Memory Writers Network

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.)

In 1998 a group of American veterans joined their former Vietnamese enemies on a bicycle ride from Hanoi to Saigon. They rode through villages and countryside, much of it unchanged since the war. The venture was documented in a recently released video, “Vietnam: Long Time Coming,” from Kartemquin Films. Villagers waved and children, who had been playing in the paddy fields, ran shouting and laughing towards the stream of brightly clad cyclists. These idyllic scenes highlighted the enormous shift in perspective between the past and the present.

Outside, in the world around them, the world seemed peaceful, while much of the real drama was taking place inside their minds, where memories boiled and occasionally erupted into tears. I empathized with the courage it must have taken to face the country where deep scars were burned into their psyche, and several times I cried along with them.

I first learned about this movie because of my interest in a memoir by one of the participants, George Brummell. In “Shades of Darkness,” George wrote about growing up black in the segregated south, coming of age in Korea, and being blinded by a land mine in Vietnam. Back in the states he learned how to navigate without sight, earned a college degree, and eventually became a director of the blinded veterans association. (Click here to read the essay I wrote about George Brummell’s book Shades of Darkness.)

George and the others who returned to Vietnam for this ride were reaching out towards a new relationship with this place where their lives had been changed forever. Through the documentary movie “The Long Time Coming” I was able to witness that experience and gain a deeper understanding of the psychological aftermath of war. This may seem like a highly specialized concern, but the pain spills out to family, friends, and the community. People are affected for decades when combat veterans feel that they have crossed over a chasm that can only be traversed in one direction, and once on the other side, they cannot find their way back. The existence of that pain in my fellow human beings stirs my desire to understand more.

The movie “Long Time Coming” illustrates that revisiting the past is one of the tools that can help heal in the present. Even though you can’t always return to the scene physically, you can create some of the same effects by writing. Visiting the past through writing can enable you not only to recreate the situation, but also to apply to those memories some of the wisdom you have gained in the intervening years. In some cases, building bridges backwards through time can create a pathway from pain back into hope.

While the most obvious healing strategy of the movie was simply revisiting the scene, there were other strategies being employed. One of the American veterans was a psychologist who conducted meetings and spoke individually with the American vets who were trying to cope with their emotional wounds. The discussions with each other and with a therapist helped them reorganize the thoughts and feelings awakened by this experience. And their connections, friendships, and warmth with former enemies soothed some of the war wounds, as well.

I’ve heard the claim that war is one of the greatest expressions of love, because soldiers must risk their lives for each other. The problem of course is that war requires a common enemy, and so it turns bloody and leaves lingering effects that are not loving at all. Team sports also have the ability to draw people together in a common goal, and that’s what the TEAM bicycle ride in Vietnam was about. These riders, instead of fighting against each other, were joining together to fight the common “enemy” – moving their bicycles towards Saigon. As their focus shifts from danger and betrayal to beauty and friendship, one of the American veterans says, “I feel like this happiness now, riding this bike in Vietnam, is pushing out some of the hatred that had been filling my cup.”

The camera followed bikers up a long mountain road in 100 degree heat. The hand cyclists struggled most because the arm levers did not provide the same mechanical advantage as the foot powered ones. As these slower riders reached the top, those who had already gathered there rushed forward to offer hugs and celebratory whoops. After this outpouring of affection, one of the Vietnamese hand cyclists said, his voice filled with excitement, “This is something both disabled and able bodied people dream of. This experience, though exhausting, is what gives meaning to life.”

He didn’t mean just climbing a mountain on a hot day in a bicycle built for someone without legs. He was surrounded by loving new friends, the honor of being part of a team, the rapprochement of former enemies reaching out to each other. It was a healing moment for him, and for me.

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Writing Prompt: Write about a time when working together towards a common goal made you feel closer to someone.

Writing Prompt: Select a memory that you have bad feelings about, and pretend you are writing fiction. Applying your wisdom and imagination, reorganize the events so that this character learns some powerful lesson, or accomplishes or triumphs in some way.

