Posts Tagged ‘Author Interview’

« Older Entries

A Memoir Author Comments on His Beginning and End

Monday, July 11th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

In this final section of our interview, I ask David W. Berner to share more about writing his memoir,  “Accidental Lessons.” Questions in this part of the interview dig in to the choices he made when constructing the book.

(Read my essay about Accidental Lessons, here.)

Beginning of the memoir

Jerry Waxler: In my experience, one of the hardest parts of finishing a memoir is to review the structure and decide exactly how to begin, so I am always curious about the way authors start their stories. I find yours especially intriguing. You start with the breakup of your marriage, and then you backfill, providing the back-story through reflection. I like the way the book is structured, and I’m trying to understand what made you pick this beginning. If it was me, I would have been tempted to start the book while you were still a newscaster, and then show how that world began to fall apart.

So how did you arrive at the particular structure that you published? What other ways did you consider? Help me understand your experience of wrestling with this structure. Was it daunting to pick one, and not do the others? If so, how did you come to peace with that decision?

David Berner: My first couple drafts were far more linear in nature – this happened, then that, then that. Frankly, that sort of story structure bores me a bit. Life is not linear. Sure, the clock ticks away in one direction, but during that time we all reflect, stop and think, try to recreate old times and invent new times. At the risk of sounding too existential, I wonder if there were no such thing as a clock, time as we know it, would life be linear?

As mentioned before, my original first chapter was not the first chapter that ended up in the book.  So I did play around with different ways to let the story unfold. But essentially, the structure was based around the school year, so starting with a startling moment in that school seemed natural.

Although I played around with the structure a bit, I did not consider major, 180-degree flips in the storyline. Frankly, you can make yourself crazy as a writer considering what you could do, or should do, or could try. Sure, adjustments, many times big ones have to be made. But fixing, adjusting, editing, shaping will become a never-ending ritual if you let it. At some point you have to say – this is it, this is what I’m going with, this seems to get the job done. Trust it and believe in it.

Ending of the memir

Jerry Waxler: I love the way the school year provides you with a natural frame of reference that can help you tell the story, and helps me read it. How did you choose this framework, and how did you decide where to end it?

David W. Berner: The structure seemed a natural to me. The school year framed the story and acted as a bookend, you might say. I had that in mind all along. It’s just that I wanted the all-important reflection to come within that framework, not be somehow transported out of it. I also think because the story is not completely linear, that framework of the school year helps the reader stay on track.

Through every draft, the ending was always the ending. That email that is tacked on my wall, the one I reference in the epilogue of the book, is still there above my desk. It reminds me daily of that very special year and those students, and renews my commitment to teaching every time it gets shaky, and yes, there are times it gets quite shaky. I hope the reader would finish the book with the belief that although our past may be gone through the passage of time, it has left an indelible mark, a branding on all of us. And we should not dismiss it even when it’s painful or troubling; we should embrace it, use it to our advantage, and savor it until it becomes a memory that can be used as fuel to move us along in our lives. My mother always used to say, “It’s not what happens to you, it is how you deal with what happens to you.” I think that message comes through in Accidental Lessons.

Jerry Waxler: What are you writing next?

David Berner: I’m the Writer-in-Residence at the Jack Kerouac Project in Orlando this summer, and absolutely honored and humbled to have been awarded this time at Kerouac’s old apartment in the College Park neighborhood. The room where I’m writing is Jack’s old room. Maybe you don’t believe in these sorts of things, but there’s an energy in that room I hope I can bottle. It’s where he wrote The Dharma Bums, a book like all his others that was creative nonfiction before there was creative nonfiction. His work was always autobiographical, a memoir hybrid, I might call it. I’m hoping to complete a first draft and begin a second on another memoir while I’m here, this one based on a road trip I took with my sons. It’s really a father-son story, reflecting on all the men who came before me in that long line of fatherhood and how what they did well, and not so well, resonates in the generational DNA.

Notes

David W. Berner’s Home Page

Click here for information about the Jack Kerouac Project

Three Part Interview with Author David W. Berner
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
Interview Part 3
The author of the memoir Accidental Lessons answers questions about the craft and experience of writing the book.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in David W. Berner | Please Comment »

On Writing a memoir, interview with author David W. Berner

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

David W. Berner changed directions in mid-life, and became a teacher. Then he wrote a memoir “Accidental Lessons” about how his second chance gave him a deeper appreciation for life than his first. The book is an important one for anyone who is attempting to reinvent themselves in order to keep up with changes in external circumstances or in their own goals. This is part one in my interview with him about writing the memoir.

(Read my essay about Accidental Lessons, here.)

Jerry Waxler: In Accidental Lessons, you were starting a new career and you were single for the first time in many years. In addition to being hurled back to the beginning of relationships and career, you are entering the early side of aging. For example, when looking to date, you had to come to terms with the problem that you were no longer such a young, vibrantly sexy man. At what point during these tumultuous changes did you decide to write a book about it? What motivated you to share these vulnerable aspects of your life with the public?

David Berner: I had been kicking around book ideas for a long time. As a journalist, I had been telling a lot of other people’s stories, but in recent years had been doing a good bit of immersion journalism and writing from the — I — perspective. I had written some essays and personal memoir pieces that had been published in a few small literary journals, but a book was a bigger project than I ever considered before. And since my journalism background made it difficult for me to “make things up” — I figured the best way to get a book done was to tell something of myself. But I had in no way planned on revealing the story of my year in the troubled school outside Chicago. Not until my sons encouraged it.

Each day I would return home from the classroom with stories, the kinds of stories my two sons — middle school and elementary — had never heard before: students talking openly about sex in class, and using the “F” word in every other sentence in front of the teachers. Most shocking, and interesting to them, were the students’ personal stories of their dysfunctional families, gang influences, and drugs. “Dad,” they said, “are you writing this down?” I hadn’t until then.

It was a month into my teaching assignment, one I had secured through a scholarship program that would allow me to get my Masters in Education degree as long as I agreed to work in a troubled-school for a period of time, so I had to catch up on some notes. But from there on out, for the entire year, I kept a journal. Some notes were quite detailed, some cryptic, but enough for me to remember the daily experiences. My journal entries included the facts, but they also included how I felt, what touched me, worried me, concerned me, the stuff below the skin where the emotions are raw.

If I was going to write an honest memoir about this experience, I better be honest about it all, every bit. The reader can spot a fake. Hemingway said a writer has to be a very good “shit detector.” Be authentic and the reader will connect. I was determined to do that. Besides my sons, the strongest motivator for me to tell the true story of my feelings and experiences was the desire to be a good, honest writer. To me, there was no other way to take on this project.

Jerry Waxler: It takes time to put together a whole story about your life, and along the way, there are unlimited number of opportunities to shrink back from the task, put it away in your drawer, and just consider it a good writing exercise. What sorts of internal discussions or external supports kept you pressing through the effort, to keep you going to the end?

