Posts Tagged ‘Storytelling’

« Older Entries

Memoir writing is a form of therapy

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

By Jerry Waxler

I sat in bed, beneath a six foot poster of Picasso’s Guernica taped to my wall. The book I held, Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents,” was probably not on the summer reading lists for many other 17 year-old boys in 1965, but I was on a mission. I needed to figure out how to become an adult. The book by the father of Twentieth Century psychiatry raised more questions about war, peace, and human nature than it answered. I kept looking, and over the next few years, broadened my search, delving into science, psychology, and social theories.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out my place in the world. By my early 20s, I began to meditate, watching my thoughts like a river, learning that I didn’t need to jump in after each one. In my 40s, I discovered psychotherapy. I became an instant believer, grateful to receive help on my introspective quest. I loved talk therapy so much, I returned to school to earn a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology.

Finally, by the age of 52, I was fully invested in adulthood and one of my first steps as an adult was to figure out how to help other people. I put out my therapist’s shingle on a busy street and nothing happened. Few people were willing to spend money to tell me their most intimate thoughts. It turns out talk therapy is not for everyone. Frustrated in my desire to help, I continued to search. Now, instead of looking for knowledge, I looked for connections with people.

Writing gathers, shapes, and then shares

During my long search for meaning, I wrote regularly in a journal. The flow of words on paper soothed my agitated mind, an experience shared by many journal writers. Journaling allows sentences to pour from the cloud of unknowing, allowing you to verbalize what you didn’t even know you were thinking. Natalie Goldberg, arguably the most influential writing teacher of our era, suggests that powerful writing emerges from deep within our spiritual and emotional core. When such authentic feelings burst from their hidden places, we feel a lift and clarity.

Entering the Twenty First Century, I was stuck in this puzzle. By filling journals I was pleasing myself, but I was not learning the principles of storytelling, and so I was powerless to please readers. And then, I began to notice memoirs abundantly filling shelves. I began to read them and my questions about therapy and life journey snapped into place.

Memoirs push us towards the heart of civilization

Each memoir taught me about the workings of an author’s life. I started looking into this system and began to experiment with it myself. By pouring my life into a story, I saw the boundaries and definition and shape of myself. And the most exciting thing about memoir writing is that I can share it with others.

When writing our lives, we have no therapist to offer feedback, to ask us to explain a feeling, or see more deeply into a particular situation. However, in a sense, we have a more natural resource than simply one individual guide. By writing for a broader audience, memoir writers follow the form called Story, with its familiar beginning, middle, and end. The broken thoughts that make no sense begin to take shape. Like assembling a puzzle, the pieces fit together into a continuous whole.

Once a story is on paper, any reader can say if the explanations sound complete. How do they know? Because by following the ancient principles of storytelling, memoirs push us to organize experiences into the structure civilization has been teaching us since the beginning of time.

Life into myth, life into literature

Until I read the work of the scholar Joseph Campbell, I never realized stories were so important. I thought books and movies were just for entertainment, the evening news was just for information, and literature classes just allowed us to admire the expressions of previous centuries.

Thanks to Campbell’s work, I know that stories are everywhere, and that we use them to discover fundamental insights into the human condition. Through his interpretation, I realize that memoirs are exactly the tool I’ve been looking for. By reading them, I understand the shape of another person’s life. By writing, I develop a deeper understanding of my own.

Perhaps when people write memoirs, they are participating in the original therapy. Sigmund Freud apparently thought so, since his technique consisted of asking clients to tell stories about themselves. Now as I learn to tell my own stories, I see how my life works, and finally discover the river into which my years have been pouring me all along. Memoir writing is a social form of therapy, joining us through understanding ourselves and our relationship to each other.

Note: This entry is a rewrite of an essay first posted on September 28, 2007

—

Notes
While talk-therapy is studied in the psychology department, literature is studied elsewhere. So combining the form of language art known as “story” with the psychology art of healing the self does not fit nicely into an academic framework. But there are those independent thinkers within academia who make the bridge.

For a more literary explanation of how memoirs heal, read the fantastic book Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo, a literature professor at Hunter college. The book immerses you in the way memoir writing heals.
Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo

For more about research into the psychology of talking and writing, see:

Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions by James W. Pennebaker

For more about cognitive therapy, google for Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, two of the founders of that movement.

For the brain science of cognitive work, see Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz book on combating OCD with cognitive methods.
Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffrey M. Schwartz

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on this blog, click here.