Note, links and resources
The ride was organized by a non-profit group called World TEAM Sports –http://www.worldteamsports.org/. The documentary was produced by another non-profit, Kartemquin Films, best known for the award winning documentary Hoop Dreams about inner city youth looking to basketball to elevate their prospects in life. You can help the organization by shopping at: http://www.kartemquin.com/

An excellent book for understanding more about PTSD is “Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character” by Jonathan Shay. Because of the profound effects of PTSD, neurologically and on the very foundation of character, many of the methods in psychology are not sufficient to unravel the damage wrought by combat. And yet, there is much research and compassionate work that has helped veterans suffering from PTSD. In addition to helping them cope with their specialized needs, I believe these therapies and strategies can help other people who suffer with an irreconcilable relationships with painful memories.

For an example of one person’s successful strategy to channel inner directed shame into bicycle racing read the moving memoir “Ten Points” by Bill Strickland. Another memoir in which a soldier seeks healing by revisiting the past is William Manchester’s “Goodbye Darkness.”

For more about revisiting the past, see my essay about the movie Pursuit of Happyness, which portrayed Chris Gardner’s life. For him, it was a return to the trauma and triumph of his youth.

To learn more about how two groups can join to become one by sharing a common task, see the famous sociology experiment by Muzafer Sherif et al (1954) The Robbers Cave experiment. For example, see the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzafer_Sherif

by Jerry Waxler

Dee Dee Phelps was a singing celebrity in the 60’s. Just out of high school, she joined Dick St. John to form the duo Dick and Dee Dee, had some chart-topping singles, and went on to national television, international tours, and singing with a few big name stars, and a lot of smaller ones. Forty plus years later, Dee Dee Phelps wrote a memoir about those times, “Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee Dee.”

While the book contains many celebrity scenes, on stage and hobnobbing with stars, she also shows me her life as a real person: what it was like for her as a young girl, surrounded by the hassles of the record business and how it felt working with her distant, at times emotionally abusive relationship with her singing partner Dick St. John who was intense and ambitious, and who thought of himself as both the brains and the talent of the duo. He treated her as an instrument of his own success. And she shares her long-term love with her emotionally unavailable manager Bill Lee.

Aspiring memoir writers wonder, as we dig back into our memories, how we could ever convincingly portray the dreams, the fears, or the passion of our past. It’s a daunting challenge. Dee Dee succeeded at this task. In her memoir Vinyl Highway I feel like I am back there with her, feeling her mix of awe at being involved with world famous people, exhaustion at being herded along from show to show, frustration with her business and singing partner, and so on.

She succeeds her task, not by telling me what she felt but showing me the scenes that made her feel that way. She crafts each scene to show the actions of the people around her, neither glamorizing nor complaining about them. While she describes her world, she understates her own emotions, allowing me to draw my own conclusions. This writing style is powerful, and follows a tradition developed by such masters of literary non-fiction as Tracy Kidder, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Sebold. In their memoirs they report emotionally complex situations, without beating me over the head with their emotional reactions. They make the reader do the emotional work. To learn how to write about emotions from your own life, take a closer look at how Dee Dee Phelps achieves this effect in Vinyl Highway.

[To explain more about Dee Dee's writing style I will be interviewing her in a future blog.]

As I admired Dee Dee’s page-turning style of storytelling, something bothered me. It wasn’t just her writing style that was sparse. She kept her feelings so under control it puzzled me. When her partner Dick was rude, I was thinking, “How can she put up with it?” And when her manager, with whom she was in love, sent her mixed signals, instead of asking for clarification, she kept silent. I felt like something must be burning under the surface, something almost tragic, as if she was a passenger in her own life.