David Berner: My sons were my motivators. They would ask me regularly, “How’s it going? What did you write about today?” I couldn’t disappoint them. And also, I knew from my journalism work that you had to set deadlines for yourself and you had to make time for writing, like going to the gym. Not just write when you felt like it, or when you had some time. You had to get up in the early morning, go out to a quiet coffee shop, sneak into a corner and write for hours. I did that a few days a week and every weekend, Saturday and Sunday mornings, for years.

When I entered my MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, I had a third draft of a manuscript. Then the real work started and I a met my new motivator – Thomas E. Kennedy, an incredibly talented author. His most recent work of fiction is In the Company of Angels He was kind, honest, and relentless about getting me to really dig into using sensory language. I could tell a story — again, my journalism background — but I would miss opportunities to bring my senses into the deep introspective moments in the manuscript. He got me to go there. And as all memoirists know, the personal reflection on your story is as important as the story itself, if not more so. He encouraged me, told me I had a good story to tell, and believed I had the skills to tell it well. I can’t stress enough to writers of memoir that finding a mentor, someone who believes you have something vital to say, is absolutely essential. Self-doubt will creep in; it’s inevitable. But it shouldn’t stop you. Never.

Notes

David W. Berner’s Home Page

Three Part Interview with Author David W. Berner
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
Interview Part 3
The author of the memoir Accidental Lessons answers questions about the craft and experience of writing the book.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in David W. Berner, midlife crisis | Please Comment »

Character Development of a Novel’s Hero

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

By Jerry Waxler

When the protagonist of the novel “Bread Alone” went to work in a bakery, she found her own strength. That’s the central premise of the novel. Through creative striving, through effort and overcoming obstacles, the protagonist grew. In this regard, “Bread Alone” provides an uplifting, even inspiring answer to the question asked by almost every good story, “How did the character grow?” I asked the author Judi Hendricks to tell me more about the importance of the character arc for her and her characters.

Jerry Waxler: Okay. I get that the character Wynter had a different experience in the break up of the marriage than you did in real life, but there is one area of your life that your protagonist seems to accurately reflect. You both went from incomplete people to much more aware and fulfilled people by working in the bakery. As a reader, I love this inner arc, which shows your character’s personal development. This is one of the reasons I read memoirs, to see how people grow, and I’m glad you reflected that part of your life in the novel. I know you’ve said you just follow your characters and your characters tell you what happens, but I wonder if you could say anything specifically about this aspect of story crafting which portrays the growing wisdom of the protagonist as she travels from the beginning of the story to the end.

Judi Hendricks: I should clarify that comment about following my characters to see what happens–I think that applies mainly to specifics of the story, not so much to the character’s arc.  In one class where I workshopped the first few chapters of Bread Alone, one of the other participants said, in essence, “Your main character is a nincompoop.  She’s totally spoiled and clueless and not very likeable.  Why don’t you make her smarter and don’t let her feel so sorry for herself and so entitled?”

My response was, “That’s the whole point of the story.  She has to change and grow or there’s no story.”

I usually have at least a vague idea of how my characters will develop, who they’ll be at the end.  But the things that happen along the way, I discover as I write.

Jerry: Okay, so flash forward. You have written a bunch of novels, and you are actually a writer now. So this whole story would make a great memoir. In the beginning was an unformed young bakery worker who attends a memoir class and realizes she could play with reality. This marks the transition into the next stage in her life. Over the coming years, like Wynter in Bread Alone, the protagonist of this memoir is becoming a deeper person, as she writes novels, and finds her voice, her audience, and her stride as a mature writer.

So if you were to look back and see yourself as the protagonist in this memoir or novel about the birth of a writer, could you offer us a scene, a revelation, a key moment, perhaps at a book signing or the completion of yet another manuscript when you said to yourself something like, “Hey, this is my life. I’m a writer.”

Judi: First of all–what a great idea for a novel!

The realization hit me as I was beginning my second book, Isabel’s Daughter.  I’d gotten a two-book contract from my UK publisher and I had to produce a manuscript in 18 months, whereas I’d had no deadline for Bread Alone and ended up taking four years to write it.  I had only the most nebulous idea for a story and was facing a huge amount of research about New Mexico and art and a bunch of other topics I knew nothing about.  I rented a little house in Santa Fe for a month and my husband and I drove over with all my books and my computer and we had a fun weekend playing tourists, and then Monday morning he got on a plane and went back to L.A. and I freaked out.  I spent most of the day walking around town in a daze, envisioning having to give back my advance.

That night I called my husband, practically in tears and he gave me his best halftime locker room pep talk.  The next morning I sat down at the kitchen table and organized my research materials, outlined a 30-day plan for what I needed to accomplish, read over the story notes I had to date and then I just started to write.  That’s when I knew I was a writer.

Jerry: What are you working on next?

Judi: Part three of Bread Alone– Baker’s Apprentice was part 2..

Notes

To learn more about Judi Hendricks and her books, click here to visit her website.

More of my interview with Judi Hendricks

A Novelist Plays at the Border of Fact and Fiction

How a Novelist Strives for Authentic Reality

Explore Painful Memories by Writing Fiction

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Judi Hendricks | Please Comment »

A Novelist Plays at the Border of Fact and Fiction

Friday, February 18th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

I constantly scan for wisdom that can help me translate my life into story, so I was intrigued recently when  fiction writer Grace Marcus told me about a friend who walked into a memoir class and walked out with an idea for her first novel “Bread Alone.” When author Judi Hendricks agreed to speak to me about her creative process, I prepared by reading the book, about a woman crushed by the betrayal of her husband, went to find herself by baking bread. The novel seemed so rich with the emotional journey of real life, I felt sure that my talk with Judi would be productive. Here is part one of our interview.

—

Jerry Waxler: So is it true? Did you get the idea from your first novel after attending a memoir class? If so, please share the events and choices that brought you to that conclusion?

Judi Hendricks: I’ve always said my career as a novelist began in a bakery, which seems appropriate, because the longer I practice both writing and baking the more similarities I see between them.  Bread is a process–slow, arduous, messy, unpredictable.  You can say all the same things about a book.  Bread is composed of distinct ingredients, that merge and become dough–a completely different entity which then takes on a life of its own.  A book follows that same process.

In my twenties and thirties, I had so many different jobs.  If there had been such a thing as adult ADD then, I’m sure I would have been diagnosed with it.  I worked as a journalist, then in public relations and advertising.  I worked in public television, then at Delta Airlines, then I had my own travel agency.  I wore suits and carried a briefcase.  I kept thinking everything would be fine if I could just find the right job. When I finally landed at the McGraw Street Bakery in Seattle, I thought I had found my calling.  Which I had–just not in exactly the way I first imagined.