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Introspection, Lifelong Learning, therapy | 14 Comments »

Interviewing is an Act of Love, Even After Memory Starts to Fail

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

Last year I visited a recording booth run by the nonprofit organization StoryCorps. The purpose of the booth was to invite people to interview and record stories of their elders. Thanks to its presence in communities and the publication of stories through National Public Radio, StoryCorps has become an influential advocate for the simple act of asking, listening, and recording the stories of our elders and each other.

Thanks to the publicity and outreach of the StoryCorps, and other social factors, the general culture has become increasingly interested in preserving the stories of their elders. And yet, for many people, a sensitive topic arises. They fear it may be too late, because Alzheimer’s is stealing their loved ones’ memories.

And so it was with great interest that I recently heard that the StoryCorps is investigating this exact problem, trying to find the stories of those whose memory is starting to fail. The program is called the Memory Loss Initiative. To learn more, I interviewed Dina Zempsky, senior outreach coordinator of the initiative.

My first question related to my surprise. How could an interviewer reach past the ravages of the disease to reclaim the past. Zempsky explained that short term memory deteriorates before long term memory, so people who forget what happened five minutes ago can have a clear memory of something that took place 50 years ago. I knew this was true in principle, but didn’t realize these memories would be accessible in coherent stories .

Zempsky assured me that the Memory Loss Initiative has successfully helped many people gather such stories. She said, “When people actually make the effort to interview their parents, the resulting stories are usually clearer and more interesting than people expect.” And the session of storytelling does more than simply pass on information. Zempsky explained that the families of Alzheimer’s sufferers have come to expect failure and disappointment in their attempts to communicate. These interviews allow them to share intact memories, offering everyone a sense of success, restoring dignity through the simple act of asking and listening.

I asked Zempsky to help me understand, “Why don’t people know about these memories? Why aren’t more families connecting to these past experiences?”

She said, “Even when their memory is intact, most of us don’t take the time to sit down and ask questions.”

Her answer hurt me with the same nostalgic regret I have heard from so many others. Even when my parents were alive and clear minded, I didn’t ask them about their younger days. In the absence of any intentional attempt to elicit the past, their history remained hidden.

When I hung up the phone, I was stunned by this offer of hope for people who think it’s too late. To learn more, I turned to another national organization whose members preserve stories, called the Association of Personal Historians. One Personal Historian, Sarah White, shared her experience interviewing a client with failing memory.

“My client and I had completed the interviews, and they went much as other people suggest — he was able to recall past events quite clearly,” said White. “In fact, he did a masterful job of dictating his life story; completely without notes, he delivered a story with a clear sense of what each episode meant in the big picture of his life. It was an honor to be witness to that act. He had been a great attorney, and all that courtroom prowess was evident as he worked from what was left of his memory.”

She continued, “Only specifics such as names and dates were missing. I certainly didn’t want to pause him to ask “Now what was that guy’s name? How was it spelled?” while he was in the midst of that creative act. But now he’s a couple years older and foggier.  So my problem is figuring out how to fill in the blanks that his mind didn’t supply the first time and is having even more trouble this time around.”

The solution for this particular elder was to research the details amidst his personal papers. But for the rest of us, this is a cautionary tale. Get those stories while there is still time. One step you can take is to go to the StoryCorps website, under Memory Loss Initiative, and learn from the interviewing tips.  If you live near one of their booths, you could visit them in person, and directly benefit from their recording studios and interviewing guidance. Or you can hire them to visit your organization. To keep their work alive, make a charitable contribution.  Visit their website for more details.

And while you are preserving the memories of your loved ones, consider preserving your own. Research indicates that education, mental exercise, and other mental stimulation can reduce the ravages of Alzheimer’s. Of course, it’s not possible to know for sure, but just as physical exercise protects the heart and arteries, it makes sense that mental stimulation will protect your neurons. And it’s fun to stay mentally active so it’s a win-win situation. While you challenge yourself to write the stories of your life, you will stimulate your mind in the present, create a legacy of your past, and at the same time increase your chances for mental vigor for years to come.

—

Notes

StoryCorps Memory Loss Initiative, click here.

To read my observations of the StoryCorps experience, click here.

For more information about Association of Personal Historians, visit their website. And if you want to make the most of what they have to offer, consider their annual conference, to be held near Philadelphia in October, 2009.