Finally it dawned on me. She was staying silent because she was accurately reporting the true feelings of a “good girl” at a time when good girls were trained to be unassertive. Dee Dee was honestly portraying her state of mind, just watching the world without a sense of being able to change it much. It’s an interesting psychological study of a pre-feminist mentality. And I think Dee Dee’s insistence on an authentic style brings this out by letting me see it, rather than her telling me about it.

The way she portrayed her state of mind offers another lesson for memoir writers. To portray the most authentic picture of what life was like for you, stick as close as possible to reporting the thoughts and emotions you had during the original scene. Resist the temptation to retrofit your childhood experience with your adult understanding. Of course, you can see the situation more clearly now, through your adult eyes. But by inserting too much of today’s insight, you take the reader out of the scene, and into the present. This breaks their connection with the actual experience, and creates more distance between the reader and the book. To keep readers engaged, let them get into the scene the way it happened. You can report how you grew up in your next memoir.

Dee Dee’s memoir pulled me along with her. It was a different time, and she showed me a glimpse of what those times were like for her, which is exactly what memoirs are supposed to do. It was a wild ride, and you can share it in Dee Dee’s memoir, Vinyl Highway.

[In the second part of this review of Vinyl Highway, Singing with Dick and Dee, I will talk more about the overall structure, and Dee Dee's character arc through her journey, how she developed and grew.]

by Jerry Waxler

Sometimes a memory from days, months, or years ago will pop into the foreground. For a moment I’m back in the original experience, often from my childhood home, my dad’s drugstore, or walking around the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, where I went to college. Once I’m in the scene, I can look around to find more detail. In fact, this is a good trick to cultivate to gather material for writing memoirs. When I work with such memory glimpses in my memoir workshops, it almost always results in interesting, and often revealing moments in a person’s life.

Recently, I finished reading Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, about how her Down Syndrome baby changed her life. A few days later a scene from the book started playing in my mind. Martha is in a hospital examination room with her husband, waiting for a nurse. While they are waiting, her husband fools around with the equipment. Here’s a passage from the scene that jumped into my mind:

“This must be the ultrasound thing,” he said, picking up the metal detector. It had a plastic handle, which was attached to a flat metal disk. John held the disk to his ear, then rubbed it along his forearm. “Put that down,” I said. “You’re going to break it.” “No I’m not.” He poked the buttons on the keyboard.

It intrigues me that I remember a moment in Martha Beck’s life, a woman I’ve never met. Remembering a scene from another person’s life is a perfect example of why I read memoirs. I can now glimpse a bit of her world. But as a writer I want to know more, not just about her life but about how she told her story. I’ve been trying to “read like a writer” for years, and frankly, I have been failing miserably. Once I’m inside a fictional story, I enjoy suspending my disbelief, and don’t want to disturb it by figuring out how the author got me there. It’s different when I read memoirs. When I connect with a real person telling me about a real life, I seem to be able to keep my wits about me. This lets me absorb not only what they are telling me but how. By watching my own emotional response to the story, I am gaining deeper insight into the story teller’s knack. So what does Martha Beck’s scene in the hospital teach me about writing?

The first thing I notice is that the repartee is so relaxed it reduces the tension of being in a hospital. While John is putting Martha at ease, the scene is putting me at ease. The ordinariness of it makes it easy for me to be there with them.

Second, it gives me a glimpse of their relationship. In this one snippet, I learn that John uses humor to distract his wife from an awkward situation. He’s a nice guy.

Another function this interchange played was pacing. The episode takes place at a crucial moment. She’s about to have her amniocentesis, and since the book is about her baby’s genetic defect, the reader knows the medical procedure is important. But instead of jumping ahead to the test, she takes a small detour, slows down, and brings us into the room with her. It’s a classic technique of pacing, and something I should have known from years of reading fiction. But I didn’t really learn it until I saw it in a memoir.

Fourth, the scene shows her physical surroundings. A memoir isn’t just about introspection. By showing me the inside of a hospital, or a classroom, or a school psychological testing office, she shows me the places where her life happened.