Time and circumstance intervened, and later in a different city I found myself in a creative non-fiction class with an assignment to write an essay about something I loved to do.  I wrote about making bread.  This was almost seven years after my job at the McGraw Street Bakery had ended, and yet all these memories suddenly came flooding back.  The essay became a memoir of my time at the bakery.  I never intended to write anything longer than 30 pages, but something about the piece nagged at me.  I kept rewriting it.  Every time I thought I was finished, it drew me back to the computer.

Jerry: Why did you go to that memoir class? What was your goal?

Judi: Actually my goal was to avoid having to get another job.  I’m not kidding.  I was “between engagements” and I was hoping if I stalled long enough I’d either win the lottery or figure out what I was supposed to be doing.  The only reason I took that particular class was I knew I could write nonfiction because I’d made a living doing it.  I was also sure I couldn’t write fiction because I had a file cabinet full of aborted short stories.

Jerry: What inspired you to flip from nonfiction to fiction?

Judi: It was not a conscious choice.  I remember the exact moment when I crossed the line between memoir and fiction.  I was writing about something that happened at the bakery right after I started working there.  We had a robbery one night, and the police decided that it was an inside job because the cash box was kept in a fairly unusual place, behind the huge tins of baking powder in the store room, and the thief apparently went right to it.

Suspicion immediately fell on our dishwasher–a fifteen-year-old boy–we’ll call him Josh.  His parents had just been through a really nasty divorce, and he was living with his mother, but all he ever talked about was getting enough money together so he could go find his dad in Kansas City.  Coincidentally or not, he disappeared shortly thereafter.  Within a week we had a new dishwasher–a pretty16-year old girl we’ll call Kristi.  This information is totally unrelated to the robbery.  She wasn’t even working there when it happened.
But what if she had been?

Somehow my brain made the leap that it would be more interesting that way.  What if Kristi liked nice clothes and she had an old car that needed repairs and insurance and gas…what if she stole the money and let Josh take the fall?  What if he knew and didn’t tell because he was crazy about her?  Or…what if she took the money for him because she was crazy about him?  Without any conscious decision on my part, I’d just become a fiction writer.  None of this stuff ended up in the book, but it seemed to me that my course was set.

Jerry: Fascinating! You were willing to write about “real life” but with a twist. That’s an interesting intuition. Didn’t it feel strange veering away from reality like this? I’m trying to understand why you wrote fiction instead of just sticking with the facts.

Judi: I never imagined writing about myself anymore than I imagined writing a novel.  Bread and the bakery were just two things I was passionate about.  I think almost everyone has had an experience like that–one of those magical times that exerts an almost gravitational pull on you.  You know there’s a reason for it; you just don’t know what it is.  You keep revisiting it and reliving it in your head until it becomes almost your personal mythology.  For me, the bakery was that experience.

Yes, the thought of writing a novel was daunting.  So for months I didn’t acknowledge that’s what I was doing.  At around 350 pages, it became clear that it had gone beyond a short story, but it was a scary step to admit to myself–much less anyone else–that it might be a book.  That sounded like an engraved invitation to humiliation and failure.  (I do subscribe to that school of thought that says if you don’t admit you’re trying something, then you cannot possibly fail.)

The Scottish astronomer David Brewster said,
“It is a curious circumstance, that when we wish to obtain a sight of very faint star, we can see it most distinctly by looking away from it, and when the eye is turned full upon it, it immediately disappears…”

Focusing on the bakery enabled me to see the story I was trying to tell, framed within the experience of making bread.

This is part one of the interview. In the next part we’ll dig further into the relationship between fact and fiction.

Notes
To learn more about Judi Hendricks and her books, click here to visit her website.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Author Interview, Judi Hendricks | 2 Comments »

A novelist comes alive in a memoir, or is it the other way around?

Monday, February 14th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

Rick Skwiot, author of “San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing,” also wrote several fiction books, making him a good resource to help me understand the relationship between these two apparently very different narrative forms. In the first parts of this interview I asked him about; his spiritual quest, turning notebooks into a memoir, and more about his life as a writer. In this fifth part of our interview, I ask him about fiction, fact, and finding an end.

Jerry Waxler: You have written several fiction books. Which did you learn first, memoir writing or fiction writing?  Have themes from your journey to Mexico infused your other writing? If so, how?

Rick Skwiot: Learning how to write fiction came first with me, long before I ever thought of writing a memoir, though “learning” it is a never-ending journey, perhaps like “learning” philosophy or learning wholeness. However, like fiction writing, memoir writing is creative writing, and all the tools and approaches that I learned as a novelist I applied to my two memoirs: how to organize my material for dramatic effect, develop interesting characters, modulate and pace the story, construct emotion-laden scenes, build taut and tense dialogue, keep the narration driving forward, etc.

Fiction writing also helped sharpen my imaginative powers, which certainly come in handy when writing a memoir. For example, in my childhood memoir I wrote a scene in which I imagined my widowed grandmother’s secret lover (whom I learned about 50 years after the fact) meandering North St. Louis streets after being chased from her flat prior to our Christmas morning arrival. Appropriate turf for a memoir, I think, the memoirist’s thoughts, feelings, and imagination.

As to themes from my Mexico journeys infusing my other writing, yes, they do, for they have become part of me. They show up quite plainly in my two early Mexican novels, particularly in Sleeping With Pancho Villa, though in an indirect and subtle way, I hope. The playwright Arthur Miller once said that all drama attempts to answer the question, “How does a man make for himself a home?” That can be said of novels and memoirs as well. I think the spiritual quest is central to that search for home. All men and women have something of Odysseus in them, and lives that parallel the Odyssey—we are all trying to find ourselves and our place in the world, to vanquish monsters and false suitors and navigate threatening seas to return home.

Jerry: How did writing a memoir help your fiction?

Rick: Writing a memoir helps put the author in touch with his or her deepest feelings. It is both, from time to time, a melancholy and an uplifting process. But digging into oneself and one’s past in an honest way helps a writer recognize what’s important—what resonates with you, what moves you, what frightens you. Those things are probably what should drive one’s fiction writing as well. Overall it helps you see yourself better and more honestly, which will make you stronger as a fiction writer and as a human being.

Jerry: How much help did you receive from other writers, say in critique groups. Did other writers help you gain perspective and create a clean, straightforward portrayal of your journey?

Rick: I got some valuable feedback on early drafts from writers and intelligent readers alike. Actually, the concept of starting the book at the time I broke my ankle came from a reader who is not a professional writer but a yoga instructor in Mexico. When he made the suggestion, it was like a curtain going up and I saw the rightness of it. (I’ve learned to trust my heart on fielding criticism, rejecting suggestions that don’t really resonate with me, and embracing those that feel like revelation or, conversely, sting.) Most writers benefit from good critiques, and it is very difficult to operate without them. However, it is not always easy to find. Fortunately I do have some friends who are novelists, and we read each other’s works-in-progress.