Sarah White’s home page is http://www.whitesarah.com/

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Aging, Associations/Training, Family Memoirs, Oral History | 2 Comments »

The Birth of an Adult Storyteller

Friday, April 17th, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

When I see wrinkles, around my own eyes or someone else’s, I think of all the experiences hidden behind them, decades of life now strewn throughout the vast tundra of the mind. If only I could know those memories, they might teach me important lessons and they certainly would bring deeper appreciation for the journey. What had those eyes seen? But memories are unknowable in their scattered and disorganized state, and until recently, I was one of the multitudes who had no inkling of how to convert a lifetime of memories into a story. Now, as I scan my life, I think I see the reason.

During my childhood, every Wednesday my dad came home from his drugstore to join us for dinner. Using the table as a pulpit, Dad’s voice swelled with excitement. “This guy walked in and showed me a half empty tube of ointment. He said it wasn’t working.” Then Dad laughed. “He wanted to return it. Can you believe it?” He slapped the table. My mother, sister, and I ate quietly, and when Dad paused we said “Umm,” giving him the desired reassurance that it was the other guy who was crazy. Then he plowed on to another story and another. I barely thought about those dinners for most of my life. But now that I’m writing a memoir, I replay the scenes, and learn about my family and myself.

If Dad had been a real storyteller, he would have been attentive to his audience’s reaction, providing us with enough information to enter the scene. As a storyteller Dad would have been tuning into our response, watching our body language, and steering his story in a way that would capture and move our imagination. But Dad’s anecdotes lacked detail. And even more important, he dominated the room with his feelings, rather than giving us the psychic space to get in touch with our own. The narratives had a few elements of storytelling, but not enough to be entertaining.

Of course, I can’t just blame Dad. Storytelling is not taken very seriously in our culture, and I doubt he was taught much about it. I know I wasn’t. After 18 years of education, I can’t remember a single course about how to shape a story of myself. As a result, whenever I tried to tell about my experiences, memories tumbled and tangled and I grew accustomed to evading the subject altogether.

In my forties, I began to wish I had grown up learning this skill. At first, it was just a sadness, a gripe. I complained to the Fates, “Why didn’t I learn?” And then, when no good answer followed, I shrugged, unable to see a path beyond my limited ability.

An adult can learn to tell stories

Finally, after years of whining about not being a born story teller, I began to read books about it. For example, I read Robert McKee’s book called “Story,” and Chris Vogler’s book, “The Writer’s Journey.” Gradually I gained confidence that storytelling can be learned, and like Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, I was prepared to demand it as my inalienable right.

But I found a new problem. Trying to improve my ability to construct a story made me feel vulnerable. What if my initial attempts were laughable, amateurish, and made me look stupid? The thought of being criticized actually frightened me. Fortunately, I had already experienced and conquered a similar fear. A few years earlier, I wanted to speak in public. My initial attempts indeed made me feel stupid, moronic, and incompetent. I kept pushing. I joined Toastmasters International, attended their meetings and followed their system. After a couple of years, I was no longer afraid, and could speak in front of an audience.

I wanted to repeat this learning process, finding groups to help me overcome my fear of writing. Writing groups are harder to find than Toastmasters was, but gradually, through persistent networking and internet research, I located and joined a variety of writing groups… Some at my local library… some listed on the internet… Some monthly meetings and some annual conferences.

The more I connected with other writers, the more I realized writing was not that much different from public speaking. In both media, it was up to me to tune into the audience and make sure they were with me. Gradually, I was able to increase my confidence and improve my skill.

Pass it on

Later in his life, my father worked on his skills, too. He attended a public speaking class and I suspect one of the lessons he learned was to speak with greater awareness of his audience. It would be wonderful to talk it all over with him, but that won’t be possible. He’s moved on. And I can’t teach this information to my kids, since I don’t have any.

And that raises another challenge. Without an audience, my story does not exist, like a tree unheard, falling in a forest. So now I research further and find memoir, senior, and other groups where people share their lives. The effort has ignited my imagination, and propelled me on a fascinating journey. Speaking and writing with them opens me to a new way of relating to people. Now, I can reveal the stories behind my own wrinkles. And by listening and reading, I am discovering how other people earned theirs.

—

Notes:

Online critique groups: Internet Writers Workshop,
National Association of Memoir Writers, NAMW,

Toastmasters International

Ronni Bennett’s elder story telling site
Sharon Lippincott’s Memory Writing Blog

Yahoo group discussion for aspiring memoir writers. To subscribe send an empty email to:

lifewritersforum-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

More memoir writing resources

To see brief descriptions and links to all the essays on this blog, click here.