Fifth, it shows me her uniqueness. Lots of people have prenatal tests. If she had rushed through it, Martha’s experience would have been just another one. By slowing down and describing personal details, I feel like I know what that moment was like for her in particular, rather than a person in general.

Sixth she is teaching me a technical fact. When John played with the ultrasound equipment, I started seeing it and even touching it. Once I became oriented to the machine, I gently and enjoyably learn a little about sonograms and amniocentesis. For example when the technician saw how the fetus was positioned, she marked an X on Martha’s abdomen at the spot where the needle could be safely inserted. I always wondered about that.

Now that I’ve learned these writing lessons, I can try using them to enrich a scene of my own. I might want to teach something to the reader, show the nuance of a relationship, and by adding this sort of detail, the reader can relate to me not as a general person but a unique person, telling a story that can only be told by me. In a story I submitted to Ronni Bennett’s story site, I dig through my memory for a scene that will help the story in some of these ways. If you’re interested in submitting stories, or reading reader-submitted stories check out this site.

by Jerry Waxler

I’m reading two books that take a teaching approach to memoir writing. Instead of focusing primarily on the life the author, they use the author’s personal experience to provide an in-depth look at a topic they learned about. The two books are “I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist’s Journal of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love“ by Doreen Orion, and “China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power” by Rob Gifford. If you are unsure how to turn your life experience into a great read, Orion’s and Gifford’s approach could expand your options.

In “I know you really love me,” Doreen Orion has written about her experience of having been stalked for years by a woman who had the delusion that she and Orion were secret lovers. Orion, a psychiatrist, met the woman who came to the hospital looking for treatment. The patient became obsessed with Orion and then began years of stalking, fortunately not violent, but astonishingly intrusive. Because of the depth of her delusions and her instability, there was never a guarantee it wouldn’t reach a crisis point and turn violent. Many murders are committed by jealous lovers, and since Orion’s stalker believed they were lovers, there was a risk this would end tragically. And to make matters worse, the laws against stalking are vague and ineffectual, so Orion not only had to deal with her stalker, but with a disinterested legal system as well. To protect herself she had to become an advocate for legal reform to improve laws and help other victims of stalking. After reading this page turner, I know more about delusional obsessive love (erotomania) and stalking than I thought I would ever know.

China Road by Rob Gifford teaches an entirely different sort of lesson. While Orion was forced to become an expert in erotomania because of a twist of fate, the only pressure Gifford was under was his own obsession to more deeply understand China. To satisfy his obsession (can obsessions ever really be satisfied) Gifford immersed himself in his subject, traveling for months across Route 312, China’s equivalent to our old Route 66, and like Route 66, extends across the breadth of China. This road parallels the old Silk Road, one of the oldest trade routes in the world. His journey, symbolically from east to west, shows the transformation of the Chinese culture from the quintessentially eastern civilization into a great westernized power. He does so through conversations, research, and personal observations. It’s a terrific read, and provides me with fascinating, complex, and very personal insights into the Chinese people and the course of their history.

While both of these books serve the purpose of teaching books, they are also memoirs, based on personal experience. As I try to tease out what they are doing, reading these memoirs like a memoir writer, I look more closely at how they have harnessed life story to keep the reader’s attention. How are these personal stories like memoirs embedded in a context of knowledge? The most immediate observation is that in both books, the author is clearly in the frame, sharing sensory and emotional impressions. As you read, you are walking miles in the author’s shoes, empathizing with their needs and emotions.

To grab this empathy, each book starts by engaging the reader in the author’s personal challenge. The protagonist wants something, at the beginning of the book, and then achieves it at the end. Orion is in danger. She wants safety and to get her normal life back. To protect herself and others like her, she digs for deeper insight. Gifford wants to fulfill his dream of understanding the Chinese people. Also, Gifford uses traveling along the road to keep the reader engaged. He starts out at one end of the road and strives to reach the other end. It’s tangible, as well as symbolic and provides a satisfying impression of motion and achievement.