Jerry: What are you working on next?

Rick: I have just finished a “final” draft of a novel, Key West Story, in which a down-and-out writer in Key West, suffering from writer’s block, penury, and self-doubt, is visited by an angel—a young Ernest Hemingway reincarnate—sent down to get this worthy yet misguided soul back on track as a man and a writer. Together they set off to Cuba in Hemingway’s fishing boat, to attempt to smuggle out a Cuban Navy salvage diver, a Santeria priestess and maps to sunken Spanish galleons. Although it has certain autobiographical elements, probably best written as fiction, not a memoir.

Jerry: One last thing. I am very sensitive to downbeat endings. For one thing, my experience with the existential and nihilistic literature popular in the sixties depressed me profoundly. Once I overcame that depression, I have tended towards literature that lifts. From that point of view, your book challenged me. I found the pervasive death and poverty depressing. And yet, in the end, I felt uplifted, not by what you found in Mexico but what you found inside yourself. This theme of a young person trying to find himself is one of my favorite themes. But you had to finesse your personal rewards within the gritty reality around you. I can see a dynamic tension between these two opposing forces, your insistence to grow and the severe limitations that poverty placed on the people around you. How did you feel about portraying this tension?

Rick: I have spent my life trying to balance those opposing forces, the yin and yang, my melancholy and my exuberance—product, perhaps, of a mercurial Slavic soul. The world has always been a difficult and dismal place for our species, with threats and evil lurking, but also an enveloping home with great beauty and riches. Life is struggle, for everyone, and those who have the inner resources and high spirits to fight on in the face of great adversity are those we most admire. Like you, I want to hear their stories, not the stories of quitters, pessimists and whiners. The protagonists don’t have to succeed in reaching their goals, but they have to strive with great heart. When we read these stories, we see it is the struggle that ennobles us and the thing that matters most.

Click here for Part 1 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Spiritual memoirs

Click here for Part 2 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Journals and Notebooks

Click here for Part 3 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Backstory of a memoir

Click here for Part 4 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Tenacity of a Writer

Notes

Rick Skwiot’s Blog, “New Underground”

Rick Skwiot’s Home Page

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Rick Skwiot | Please Comment »

A Memoirist Talks About the Backstory of His Memoir

Friday, February 4th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

Writing a memoir is a journey. In addition to finding and writing material, we also strive to improve our skills, the same road taken by the authors of all those books that have entertained and informed us since the beginning of our lives. In addition to the lessons they have recorded between the covers of their books, many writers are also happy to teach. In this third part of my interview with Rick Skwiot, novelist, writing teacher, and author of the memoir “San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing,” I pry into his insights about writing.

Jerry Waxler: I was intrigued to see you immersed with these characters. You wanted deeply to learn from them about letting go and just living. And yet, you kept diving into your books. It was an interesting character portrayal of yourself, a guy who wanted to find himself in the culture and yet kept finding himself in books. I can relate! How self-conscious were you of this self-portrait? Did you have to work at the self-portrayal, or did this emerge naturally from events.

Rick Skwiot: I don’t think I consciously crafted a self-portrait here. I was just trying to report on this guy who went to Mexico and found himself, and how that came about. For most any memoirist, there are two first-person characters: the author/narrator who is writing it and the historical character who experienced the events in the book’s scenes. The author has some temporal distance from that other first-person character, in my case, the man I was some 25 years ago. I think I was able to write about him with some detachment because he isn’t me, but a character from my past who has no current existence. This was even more apparent to me when I previously wrote my childhood memoir, Christmas at Long Lake, which takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1953, when I was six years old. In fact, in early drafts I used third person to describe the six-year-old Rickey, since he seemed another person to me. (My agent and the first few publishers who read the manuscript found this rather off-putting, and I subsequently agreed and changed it to first person.) Anyway, in writing San Miguel de Allende, Mexico I was able to draw from extensive journals I kept in those days, a day-by-day reporting of what I did, what I read, and what I thought. So I was able to recount fairly accurately who I was in those days, and to perceive the significance of events then thanks to the authorial distance of some decades.

Jerry: In your book you show scenes when you are reading great works of literature or working on your own writing. I enjoy this aspect of your book. You let me watch your literary coming of age, during which you drink in the literature that came before you so you can learn how to write your own. Could you say a bit about your choice to put your literary passions into the story of your stay in San Miguel Allende.

Rick: I think you’ve said it pretty well, Jerry. The great literature I was being exposed to then for the first time affected me deeply and altered me–it was an important part of my experience. And these were the giants I was, and am still, measuring myself against as a writer. I know there are all sorts of writers just as there are all sorts of people, but in my heart I never really wanted to be a commercial writer but a writer of literature. This was a great and difficult leap for me, to aspire to do that, as I came from a working-class environment where there were no writers, much less literary artists. Being a creative artist just wasn’t on the radar for me. But as I grew and developed and gained confidence, I kept raising my goals and expectations for myself. As I show in my memoir, at the time I first went to San Miguel de Allende I was still very unsure of myself as a writer and an artist–I had hopes, but that was it. But I also had some great mentors who pointed the way–Chekhov, Simenon, Cather, Hemingway, et al. These were my instructors and role models. They were pivotal in my development and important characters in my life, even though I had never met them. Thus they had to be characters in my book.

Jerry: Fascinating. That explains a lot. Your journey from a working class family to an young man who wanted to be a literary writer is an unspoken subtext to the memoir driving the protagonist. It’s like I am now seeing the backstory that makes the book work even though in the book you don’t show scenes from that childhood. I love it. Many memoir writers struggle with how much backstory to put into their memoir, and now I’m seeing that sometimes it’s okay to let the  character’s personality speak for itself.

Rick: Exactly. The reader will get it if it is embedded honestly…I’m now writing a novel in which an angel from Writer’s Heaven, Ernest Hemingway, acts as a mentor to my protagonist, so I’ve been immersed in what the real-life Hemingway had to say about the craft of writing. I think his “Iceberg Theory” from Death in the Afternoon applies here: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, there would be no struggle, no story, if our protagonist had come from, say, a family of writers or artists or successful people who paved the way for him–or at least it would have been a different type of struggle. But I knew my working-class backstory (and the role it played in my struggle) and had previously written about it with affection in my childhood memoir Christmas at Long Lake. There you see that while I had no material class advantages to speak of, I was given one great gift, a hard love that granted me emotional security and kept me grounded–which ultimately enabled me to venture out spiritually, intellectually and artistically. As to my Mexican memoir, I sensed rightly, I think, that any extensive digression into my childhood or my frugal family background would interfere with the narrative drive and perhaps come off as self-indulgent.
In the next part, I ask more questions about Rick Skwiot’s journey as a writer.

