being here.

NG: Yes, seasons were an amazing revelation for me. Their healing power was good to me as it is to Daphne. I am still awed by the lush flowers of spring, by the unpredictability of summer, by the changing colors of fall leaves and by the serenity of snow in winter. Nature allows you to feel deeply the change of seasons in your own life cycle, it gives one hope since there is a constant renewal and change.

JW: What else can you share about how you have used your life experience in your fiction writing?
NG: All my fiction is based on memory one way or another. I am thinking back to all my novels, even the unpublished ones I wrote in my teens and twenties. It is always about me, even when it looks different. Daphne, as Nora, the protagonist of Soap Opera, my first novel, written in Hebrew. These were “un-liberated” women who go through transformation thanks to dramatic events in their lives. I guess my life was always a quest for freedom mainly as a woman. Fiction allowed me more dramatic changes, my life was more of an evolution than a revolution. Daphne’s husband has to die tragically so that she can grow out of the shadow he cast over her, and the same goes for Nora, in Soap Opera, who is confined to a hospital bed after a car accident and can at long last look at her life from the outside. I guess fiction is a condensed form of memoir, a more dramatic one. You can skip lots of mundane details.

JW: So if someone was wondering if it’s okay to weave their life experience in their fiction writing, what would you tell them?

NG: When Gustav Flaubert, who was very different from his protagonist Madam Bovary was asked how could he write with so much credibility and accuracy about a woman so different from him in every respect he allegedly said: “Madam Bovary is me.” So yes, I believe we always write about ourselves, even when our characters seem different. We can only rely on our experiences and system of beliefs no matter how and what we write. Everything we write is a memoir to some extent. At times a wishful one. All my protagonists have daughters. I have sons but always wanted a daughter. Daphne, as well as Dea, the heroine of my novel Lovend are accomplished pianists. I love music but I can’t play.

Virginia Woolf in “Room of one’s Own” cites a passage from the novel “Jane Eyre.” Woolf complains that Charlotte Bronte is talking for herself and not for her character, but I really can’t see the difference.

JW: Have you thought about writing a memoir?

NG: I prefer fiction to memoir because fiction allows me to better hide. Many years ago I had a personal column (this was before internet and blogs) and every week I would write about personal matters, and then all of a sudden I couldn’t do it any more. I needed privacy, so I started hiding behind characters in novels. That way I could improve, change and give free rein to my imagination. I love inventing. I can embellish and ameliorate reality.

JW: As a writer and a writing teacher, what other advice would you like to pass along to people who are thinking about writing their memoir?

NG: Everyone has a story is what I say when I teach creative writing and every story is worth writing and reading. I wish my parents, my grandparents and my great great grandparents would have written their memoir, but they didn’t and they are all dead and there is no one to ask the many questions I would love to ask. So write, write, write. Don’t discriminate. Just write as much as you can, editing will come later. Go back into your past and start with memories that are vivid, you will find out that as you write less vivid memories will surface and find their way to the paper (or computer). There are techniques to overcome your fear of writing or what I call your ISJ (Interior Supreme Judge) who sits there criticizing and prevents you from writing. Learn to tame her (or him) and one of the ways to trick your ISJ is with automated writing, early in the morning, before ISJ wakes up or late at night when she is tired. Write even if you don’t like what you are writing. Later you will be able to discern the good from the bad. For now, just write. You can record your voice if you are computer shy, but writing your memoir is a great opportunity to befriend this practical contraption.

 by Jerry Waxler

I went to a book fair in Philadelphia yesterday, hoping to find a few memoirists. The book fair was held on the sidewalk surrounding the Philadelphia Free Library on the Parkway, a few blocks away from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (made famous by Rocky Balboa). Driving into the city yesterday down Kelly Drive, I passed Boat House Row, and saw the sculling crews on the Schuylkill River. It was the first sunny day in weeks, and the joggers and walkers were out in force. I parked at the Art Museum and walked down the Parkway past the Rodin Museum, and the Franklin Institute (founded in 1824 as the first professional engineering institute in the US), towards William Penn’s statue on top of Philadelphia’s City Hall brought back memories from High School when I used to take the subway down to the Library to learn about classical music. They had a room full of phonograph players and a catalog of music, and you could go to the librarian and ask for any record you wanted, and she handed you the vinyl record, and you walked to the record player, put on the headphones and dropped the needle into the groove. Wagner and Beethoven were my two favorites. Another time my grandfather asked me to get a book of poetry by the poet Mikhail Lermentov. It was printed in Cyrillic. As a young man, the Parkway offered a wellspring from which I could drink the finest culture, in science, art, music, and literature.

And here I was again, decades later, looking to drink in the culture offered by these books and book people. There were book sellers and publishers, and a few authors. One of them had written a memoir, “That day in September, a personal remembrance of 9/11″ by Artie Van Why. He had been working across the street from the Twin Towers on that day. I spoke with him for a while and asked him how things were going. While I stood chatting several walked over, picked up the book and bought it, looking to share his experiences of that tragic day. I swapped with Artie, giving him a copy of my book “Learn to Write your Memoir” for a copy of his, and when I got home I started to read it. It’s only 84 pages long, and I read half of it in one sitting, my eyes growing wet as his first person account awakened memories in me. When I’m finished I intend to ask Van Why more about how writing the book changed his life. One thing about his memoir writing experience I didn’t need to ask. I could see for myself what efforts he was going through to sell his book. He had rented a booth at the Bookfest, come in from out of town and stayed over night at a hotel in Philadelphia. Certainly selling a few copies of his book was not going to earn him great financial rewards. Like any story teller, he was there to share his story, and to share it, he needed to reach out to readers.