Writing Prompt

To decide how you are going to tell about your life, consider how your life has taken you into contact with knowledge, by choice or by chance. For example becoming expert at a disease because you cared for someone who has it, or learning on the job in a nerve wracking business environment, or being a peace corps volunteer in an exotic culture, or an astronaut, or your wife’s passion for horses, or any of a million other ways life might have carried you into a specialized area of learning. If your life connected you with knowledge, then you can share that part of your life with the reader, and teach them something while they are turning pages. Harness your curiosity and the reader’s curiosity as two wings of a bird that will carry the reader through your story.

Carol O’Dell has never been in headlines. She was an ordinary woman raising a family when her mom’s mind started failing. When O’Dell asked her mother to move in, their relationship became laced with the humiliation and confusion of dementia, madness in the midst of normalcy. It’s a story worth knowing for millions of people in the sandwich generation. To learn more about it, read her memoir called Mothering Mother. And there’s another lesson you can learn from O’Dell’s book. If you think your own life is not famous enough to be worth reading, take another look at what is happening to the memoir genre. You don’t have to be spectacular. You just need to be you, and find the story in your experience.

For proof that people want to know about each other, stand in the checkout line at your local supermarket, look around at the ordinary people. You could reach out and touch them, if you wanted to get smacked, and yet you know absolutely nothing about them and they know nothing about you. Most of us prefer it that way, trying to blend in so we won’t stand out. Then, turn around, to see, also within reach, the tabloid racks, covered with photos of celebrities entering or leaving rehab, getting married and getting divorced. An entire industry brings their private lives into the supermarket, a testimony to the fact that people are curious about other people.

But why should we want to know so much about these particular people who have thrust themselves into the public eye?? All we learn from them is the artificially self-indulgent world of celebrity. Sometimes it’s fun but most of the time it’s plain sordid. I think we’re getting tired of limiting our curiosity to movie stars. I know I am. There is a whole world of people, and I want to learn who they are, what makes them work, how they feel, how they grow.

Apparently, I’m not alone in my desire to know about ordinary people. Look at the popularity of blogs, through which people share snips of our lives, pictures of our kids and pets, and what we did last night. Millions of people are reading this stuff. Memoirs are the next wave in this curiosity about each other. Memoirs let us go deeper, sharing what it was like to grow up, or to take care of someone in need, or to suffer a loss, or fight in a war. We can learn so much about each other through memoirs. It’s an exciting expansion of our ability to know the world.

Most of us only know the private lives of a few people; the ones in our family, and perhaps one or two close friends. Everyone else we see only in the fragments we come across in life situations or tales we share in conversations. As a therapist I hear more, but even in this environment memories arise in disjointed fragments, spread out over time, and not delivered in sequence. If any of them wanted me to really know about their lives, the best way would be to write their memoir.

It turns out that a memoir is by far the best way to find out what it’s like to be someone else. For example, Brooke Shield’s memoir Down Came the Rain, informed me about postpartum depression. Alice Sebold in Lucky informed me of the problems of coping with the aftermath of rape, an unmentionable topic if ever there was one. Martha Beck’s Expecting Adam takes me inside the experience of expecting and then raising a baby with Down Syndrome. William Manchester in Goodbye Darkness brings me face to face with the gore of war, of being shot at and watching friends die in front of you.

None of these topics are pleasant, and so, they don’t come up in polite conversation. And that’s precisely the reason I don’t know much about them. People don’t talk about these things, so how can I ever learn them? In fact, these topics are so unmentionable, people in these situations often feel isolated. But in memoirs, we can be frank. Writers record thoughts in private, and readers, also in private, enter the writer’s experience and learn what it’s like. If the information becomes too intense, they can take a break. No one has to react, offer platitudes, or hide their discomfort.