Click here for Part 1 of the interview with Rick Skwiot

Click here for Part 2 of the interview with Rick Skwiot

Notes

Rick Skwiot’s Blog, “New Underground”

Rick Skwiot’s Home Page

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Author Interview, Rick Skwiot | Please Comment »

Turning Journals and Notebooks Into a Memoir

Friday, January 28th, 2011

by Jerry Waxler

When Rick Skwiot moved to Mexico in the 1980s, he had two goals. He wanted to find himself spiritually and also find his writing voice. Years later, he wrote about the trip in the memoir “San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing.”

In the first part of this interview I asked Rick to help me understand more about the spiritual aspects of his search. Now in this and following parts, I ask about his literary journey. The book explains that he wanted to be a writer. I wanted to learn more about how he fulfilled those dreams by turning his powerful life experience into a book that invites readers to relive it with him.

Jerry Waxler: You mentioned your writing journals quite a bit, since writing was one of the things you did to pass the time. Explain how you used your writing notebooks while you were in Mexico.

Rick Skwiot: My journals were crucial in my development as a writer. Not only did I record events of my life, but I also, as you suggest, wrote fictional scenes there, experimented with writing styles, penned criticism on the books I was reading, recorded my dreams and more. It was a mishmash of fact and fiction that would likely misinform and mislead any reader other than myself. My journals were a cauldron from which a writer emerged, finally. They also taught me the discipline of writing every day and thinking every day, examining my life and the world around me with a sense of writerly investigation. For a writer, most everything is research and potential material, which makes us such charming companions, half vulture, half snake-in-the-grass.

Jerry: As you were attempting to write the memoir, what help were your original contemporaneous notebooks? How did it feel reading that old material?

Rick: A curious thing occurred regarding the notebooks’ content. I had mined the notebooks/journals years earlier when writing my two novels set in Mexico, and had not revisited them in perhaps ten years. But when I did I found that the fictionalized versions of events, from my novels, had come to be my reality, how I remembered things. My contemporaneous reporting of events shocked me at times, for I had not remembered things that way at all. This showed how unreliable memory (and perhaps a memoir) can be, and alerted me to the power and truth of fiction. I was also surprised by how hungry I was back then. I was on a compulsive quest to find myself, and my journal notes underscore how serious and driven I was, how dead set on saving myself. It was somewhat frightening in retrospect, for I saw what peril I was in at the time, and found myself feeling sympathetic and paternalistic toward my former self.

Jerry: How have your habits and strategies with notebooks changed over the years? How do you use them now?

Rick: Nowadays I don’t keep a regular journal and only start doing so when I am beginning to work on a book. Then I use a notebook to sketch out plot, dialogue, scenes, characters, etc. So it is more of a workbook than a journal. Also, I think my life has become much more mundane–which is a mixed blessing–and doesn’t inspire journal entries. Also, I have come to trust my memory, which is a writer’s capital, his material. I know everything that has happened to me is in my mind, in my conscious or unconscious, and that it will surface in some form when I need it. I noted this in particular when writing my childhood memoir, Christmas at Long Lake. When I began writing a scene and put myself in that place emotionally and, through the imagination, physically, I began to see and remember–the sights, smells, words, feelings–from my childhood. It was in some ways a very moving experience, spending time again, in that way, with my late parents, when they were young and vital. Most bittersweet and affecting for me.

Jerry: Many aspiring memoir writers look at their pile of notes, their many memories, and feelings, and are daunted by the prospect of turning them into a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. What was that like for you, as you tried to find a theme or organization or thread of this book?

Rick: That’s always the most agonizing and daunting part of writing a book, organizing and structuring it. What I try to do, and what I advise my writing students to do, is to think in terms of scenes–as in theater, compressed, meaningful action that takes place in real time at one location with a few important characters, and dialogue that drives the narrative forward and reveals character. I will note down what scenes I feel are obligatory, scenes I know I want in the book, somewhere, or that need to be there. Then I start to organize them in some effective way–whether it’s chronologically, thematically, geographically or whatever. I often do use a schematic in doing this–I draw boxes that represent scenes–so I can see what needs to happen first, what relationships and interconnections there are between various incidents and characters, and so I can easily move things around. Once I arrive at a workable ordering of the scenes, I can write them (or often I write the scenes first and worry later about where they go.) The last thing then is to write the summary and transitions, the authorial intrusions, if any, and needed exposition. Of course this is a very messy and recursive process, and difficult and potentially heartbreaking. You can write the whole book and then see that one particular scene is out of place, so you have to tear the book all apart and do another organization and a lot more work. This was even more daunting in the pre-computer days, when each draft meant having to re-type the whole manuscript. But I was happy to do it, as I thought such rigors weeded out the dilettantes and other writers not as insanely committed as I.

Jerry: There was a rhythm to the way the book was set up, with your initial burst of enthusiasm, some rethinking, then a trip back to the states and the start of a second round. I liked the rise and fall and rise again. It felt organic and natural. This is especially important for writers because the middle of a book is supposed to be the hardest, keeping the energy moving during the “long middle.” It’s hard enough to get the overall structure. You have done an excellent job of finding internal structure too. Talk about how you worked through the material looking for the shape.

Rick: I am gratified that the book’s structure “felt organic and natural,” because it was arrived at after a lot of trial and error and anxiety. Yes, I did labor over it, and it changed shape drastically over the ten years of its gestation. At last–and this came after numerous drafts over the years–I settled on starting the book in the middle of things, at the pivotal and dramatic point when I broke my ankle playing basketball on the Mexican team. Then most of what happens in the first half of the book is told in flashback. This gave me the opportunity to order things thematically and control pacing. Part two, my return to Mexico, is told more chronologically. The key for writers is the get the story going right off the bat, to get and hold the reader’s interest and attention. Once you have some conflict or problem on the table that captivates the reader, then you can begin to layer in some of the needed exposition, in a judicious way. This applies to creative nonfiction as well as fiction. It is perhaps the most difficult thing about writing a book, keeping the narrative driving forward.

End of Part Two

In the next part, I ask more questions about Rick Skwiot’s journey as a writer.

Click here for Part 1 of the interview with Rick Skwiot

Click here for Part 3, A Memoirist Talks About the Backstory of His Memoir

Click here for Part 4 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Tenacity of a Writer

Click here for Part 5 of the interview with Rick Skwiot, Novelist or memoirist

Notes

Rick Skwiot’s Blog, “New Underground”

Rick Skwiot’s Home Page

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Author Interview, Journaling, Rick Skwiot | 1 Comment »

Memoir Interview with Matthew Polly Author of “American Shaolin”

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

by Jerry Waxler

Matthew Polly’s memoir, “American Shaolin” chronicles the two years he learned Kung Fu in an ancient temple in China. The trip took place in the 90s when the giant nation was moving rapidly out of isolation and into the global economy. In this interview, I ask Polly questions about writing his memoir, about Coming of Age, and about seeking Truth.