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

 Standard Podcast [7:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (244)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Aging, Courage to Write, Family | 8 Comments »

Yin and Yang of Storytelling – Dramatic Tension of Opposites

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

by Jerry Waxler

An author’s job is to tie us in knots, forcing us to search for relief on the next page. Thrillers easily generate tension when the hero races to find and defuse a bomb. But how do writers create tension from ordinary life? To find out how one writer achieves this creative task, I peered into the collection of short stories, “Inheritance of Exile” by Susan Muaddi Darraj.

Each story shows characters caught in the emotions and circumstances of ordinary life, and yet despite their ordinariness, I feel engaged in their struggles, turning the page to learn more. As I seek to understand how Susan Muaddi Darraj has accomplished her hold on me, I notice a particular feature of the writing. She has superbly tapped the power of opposites.

Opposites generate texture in every aspect of ordinary life: sad and happy, rich and poor, young and old, hope and despair. It’s the yin-yang of nature, that oriental principle that claims each polarity contains its opposite. I knew about the principle, but I never noticed it as a tool for storytelling. Now I discover the secret hidden in plain sight.

Opposites, by their nature, create tension, like the sparks that jump across the two terminals of a battery. The tension pulls together when opposites attract, or pushes apart when we want to maintain our distance from the other. By juxtaposing the two sides and allowing us to feel the contrast, the writer generates energy, creating an intellectual and artistic feast. Here are examples of the opposites I noticed in these stories:

Girl and boy romance

While describing a relationship, the author maintains her protagonist’s feminine needs, and at the same time, she shows a deep empathy and understanding of the boy’s perspective.

Child and parent have two very different views

She shows characters at different stages of Coming of Age, wanting to grow up, and at odds with their parents. This universal tension can be confusing and polarized. And yet, somehow, Inheritance of Exile brings enormous compassion to these situations by giving us deeper understanding of the parents’ point of view.

Tension between rich and poor

To earn a few dollars, she sells hand-made baskets at a craft fair. People with lots of money stop by to look. The contrast between their economic situation and hers crackles with tension.

Hoodlums and law abiding working people

A working man is robbed at gun point, showing the stark contrast between these two lifestyles. The man works hard, pushing himself through the daily grind to support his family. The hoodlums break the law and steal what he built up. The scene creates an intense contrast of these opposing life choices.

Relationships with Father vs. Mother

The protagonist’s relationship with her mother and with her father are each formidable, each rich in emotion, tension, and love. The real power, though, comes from the juxtaposition of the child’s relationship with each. The difference in her connection with each of these two parents creates enormous tension that the character must sort through, and which drag me deep into their family dynamic. Mother-love and father-love, so different and so authentic, create dramatic tension that drives me not only to turn pages, but to ponder these truths of the human condition after I have closed the book.

Palestinian (immigrant) culture and American (dominant) culture

Of course, every immigrant copes with these two opposing forces – the confining boundaries of the culture-of-origin, and the inexorable crucible of the melting pot that demands escape from that confinement. Susan does an artful job of showing her characters moving sometimes easily and sometimes awkwardly between these two different states.

Life as a balance of opposites

All of life is caught in the pincers of endless pairs of opposites. Opposites create revolutions, hatreds, and passionate love. We live day by day, constantly striving to resolve these opposites, and so, as readers, they hold us in their spell, adding tension and texture that pulls us to the next page and the next, hoping for relief. As we strive for the relief of this tension, it turns out that the tension that sometimes threatens to tear us apart is the same force that holds together these compelling stories of ordinary life.

—

Writing Prompt

To accentuate dramatic tension in your own story, look for the opposites. Use the same ones I list from Inheritance of Exile or look for others: educated and not, healthy and sick, and so on.

Notes

The famous graphic symbol of yin and yang is a circle with the two black and white interlocking shapes. It is called Taijitu. Here’s a link to a wiki page.

Visit Susan Muaddi Darraj’s home page

Visit Amazon’s page for Inheritance of Exile

 Standard Podcast [7:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (403)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Coming of age, Family, Immigration Experience, Writing Workshop | 3 Comments »

Link isolated anecdotes into a story with the power of your beliefs

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

By Jerry Waxler

A memoir starts with a single anecdote. Then another, and another. In our imagination, we know these events formed our life. But other people can’t read our imagination. They can only read what’s on the page. We must transform the anecdotes into a compelling story. The memoir writer’s job is to discover the binding that will bring the reader from one event to the next. One place to look for this continuity is in your beliefs. Beliefs are important. They influence our decisions and shape our mood and emotion. And yet few writing classes explore the impact of ideas and beliefs.

To see how ideas can influence a life, see my essay about the beliefs that changed Henry Louis Gates’ attitude towards girls. In today’s essay, I explore this strategy further by looking within a series of my own anecdotes for the underlying beliefs that could help pull them together into a story.