The insights from memoirs take me far beyond my experience, and far beyond my comfort zone. I would never have asked George Brummell what it was like to grow up black in the segregated south, starting to come of age in Korea, and then after being injured in Vietnam, starting over again, now blind. But I can read about it in his book Shades of Darkness. I wouldn’t know what it was like to be beaten by a stepfather, or to feel the other heartaches of a broken family the way I could by reading Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life. And while I might imagine what it was like for a daughter to take care of a mom with Alzheimer’s I would never have been able to see it so intimately as by reading Carol O’Dell’s Mothering Mother.

One of the powers of any good book is to invite the reader into a different world. Sometimes it’s sheer escape from our everyday life. But while we’re out of our world, what are we learning? I went through a decade when I was only reading murder mysteries. The battle between good and evil put me into a wonderful hypnotic state. But after years of escaping into the same type of world over and over, I was getting bored. Now that I’m reading memoirs, I not only get out of my own world. I also have a wonderful opportunity to enter other people’s worlds. By reading their lives, I understand a lot more about the people around me. One person’s story at a time, I’m finding that ordinary people at the checkout counter are much more interesting, varied, and offer many more lessons than the menagerie of celebrities facing me on the covers of tabloids.

 by Jerry Waxler

After hearing journalist Michael Vitez speak at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference, I’m reading his book Rocky Stories: Tales of Love, Hope, And Happiness at America’s Most Famous Steps by Michael Vitez, Sylvester Stallone, and Tom Gralish. Vitez and his Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Tom Gralish parked themselves at the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, made famous by Sylvester Stallone’s movies. The stairs are so famous that 30 years later, people from all over the world stop by so they can feel the Rocky Balboa’s victory run for themselves.

Vitez’s talk at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference was about his experience as an immersion journalist. Immersion journalism is the practice of entering into a situation in order to write about it. For example, he researched a story about what it’s like to be a highway toll taker, by spending weeks parked inside a toll booth. Another time he hung out in an intensive care unit with families of patients in life or death situations. This is the story that earned him the Pulitzer Prize. When Vitez heard that people were still running up the Rocky Stairs, he took a break from his Philadelphia Inquirer office and went to see for himself. Within a few hours he realized he had discovered a cultural phenomenon. People pulled up in cabs, ran up the stairs, sometimes gasping for air, and when they reached the top they leapt, danced or whooped. Vitez decided it would make a good story, and so he and his Pulitzer winning photographer spent around 200 days through all four seasons on location. After Tom Gralish snapped the photos Vitez asked people what they were thinking.

Generally, they were thinking about their own dreams, and how the Rocky movies had awakened in them a sense of purpose and hope that they wanted to experience for themselves in Philadelphia. As I read through the 52 vignettes about the people from all over the world, I saw many of them as mini-memoirs. This landmark stirred up stories about overcoming obstacles on the way to achieving dreams. Sometimes they were already fulfilled and sometimes the dreams still pointed to the future.

Each of us has a life filled with experience but it’s not always easy turning that experience into a story worth reading. Vitez’s experiment at the Rocky Stairs could help. Just as those people who had just huffed up the stairs told Vitez about the upward journey of their lives, you could imagine doing the same thing. Or come to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and experience it yourself. From that exercise, distill the hopes and dreams that drove you to be who you are today, and continue to drive you to be who you will be tomorrow.

What did you long to accomplish? What big dreams called you to a different dimension, a new beginning, a lofty goal? Some of the dreams that drove you have long since drifted into the past, so you have to dig deep to recall the freshness and enthusiasm of your youth. Perhaps you stayed resolutely on course, letting your desire guide you like True North. Or your actual journey may have diverged from your plan. If you had to let go of dreams, remembering them now might awaken disappointment and even pain. But whatever your dreams were at any particular time in your life that was the force that drove you. By getting in touch with your longing, you will reveal vital, interesting aspects of your story.