Jerry Waxler: In your childhood you moved from one home to another, creating a radical shift in your self-image and your need to fit in. Then you moved from the Midwest to a top Ivy League school, a huge cultural change. Then again, you made the transition to China. I’m fascinated by these major transitions, because transitions always contain power, as we try to reclaim our center in the new place. My question, though relates to you as the memoir writer. How did writing the book help you make sense of the transitions?

Matthew Polly: It forced me to re-experience my time in China. Also because the book was written 10 years after I’d gone, I was able to look back at my younger self from a certain distance.

JW: Did writing help you gather all these disparate parts into a unified whole?

MP: I don’t know. I’m not sure we are ever really a unified whole. What it did more than anything was to put that part of my life to rest. I stopped thinking about China as much.

JW: What were some of the issues, if any, of going from a private person, known mainly by your friends, to a public one, known by strangers? Of course as an author, you now want to be known by as many strangers as possible. Help us understand this shift out of privacy.

MP: It didn’t bother me at all, strangely enough. As you said, I wish more strangers knew about me, provided they actually bought the book. I don’t get stopped on the street, but I do receive a fairly large amount of email from people wanting to compliment the book or talk about the book or ask for advice. On the one hand, this is highly flattering; on the other, it is a new burden, because I try to reply to everyone in detail. The other big difference is that it gave me a huge increase in credibility as I was researching my next book about the sport of mixed martial arts, which was nice.

JW: The years at the Shaolin Temple represent remarkable self-sacrifices. You gave up so much. You invested years to learn a new language. You became a foreigner in a foreign land, a celibate monk who worked hard every day to learn to fight. You immersed yourself voluntarily in the third world poverty of rural China. And yet, you never ask the reader for sympathy or admiration. How did you achieve your “this is just the way it was” style of writing? Did you workshop to weed out self-consciousness? What steps did you go through to generate the sincere, revealing tone of the book?

MP: It’s the old saying: “tragedy plus time equals comedy.” It was ten years later. And it was hard to feel sorry for myself when so many good things came out of the sacrifice. For one, I was a stronger and more interesting person. For two, I won the Rhodes scholarship almost solely on the strength of the trip. (My grades weren’t that great.) If I had written the book right after my return as I tried and failed to do, there probably would have been much more “feel sorry for me” to it.

JW: At first you were peaceful, almost a wimp. But later, you hit people in the face until they bled, and got so fired up with adrenaline you were screaming with rage. This raised some weird moral questions for me. This wasn’t an action movie. You were really hurting people. I started to worry, “hey, maybe he’s not such a nice guy after all.” When you portrayed yourself as an aspiring “bad ass” did it make you cringe, and ask “was I really that crazy?” Or did you appreciate discovering that side of yourself? Do you like to think of yourself that way now?

MP: I often ask myself: “Did I really do all those things? Was I that crazy?” But I am happy I integrated my shadow self. It wasn’t that I didn’t have that anger inside me; it’s just that it was terribly repressed. But as you suggest, as the anger came out it started to worry me that I was becoming a bad person, a bully. It didn’t bother me to reveal that. I thought there was a great moral lesson in it. What really bothered me was writing that first chapter where I revealed that I had been a wimpy kid who had been bullied. I wrote that chapter last. I still had strong feelings of shame over my cowardice as a child.

JW: I really loved your comments about visionary experience and other direct experiences of transcendent presence. It was fascinating that you found a surprising number who had such experiences themselves. How did you feel about turning such private experiences into a public statement? Does it make you feel vulnerable? Did anyone ever accuse you of being weird for expressing this interest?

MP: I was concerned about revealing it in the Lao-tzu sense: “The knowers do not say, and the sayers do not know.” But I felt an obligation to reveal it and let people know that Shaolin wasn’t just about learning how to fight, it was also a spiritual center. That kung fu is a form of spiritual practice and that I knew that for a fact because I had directly experienced it.

No one ever accused me of being weird. Quite the opposite. I received a number of emails early on from people who have had their own spiritual experiences. Some were very interesting, some were slightly disturbed. I think it is the Upanishads that says something to the effect, “the line between divinity and insanity is as thin and sharp as a razor’s edge.” But I may have that quote wrong.

JW: You were apparently on a spiritual search and yet after three years of studying religion and philosophy, your memoir contains hardly anything about your belief system. I consider this absence of preaching to be an impressive feat. You stuck to your story rather than reported your belief systems. Please comment on your choice to hold back so completely on ideas, belief, theology, and so on.

MP: That is very astute of you to notice and kind of you to say. The grandiose answer would be: Jesus taught through parables. The truth is I’m very uncomfortable when people evangelize, so I didn’t want to do that to readers of my book. I felt that the moral thing to do was simply recount my experiences as best I could and let the readers draw their own conclusions.

JW: Are you tempted to write more about what you believe? Why or why not.

MP: No, I’m opposed to it. I think of myself primarily as a colorful storyteller, not a preacher or a missionary. It strikes me as dangerously arrogant to believe that “I know the truth and you should believe as I do, because I tell you so.” It’s the sin of pride. It’s a short step between writing about what you believe and expecting others to do the same.

JW: I was delighted with the way you end the book. I don’t like to discuss endings in detail, because I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that the last section of the book and especially the last line created an excellent effect, wrapping up the whole thing in one fell swoop. The end is an important part of any book, because that’s when readers are trying to make sense of what they just read, and the writer must guide them from his life back to theirs. You performed this part of your task beautifully. Was it hard for you to come up with the ending? What went in to creating it? Did you know where the book was going to end when you started it?

MP: Thank you. The story goes: I had finished the manuscript. My book editor read it and suggested that I should really go back to the Temple and see how it had changed for the closing chapter. I pitched the idea to Slate, so I could cover the cost of the trip. (Your readers can find the article here.)

The final two paragraphs of the book just flowed out of me. I didn’t know what I was going to write until I reread what I had just written. When that happens, it is almost always great material.

JW: How did this brainstorm about the ending work in with the overall structure of the rest of the book? Did finding the right ending make you rethink the beginning?

MP: I liked how the ending had turned out so much that I went back and rewrote the entire manuscript. It wasn’t the structure so much as the quality of the work. I’d reached a new level with the epilogue and I needed to improve the rest of the book to match it.

JW: What are you working on next?

MP: I’ve been researching a book about mixed martial arts (MMA). It has involved getting hit in the head frequently. Probably not the best thing for a writer.

—

Notes

Click here for the Amazon Page for “American Shaolin” by Matthew Polly.