High School Trolley
My own school, Central High in Philadelphia, drew academically inclined boys from all over the city, so at the end of the day each of us went off in different directions. Sitting by myself on the trolley car I rode home every day, a pack of boys piled in from a nearby Catholic High School. They all knew each other and they shouted and laughed far more boisterously than the studious kids I knew. Even though they never bullied me, nor did they seem to be bullying each other, I kept very still. When I reached my stop, I nonchalantly pulled the cord to signal the driver, and squeezed my way to the door. It slapped open and I stepped down, safe again on a quiet street in familiar territory.

Brainstorm underlying ideas
I look more closely at my thoughts and feelings in this scene. What can I learn about my trust in people, my fragile pride, my ethnic identity, and the way a city kid could feel vulnerable in a crowd, hoping to remain invisible.

Freshman year debate
In Freshman year, I was a thousand miles from home, living in a high-rise dormitory at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a sprawling campus with thirty thousand students. Some upper classmen were visiting the dorm to debate the U.S. action in Vietnam, while the mainly freshman residents crowded in to the meeting room to listen. “The U.S. government is using Vietnam as an excuse to test its weapons. We shouldn’t be there.” “Oh, yeah? You’re a fool. If we don’t stop communism in Vietnam, it will spread and take over the world.”

I tried to find my own truth amidst their battle of ideas. I could barely keep up. How did these people know so much? And why were they filled with so much intensity? What did it all mean?

Sophomore Year
At the end of my freshman year, I went home to a quiet summer in Philadelphia, working as an assistant in a medical research lab, and working in my dad’s drugstore on weekends. In the fall, I returned to Madison. Amidst the hordes walking to and from class, I saw Kathy Bridgman, one of the only girls I had dated the previous year. The date didn’t go well. I had become so nervous I had to cut it short, and never went out with her again. Now, our eyes met, we smiled tentatively, and kept walking.

Walking with the crowd, I felt a  little lonely. Seeing Kathy tipped me off balance, reminding me of my social incompetence. How would I survive three more years?

Junior Year
A year later, in the fall of 1967, my hair in a frizzy mop, and sporting bushy sideburns, I approached a group of students who were gathering to block a classroom. By now, I had decided to join the protestors. Together we would alter the course of history. I crowded into a hallway of the Commerce Building, packed tightly, arms locked together. After we had been there for a while, police broke out the plate glass entry-way, stormed in and swung their clubs with force. Many students went to the hospital, including the girl who stood next to me. She needed emergency surgery for a ruptured uterus. The violence I had witnessed disturbed me. I had started out full of hope and ended more confused than ever.

What ideas drove me to protest? What other ideas drove the police to fight back with such violence? What happened to me, as my ideas shattered along with the day’s events?

Senior Year
For most of my senior year, I stayed alone in my apartment. Depressed, I skipped as many classes as possible. I was falling off the edge of my ambition, and collapsing into myself.

Search for the ideas
As these scenes first occurred to me, they seemed isolated. Now, by looking for ideas, I recognize the way crowds worked in my mind. I had always been fascinated by mobs in history. Now I could see that my academic curiosity was really about me. I was constantly looking for the balance between my desire to be inside a crowd, and my desire to be completely alone.

My Coming of Age was beset by this tension. In high school, I started out as a nerd, very much alone. Then at the university, I jumped in to crowds, deeper and deeper, until I felt stripped of my sense of individuality. I lost my momentum and collapsed back into myself. Now, to collect the events and find a conclusion, I need to show how a more balanced understanding of groups redeemed me, filled me, and brought me back to life.

These anecdotes have not yet formed a story, but now I see the thoughts that link one to the next, providing the seeds of an emotionally authentic and hopefully powerful tale, transforming isolated bits of memory into a story that will hold a reader’s attention from beginning to end.

Writing Prompt
Look at some of the anecdotes in your notebook. See if you can tease out the ideas that added power to each scene and linked it to the next. What additional background about ideas will offer the reader a greater understanding of your emotions and decisions?

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Coming of age, Introspection, Lifelong Learning, Madison Wisconsin, My own life, Storytelling | 1 Comment »

Give Thanks for Your Family Stories

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

Thanksgiving is a banquet for the senses, with a table overflowing with food, and the room overflowing with relatives, now a year older and hopefully wiser. And yet family gatherings often arouse tension. We fear arguments with some visitors or feel a hole where we wish we could see a loved one, or wonder about a new potential spouse. Our anxiety seems ungrateful. This feast ought to be a time of joy. To shift attention to the positive aspects of such meetings look at them as opportunities to learn and share each other’s stories.