At the Philadelphia Writers Conference, Michael Vitez told how when he first had the idea for the book, he reached out to Sylvester Stallone for an endorsement from Rocky himself. His attempts to get through to Stallone were rebuffed by an overzealous gatekeeper. After a year of trying, Vitez finally penetrated the walls surrounding Stallone, who immediately loved the book and agreed to participate. So Michael Vitez, whose mission was to report on other people’s Rocky Stories, told us a Rocky Story of his own.

Writing Prompt
Do you have a Rocky story waiting to be told? Do you see how a Rocky Story could help organize a memoir or essay?

 by Jerry Waxler

“Beatles.” This word contains the memories of a generation. Who among us has not seen videos of them waving as they disembarked from the plane on their first American tour? As they’re playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan show, the camera pans to the girl screaming so hard she has to hold onto her face with both hands so her head won’t explode. Since such scenes were part of your life, you might want to tell about them. But to a listener these culturally loaded words sound like clichés. Events that happened to you also happened to hundreds of millions of others. We’ve heard and seen these images until we are weary of them.

If you tell a story with loaded words, people will hear what they already know, rather than learning about you. The loaded words will wash out the individual meaning from your story. So how do you write about the past, without falling into this trap? Use the storyteller’s advice. Slow down, set up the scene, and tell the reader how they affected you in particular.

So how could I unpack the meaning of the word Beatles and turn it into a unique image in my own life? I can see myself standing at the record store in Madison, Wisconsin, where I stopped on my way home every day from class, to stare at the rack of new releases. My mind was blazing with an almost supernatural desire, as if each album might release a Genii that would grant my every dream. But describing a boy standing at a record rack doesn’t give the reader much to go on. To share my unique feelings, I have to set up a scene in a way that you’ll be able to relate to.

Here’s a piece of advice on this topic by author and writing teacher Philip Gerard, from his book “Writing a book that makes a difference.” He says, “The key is always to include your reader in the process by which you arrive at your position. Instead of demanding that the reader experience anger or love simply because you say so, create for your reader the same experience that led to your reaction.”

So I try to remember a scene that would help me show my relationship to music in the sixties and I remembered the summer when the Revolver album was released. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I wanted to get back to campus early. When I returned in mid-August, all the summer classes were over, and even the faculty and staff were away on vacation. Madison, Wisconsin was essentially a ghost town. I didn’t have anywhere to live yet, but an acquaintance was out of town and told me I could crash at her place.

I walked in to the apartment building, musty from years of student tenants, and set down my belongings. My stuff was stored in another friend’s basement so all I had with me was a suitcase and the Revolver, which I had picked up from the record store on my way in to town. As soon as I sat down, I took out the album, turning it over and searching the graphics, the liner notes, and even the names of the production staff as if they might reveal some secret.

Ripping off the flimsy cellophane, I pulled the record envelope out, and then grabbed the record by the edges between my open palms to avoid letting any finger oil smudge the surface. Positioning the record over the turntable, I dropped it gently, feeling the anticipation not only that this would be the first time I listened to it, but also disappointment that this would be the last time I would ever listen to it for the first time. This troubled me because records lose 40% of their quality after the first playing, wearing down the little plastic ridges that jiggle the needle to create the sound.

In rapt attention, I turned towards the speakers and listened. And as I entered each new song, I felt a wave of excitement. Somehow the Beatles had broken with their genre over and over, as if they were inventing a new style of rock and roll in each song. I was especially smitten by the haunting violin accompaniment like cries of sadness, wails really, on “Eleanor Rigby.” I wondered who she was, and why I felt so drawn to her.

That afternoon, I left the apartment to buy food, and I saw a girl walking my way. A person! As she came nearer, I smiled. The smile of a stranger always made me feel okay, like the world was safer and more fun. So I smiled at this stranger, and she kept walking past me, as if she didn’t see me. Despite the long, cruel winters, Madison in August is blazingly hot and muggy. I looked around at the apartments that would in a few weeks be teeming with kids living in every possible space. The houses had not been painted recently nor were the gardens groomed. It was a student neighborhood, run by landlords we never saw, and kids who were just passing through. And now they were empty. I wondered where my home was. Certainly not Pennsylvania. I was no longer a child, and it was time to get away from there. And I didn’t feel at home here either, where there were no other students, and the only person I saw didn’t even smile at me.