To read my essays about the memoir “American Shaolin,” click the links below:
Princeton Student transfers to the School of Hard Knocks or Learning Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple

Flawed heroes and mechanical body parts: Shaolin Memoir Part 2

Seeking Truth in a far off land, “American Shaolin” Part 3

For more background about the modern history of China, see my essay about the memoir, “The Man on Mao’s Right.

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order my step-by-step how-to guide to write your memoir, click here.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Memoirs | Please Comment »

Author Interview: Curtis Smith talks about publishing in Literary Journals

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

By Jerry Waxler

At this year’s Philadelphia Stories Push to Publish conference,  Curtis Smith played an important role, by throwing in a few choice comments about how much fun writing is. (To read more about his comments, click here ). One of the parts of writing that seemed to be working especially well for Curtis was his regular publication in literary journals. Since he was getting so much satisfaction from that aspect of his craft, I asked him to share some tips and pointers with the rest of us. Our interview follows:

Jerry Waxler: Your bio says you have published in 50 journals. Could you say more about how you found these journals? How much legwork do you do to become familiar with the journals in your “space.”

Curtis Smith: In the pre-internet days, I found them using books like The Writers Market or Dustbooks Small Press directory.  I’d familiarize myself with them mainly through the stories reprinted in the annual anthologies like Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, or the O’Henry series.  Sometimes I’d order a particular journal; other times I’d go to the local college library, which carried quite a few lit journals.  These days I mainly use websites like Duotrope or New Pages to find markets.  And I visit the journals’ websites and see what kind of work they post.

JW: Do each of the journals tend to have their own “voice” — and if so, when searching for a journal you will submit to, how much must you understand their voice preferences?

CS: Some journals do have a unique voice, the independents mostly, print places like Hobart and Monkeybicycle and online places like Smokelong.  These days, a website will give you a good indication of a journal’s aesthetic.  I think if you’re dealing with a journal affiliated with a college, you can find the turnover of editors may lead to a somewhat less defined voice–that said, many university-sponsored journals are beautiful and have a long history of publishing great work.

JW: How did you decide which journals would be most appropriate for the nonfiction essays you wrote about your relationship with your young son?

CS: That’s been more of a crapshoot–since many journals only have one or two essays per issue, it was harder for me to get a feel for that.  Some markets I did target–I had a piece in The Humanist and a few others in special theme issues.

JW: During your writing process, do you ever write with a particular editor or publication in mind?

CS: Rarely–sometimes I’ll see a call for a theme issue that piques my interest, but usually I just write for myself.

JW: You mentioned at the Philadelphia Stories conference that once you have published in a journal, you develop a rapport with the editor. Could you say more about that process or give an example of how it has worked for you.

CS: I’ve been lucky to click with a few editors–the collection of essays coming out next year will feature three essays that first appeared in Lake Effect and two that first appeared in Mississippi Review.  I’ve developed a long relationship with other editors with my fiction–my last two story collections featured a trio of very long stories that first came out in The Greensboro Review.  I also have a couple places that have taken a number of my flash fictions.  If I enjoy an editor and his journal, I’ll gladly submit more in the future.

JW: When your work is published in a journal, of course the journal’s stamp of approval gives you authority as a writer. I imagine, then, that as an aspiring writer, you would want to be accepted into the most prestigious publication, the higher the better. Right? How do you even know which journal is more prestigious and which is less so?

CS: Of course you want your work to appear in the best journal possible.  And there are some wonderful journals out there, but outside that first tier of places like The Paris Review and Ploughshares and Georgia Review, there are any number of fine journals putting out great work.  How does one know which journals are good?  I think you just have to keep your eyes open–check out the annual anthologies like the Best American Series and Pushcart and see where they’re getting their work from.  Listen to what your friends are reading and where they’re publishing.

JW: What sorts of feedback do you get when publishing in a journal? Do you hear from readers? Is it like a tree falling in a forest? Is there a specialized audience that gets to know your work?

CS: It used to be pretty rare that you’d get feedback.  If you were lucky, you’d get a Pushcart nomination or a mention in the Best American series.  But now with the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, you get a lot more feedback.  If I read a story or essay I enjoy, I make sure to drop a line to the author if we’ve hooked up on a site – and many people do it in return.  The audience is pretty much limited to writers and fans of lit fiction and journals, but it is a bigger audience than before.

JW: Do you put much of your own marketing/networking energy into publicizing your piece in the journal?

CS: Not much beyond a posting on Facebook.  I add links to online pieces to my website.  I save the bigger pushes for my books.

JW: Please give examples of journals you published non-fiction essays in, and some thoughts about why these particular ones worked out for you.

CS: I’ve published a number of essays in Mississippi Review and Lake Effect.  Others have appeared in Turnrow, Bellingham Review, Philadelphia Stories, Red Cedar Review, Inkpot, The Humanist, and a number of others.

The two essays from Mississippi Review were theme issues, so they worked out because my work could address those themes.  And the same for the Humanist.  The others were just nonfiction spots in lit journals–and I think they fit because my writing comes from a fiction-writer’s perspective, and I bring fictional techniques into my work.

JW: Many of the readers of my blog “Memory Writers Network” do not come from a “literary” or “creative writing” background. They are just looking to develop the best writing skills possible so they can share parts of their lives. Are there journals that would appeal to this segment of the writing public, the well-told stories, that would not necessarily earn high grades in a creative writing class?

CS: That’s an interesting question.  I’m not sure.  I’m guessing that journals would, by nature, appeal to the folks with literary and creative writing backgrounds.  That said, I think there are some wonderful journals that have fine literary work that is also very accessible.  For the readers of your blog who are interested in nonfiction more than fiction, I’d suggest Creative Nonfiction or Fourth Genre.  The online journal Brevity is also very interesting (short-short nonfiction).

Notes

Click here for Curtis Smith’s home page.

Click here for Philadelphia Stories Home Page

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Author Interview, Literary Non-fiction, Literary Publication | 1 Comment »

Memoir author talks about writing, sharing, and healing

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

By Jerry Waxler

Bill Strickland’s memoir, “Ten Points,” weaves together three things: a promise he made to his daughter, a summer of cycling to fulfill that promise, and his insights into the wounds of his own childhood. To see my review of his memoir, click here. To learn more about his experience of digging so deeply into his past and then sharing it with the public, I asked Bill Strickland to answer a few questions about writing and publishing his memoir. Here is the second part of the interview I conducted with him.

Jerry: Many writers feel a concern about sharing their private lives in public. I imagine this was even more intense for you, given the very personal nature of some of your disclosures. What was it like to share these private experiences?

Bill: At first I was terrified. When I first met my agent David Black, I couldn’t even look him in the eye as I tried to describe what I thought the book might be, even without details. I also hated sending the story to my mother, but it turned out to be good; we talked like we never had before ? a conversation that made its way into the end of the book.