Listening, as the saying goes, is an act of love, and your willingness to open up and let their stories in will create a lovely, kind, and energetic atmosphere. But the old conversation patterns have a mind of their own. Instead of hoping the energy will shift, take a leadership role. To steer the conversation in a new direction, you need to prepare.

When you are in a safe, healthy space, right now for example, list a few things you wish you knew about each person. Then, in the press of food and family, if you feel a wave of annoyance coming on, switch it to curiosity. Look at your list, take a deep breath, and ask a question. You might at first feel a moment’s hesitation, like you are being rude for breaking into the old pattern. But the surprise will last just a moment, as the other person adjusts his thinking to focus on your question. By asking them to talk about a specific time in their lives, your curiosity will arouse memories. If you press forward, asserting your real interest, you have a good chance of shifting their attention into a reverie about the good, or strange, or formative times. Their story telling will (hopefully) arouse more interesting emotions than the ones you interrupted.

It’s easier if you get this storytelling focus started early in the day, before the old patterns set in. Broadcast the message that you expect them to tell at least one story that you haven’t heard before. And for best results, make suggestions. It’s almost like pitching them some of the writing prompts you would use to develop your memoir. “Tell us about your first day at your first apartment.” “Tell us about where you were when you saw a beautiful sunset.” If you don’t have time to arrange this before the holiday, do it when you first walk in. Write something up. Claim you need these stories for a writing project you’re working on. (And if you write the stories afterwards, then this claim will be true.)

Once you get the ball rolling, if you feel people steering towards boring territory, say, “The rule today is a story we’ve never heard,” or, “I already knew about that situation. But I can’t picture it. Tell me who else was there, what the walls looked like, what did you smell?” You can lead people away from negative feelings by pushing the clock forward. What happened afterwards? Where did you go next?

And if they get stuck in a story you know, listen to it with fresh ears. See if you can imagine being there with them during their original experience. Your curiosity will instigate new questions that will pop you into a fresh perspective. You could think or blurt out, “Hey, wait a minute. That sounds similar to another time in your life.” Or, “Oh. I didn’t realize that happened so soon after you moved.”

In addition to gaining material for your family storybook, you will achieve immediate benefits. Speakers will feel the unusual sensation that people are actually listening to parts of their lives. This is a warm and disarming sensation, that draws everyone closer and reaches across boundaries. For example, if an old-timer tells you about a youthful experience, it puts them on a level playing field with younger family members. And then, when you give a younger person the floor, they will feel empowered by an audience of adults who are suddenly interested, not in finding fault, but in finding entertainment. And for new couples, visitors, and distant relatives, it will give everyone an opportunity to appreciate this whole person.

Prepared to follow your own rules. Dig up a story you’ve never told before. There’s a good chance you never told it because you feel a little embarrassed. This is good. It’s an opportunity to tell people things about yourself that will give them a more intimate and less formulaic impression. Your willingness to share parts of yourself in a room full of people is a good way to flap your memoir wings. So as you look forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, or any time when extended families get together, use stories to create intimacy, defuse tension, and develop a deeper sense of gratitude for the people in your life.

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below.
You can also download the podcast from iTunes:

 Standard Podcast [6:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (330)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Family, Family Memoirs | No Comments »

Awakening bad memories helps shape your new life

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

One night in the summer of 1968, I walked along a busy street in Madison Wisconsin with my friend Ely, a soft-spoken math graduate student, and his girl friend Joan. We were enjoying the cool evening breeze, in a college town relatively quiet during the summer holiday. Then we heard shouting. I turned around and saw five boys rushing towards us. I shouted at them to stay away, and the ringleader tackled me and threw me down. Then the others swarmed around me and kicked. Ely asked them to stop. A boy punched him in the mouth and split his lip.

Joan screamed, and passing cars honked. Then a getaway car pulled up and the boys drove off. The intern at the hospital expressed no interest in how violated I felt. Reluctant to order an X-ray, he brushed off my headache. “Of course it hurts,” he said. “You were kicked in the head.” It turned out, he was right. I had no serious physical injury. By now almost dawn, two policemen took me back to look for my contact lens. When I was a protester, I hated the police, but now, these two men were shining their flashlights, bending down and looking for the tiny piece of plastic that enabled me to see. I felt an unexpected flush of gratitude.