The one thing I did have, the one element in my life that made me feel connected at that moment was the Beatles. Their passion for breaking with all the things that were wrong with the world leapt out at me. But rather than providing simple answers, they asked questions, set to music. Not just any music but orchestral music and fresh melodies and rhythms. They poured their creative energy into the album to let me know they shared my sense of urgency. We had entered a pact in which we agreed that our questions were important, were powerful. I closed my eyes, and hummed along with the lyrics, already starting to burn into my memory.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

I too lamented about life, while those violins tore into my heart. Hearing the lyrics made me feel more peaceful, understood, and one with the world.

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

The tiny town of Bethlehem in Southeastern Pennsylvania has a lot going on. It was the birthplace of Bethlehem Steel, it sports an 81 foot high Christmas star, hosts the annual regional music bash called Musikfest, is home of Lehigh University and Moravian College, and has its own public radio station, WDIY where I’m being interviewed today. It also happens to be the home of Lehigh Valley Storytelling Guild. Storytelling interests me, not because I’m an expert but because I’m human, which is the chief prerequisite for interest in stories. We start learning stories from the time we’re babies, and we become attuned to them through a life time of exposure. In fact, they are everywhere, and form the basis for the way we look at the world, learn about people, and let people learn about us.

When I started to explore life-writing, I realized that while I’m an expert story listener, I have a lot to learn about story telling. Since stories are everywhere, you would think that learning about telling them should be simple. Many successful writers recommend that you learn the art of writing stories by emulating the books you enjoy reading. My problem with this method is that once I dive into the story I stop thinking about writing. In a trance, I turn the key on the door of his apartment, put my briefcase on the table by the door, and recoil in fear at the sound I heard in the other room. It’s hard for me to break out of this trance and analyze the writer’s technique.

It’s easier for me to draw lessons from memoirs. When I read a memoir, a significant proportion of my attention is already focused on learning lessons from the protagonist’s life. I want to understand what makes his or her world work, what’s special about it, what I can see that will help me live in my world. So since I’m already learning, it turns out to be natural for me to learn lessons about storytelling. And I can learn from first time authors, as well as from the masters. I find many lessons about storytellers from beginners, such as Margaret George’s Never Use your Dim Lights, or George Brummell’s Shades of Darkness or Harry Bernstein’s Invisible Wall.

Another place I learn about story telling is from people who teach writing. One comprehensive book for storytellers is a 400 page classic called simply Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. Since good screenwriting is good storytelling, don’t worry about the fact that your life may not be made into a movie. If you’re serious about representing your life as a story, I recommend you dig into such material, and learn more about how stories are told. Not only will you be learning to tell your own story. You’ll learn to see more perceptively into the stories you read, watch, or hear.

I love trying to understand what makes a story tick, so it was with great delight that I spoke with storyteller Charles Kiernan, from Bethlehem’s Storytelling Guild. If you want to learn how to tell stories, it makes sense to ask a storyteller. All you have to do is find one. Since I knew about Kiernan’s guild, I turned to him to ask him his ideas about stories. It turns out he was just getting ready to teach a workshop he’ll be presenting at the Augusta Heritage Folkarts Festival in West Virginia. July 8-13, 2007. This was a perfect time to have that conversation, because he told me about the lesson he is preparing to give at the Folkarts Festival. It is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard for turning life into story.

So what was the simple powerful advice Charles Kiernan offered? The gist is, “Break down the code, and spell it out.” Stories are like space ships and time travel machines. So even though I learned about this storytelling trick in a tiny town, I can use it to tell stories that transport me around the world.

I’m going to explain it in more detail in my next blog entry.

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.