After I submitted the manuscript, and it made the rounds through the offices at Hyperion, I was speaking to someone about the book – of course, right? – and the experience was so bizarre that it cured me of shock. I was lucky to be able to realize that everyone was going to know the worst parts of my life. And I’m luckier, I think, that for some reason I don’t very much care.

David Black, my agent, gave me some great advice when he read my first chapters. “Get ready for everyone on earth to understand you,” he said. And that’s been true: When I lose my temper at work with friends or I’m snotty at work or something, it’s not because I’m having a bad day but because my dad stuck a gun in my mouth ? that sort of thing. Everyone else has all these potential motivations that are hidden so we assume they’re just having a crappy day or are sick or tired or justified in their actions. But for me, now, for everyone who’s read my book the temptation is to attribute everything I do to something they’ve read. I don’t hold that against them. It’s probably hard not to do.

Most people are nervous when they approach me to talk about the story. They’re not sure if mentioning some scenes will open some sort of traumatic wound that’s been scabbed over. I try to put them at ease, and also try to apologize for the graphic nature of the story.

The bizarre thing is that I’m more myself now than I ever was. Rather than being driven or affected by shame, all the mistakes I make are my own mistakes, all the anger is my own, all the stupid decisions are just me being a stupid human, which is all I ever wanted. I’m more me than ever, yet to everyone else, I’m more the character in the book than ever.

The only concession I think I make is that when I give a book reading I try to select a section based on the audience. The story about my father making me race the killer poodle works pretty well.

Jerry: What advice would you give to people about looking at their own darker memories, and how to decide whether to dig deeper, or keep them hidden, or share them with others?

Bill: I imagine that the best way to go about our lives is different in at least some measure for each of us. Mining the hole inside me worked out; it might not for someone else. For me, it worked out that to be successful in a sport I fell in love, I had to spend a lot of time immersed in suffering, turmoil, unpredictability and other conditions that evoked my memories – and that one positive trait I possess, tenacity, was the answer to the memories as well as the sport.

Jerry: How would you describe what happened to you by writing this book – for example was it healing, redemption, therapy?

Bill: It felt like I was purified in some kind of fire. I don’t think I can make up for the rotten things I’ve done, nor do I think I have to make up for the things that were done to me. I just wanted to be shed of all of them, start fresh. My idea was never that I would be perfect, or even necessarily a better person. I just wanted to be a person.

The races themselves were the vehicles of my transformation . . . the experience of trying so hard, of failing, of succeeding only to fail again, of being outmatched but not quitting, then of having to quit anyway – all of that thrust my childhood back into my life. So my introspection took place at 30 mph, 180 beats per minute, 500 feet off the back of the pack or rubbing elbows with a whirling madman. Bike racing, as it turns out, feels like being burned clean.

Jerry: Some of the humiliating experiences your dad put you through were extremely difficult for me to read. Did you ever consider damping the book down to make it more palatable?

Bill: My editor at Bicycling magazine, Steve Madden, pushed me to be honest about my life in a feature story I wrote about cardiac health back in 2003. I was recounting my family’s cardiac history, and starting writing not just about the physical heart but the emotional concept of heart, and in a draft I dropped the detail that my father had once shot my dog, and I remember Steve saying, “That goes in,” then asking for more. At that time in my life I wasn’t going to tell anyone all that had happened to me, but the incidents I sketched out in that article marked the first time I’d admitted that what went on in my past wasn’t some hilarious caper of misadventures and loveable anti-heroes; that started a change that developed as I wrote the book.

Jerry: What role did writing play in helping you come to terms with your past?

Bill: Writing, as it turned out, was a way to process it, organize it, make sense of it. There was no narrative to my quest until I made it a narrative, in other words. I mean, we all decide where the stories begin and end in our lives — plenty of incidents related to that story happened before and after the framework of the book, but I made sense of my life within those particular boundaries.

One of the oddities about my personality is that I often seem to not know, or fully understand, what I think or believe until I write it down. It’s been this way for me as long as I can remember, just the way I relate to the world, a quirk of my mental make-up. I was one of those kids, for instance, who could learn how to hit a cue ball or build a go-cart from reading about it more so than from watching it demonstrated.

Jerry: I recently met John Bradshaw, who has spent his whole life working on the topic of shame. This fascinates me, since as near as I can tell it’s one of the main deterrents to introspection. Help me understand your willingness to stare your disturbing memories in the face and keep going.

Bill: Well, I was desperate. When Natalie was born, I was actually terrified that I might turn into the kind of monster my father had been. My choices were either to leave, to destroy myself, or to destroy the monster that was in me and wanted out. (I had no idea there was another option, which I found out only at end of that long season, which was to unmask the monster and see that it was only shame.)

At the end of the last race of the season, when I failed to get the ten points and had to deal with my failure and the fact that it had happened right in front of Natalie and my wife and my friends, I realized that the monster I’d always feared was nothing but shame. And I knew that exposing shame to the world would be the best way to neutralize it ? which meant I wanted to not only write my story but publish it so I would become transparent. I also wanted to keep my promise to Natalie. I couldn’t give her ten points (the score), but I could give her Ten Points (the book).

It wasn’t that I faced shame like some brave and noble human, but rather that the racing, the failing at racing, and the succeeding at admitting I’d failed, shone a bright light on the shame that was in me. I mean, there it was: I couldn’t not see it.

Jerry: Do you speak or do any sort of advocacy for victims of child abuse?

Bill: I don’t feel qualified to speak knowledgeably about anyone’s abuse except my own, or about the causes, effects or other commonalities. I just haven’t done that much research. The one thing I feel confident saying, which is in the book, is that I believe all of us contend with our own personal demons (though the intensity and source varies) and that for each of us, our obsessions, whatever they are – bike racing for me, stamp collecting, gardening, or whatever – can teach us all we need to overcome or learn to live with those demons.

Jerry: What’s next?

Bill: I’m done writing about myself. Next summer the paperback of Ten Points comes out. There has been some interest in movie rights to the story, though that’s notoriously unpredictable and not to be counted on, and I’m not inclined to see many of the scenes from the book acted out.

Next summer is also the release of a book I co-wrote with Johan Bruyneel (Lance Armstrong’s team director), We Might as Well Win (Houghton-Mifflin). Stories from Bruyneel’s life illustrate all he’s learned about how to win, whether it’s in the Tour de France or in life.

This is the second of a two part interview. To read more of this interview, click here.
Note: Foster Winans reports a similar experience in which revealing his observations of childhood helped him deepen his relationship with his mother, rather than alienating her as is so often feared. I comment more on Foster’s experience in this review.

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Author Interview, Heal from Abuse | Please Comment »

« Older Entries