Joan had written the license number, and with the help of a hippie lawyer we found that the ringleader was the son of the police chief of a small town 50 miles away. The lawyer and I split the settlement of $75.00. The rest of the summer I slunk around, racing into shadows when cars approached. In the fall, surrounded by thousands of returning students, I felt safe enough, and I let the incident slip into the past. After a few months I forgot it entirely.

Thirty three years later, in 2001, I was traumatized along with hundreds of millions of others by airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center. I wanted to help in some way so I took a workshop to qualify as a helper in community traumas. To learn how to conduct a group discussion, we were asked to talk about something that had happened to us. As I prepared, I unearthed my memory of being beaten.

Until that time, I had never thought in detail about the scene. Now as I tried to explain it, I saw it more clearly, describing who was there, what happened next, and so on. The event seemed important, so I tried to go deeper by writing about it. As it took shape on paper, it gradually changed from a vague, disturbing set of memories into a story.

With the Vietnam War raging, my attention was diverted from typical college concerns. All I could think about was the war. I didn’t think it was justified or fair, so I protested. I wanted to protect myself, the Vietnamese people, and the boys who were getting sent into danger. I thought my goals were noble, so why would anyone attack me?

To tell a more complete story, I tried to picture one of the high school boys in his home, eating dinner with his dad, who was probably a veteran of World War II. Dad was praising the soldiers who were out with machine guns and artillery hunting down the enemy. This was how Americans defend their freedom. Dad expressed his fear that if protesters stopped the war, it could unleash chaos, and threaten their way of life. The protesters must be stopped. So his sons protest the protesters by beating up someone with long hair. They were upholding the values of their family and country.  Under the circumstances, their actions were the most honorable thing they could have done.

Now, these many years later, I know a lot more about war trauma than I did back then. I imagine that one of those boys had an older brother serving in Vietnam. Instead of being kicked, he was getting shot at and watching his companions blown to pieces before his eyes. If he lived, he would for years continue to be assaulted by memories that repeatedly tear him apart. Flashbacks are the other way humans deal with trauma.

While flashbacks sound like the opposite of forgetting, these two reactions have one thing in common. They both leave you powerless to think clearly about the original experience and so the events remain stuck in their original shape. Only later, after you start trying to communicate, can you slow down and put things together.

Writing the memories gives me new power over them
I never understood the way the mugging influenced the following years. I always thought my profound depression was caused by some generalized angst. I didn’t make the connection with the trauma because I had forgotten it. I had not made the connection between being attacked and my loss of interest in protesting. I just thought my disengagement from the protests was because the whole thing was too emotionally exhausting. Now I see that beating was intended to stop me from protesting, and I got the message. My body wounds healed, but that part of me that wanted to share my opinions never did.

Writing the story reveals another powerful truth about that night in 1968. It was just one moment in time. Storytelling drags and pushes me to the next day and the next, until eventually I find myself on more stable ground. I find myself more whole.

How can writing help me grow?
As my storytelling reveals that night as one night in my six decades of life, I consider my decision to stop expressing my opinion. Must I for the rest of my life please everyone for fear they won’t like me and beat me up? If I am true to myself, I inevitably will displease some people. Everyone is different and unique. Now, instead of being limited by the decisions of a scared young man, I am working on a more public approach to my opinions that allow me a more vibrant relationship to the world. Diving into painful memories has helped me grow towards expressing my greater potential as an individual unique, human being.

Writing Prompt
Write a story about a time when you felt wronged. After you write it from your point of view, write another story about that experience from the other person’s point of view, seeing the way they justified their action initially, and the way they justified or forgave themselves afterwards.

Writing Prompt
In an experience you had that seemed traumatic, write a story in which that experience was the beginning, and then proceed from there. Look for a way to resolve the dramatic tension by reaching stable ground, or coming to terms with the trauma, or find some new direction or lesson that resulted in a positive ending.

Note
For another essay I wrote about PTSD and the horrors of war, click here.

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (398)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in 60's, Coming of age, Madison Wisconsin, Trauma, Vietnam War | 3 Comments »

Reach deep into memory to build a scene

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

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.)

I wish I could portray what it was like to be a nerd in high school. I had few friends and for four years, my main interest in life was studying and reading. The best way to share my nerdiness is to show scenes, bringing readers into the halls of my high school to see for themselves. And yet when I try to describe my life in high school, I feel like I’m trying to peer into the hidden memories of a stranger. Who was that guy? Fortunately, memoir writers have tricks. By prying into the hazy past, we can find far more detail than we had first expected.

One way to get started is to list facts. It was 1961 when I started attending Central High School in Philadelphia, an all-boys, all-academic school, where more than 90% of my classmates were heading to college. There was actually a minimum grade required for admission. No slackers permitted! Every morning, I walked down to wait for the trolley, an electric contraption that clanked, hissed and squealed on tracks. By the time the trolley reached Broad and Olney it was packed. The doors thwacked open, and I stepped into the hectic terminal, crossed Broad and walked down past the girls’ high school. I didn’t know any girls, and just kept walking. As I reached Ogontz, I looked up at the school perched on a hill. Then my imagination fades. I can’t see inside the building.

Since my eyes don’t seem to be working, I try stirring up smells, touch, and sounds. Groping like a blind man, I reach out and my hand lands on a blackboard. I am transported into ninth grade algebra. My teacher calls me up to the front of the class to show a homework problem. With chalk in hand, scratching the board and smelling the dust, I feel the excitement, hoping my work is right and terrified that it’s wrong. I love algebra, and I love my algebra teacher Mr. Abrams. His passionate demand for excellence would change the course of my life. He is short, and on the last day, after a year of looking up to him, I am horrified to hear a student say, “Mr. Abrams. Would you stand up on a chair so I can kneel down and take your picture?”

Ah-ha! That’s the secret. The events that emerge from memory are loaded with emotions. The emotions make the memory stick. And that’s the problem. I was an intellectual, among a crowd of intellectuals, and emotions were not in our vocabulary. We wanted to get into top schools and that meant being serious, all the time. No wonder I don’t remember much.

But there is hope. I’ve already discovered one scene. Surely there must be others. I grope again, touching the glazed cinder block walls that on hot days radiate a soothing coolness. In this tactile mode, I feel a weight in my hand. It’s my briefcase, so loaded with books I can barely close it. I smell today’s sandwich, dig around in the bottom and find pencils and stab myself on the point of the compass that I use for drawing circles in geometry class. I snap the clasp. There is a particular hallway I keep going back to outside my chemistry class. The windows seem far away, and the hall is dimly lit.

The main focus of every conversation is to drill each other about things we are supposed to know for tests. We also try to stump each other about the definition of vocabulary words. As I try to listen in on these conversations, I again feel a complex thrill of emotion, desperate to sound smart, mixed with fear that I might sound stupid. I try to home in on one conversation.

Our chemistry teacher is extraordinarily flat. Not only doesn’t he have a sense of humor. He doesn’t express emotions of any kind. In one lesson, he teaches us the laboratory notation for a chemical reaction that does nothing. Think for example of pouring water over rocks. No dissolving, no heat, no change in color. When that happens we are supposed to write “NR” which stands for “No Reaction.”

Emerging from class into that dark hallway, I walk with an awkward gait, compensating for the heavy briefcase in my hand. Another student turns to me and loudly quips, “Hey. Let’s just call him ‘NR.’” It feels good to show a little disrespect for our teacher. And the scientific terminology is a nice touch. We all laugh. Looking back, I realize why the memory stands out from the haze – we are a bunch of nerds laughing at someone who has even more trouble expressing emotion than we do ourselves.

While it’s not a complete scene, I’m adding more components, and if I persist I could end up with boys’ names, and what they looked like, and what more they said to each other, to show how these particular nerds behaved on this particular day in this particular hallway. Even if I only find one or two such scenes, readers will see for themselves that I was a nerd. And at the same time, I’m benefiting from it too. The ghostlike quality of those years has always given me the eerie feeling that I was a shadow, an outline with no substance. By discovering scenes, I feel my past self gradually taking on flesh and bones, filling in who that boy was back then, and making me feel more whole and continuous of a person today.

—

Writing prompt
What scene do you wish you could remember? List facts, descriptions, names of places, names of people. Do they remind you of anything else you didn’t think of until you started writing? Touch objects. Find a particular object, and while you are touching or looking at it, look around and describe what you see. Name a person and talk to him or her. What are you saying? Remember anything that person said or probably said, and listen to the voice. What does this tone of voice tell you about the person or their background? How does the conversation make you feel?

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (416)

Tags: , ,
Posted in My own life, Philadelphia Regional, Storytelling, memory | 7 Comments »

Fact and fiction of a girl in the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

When I was in college in 1968, I grew long hair as a protest against my parents’ generation. The old ways obviously hadn’t worked, so it was up to me to unravel everything I knew and start over. I didn’t realize that at the same time, on the other side of the world, a billion Chinese people were trying to do the same thing. Repeating slogans like “Smash the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas,” Chairman Mao had stirred up a frenzy against the wisdom of the past. Since education was traditionally held in high regard, smashing the “olds” included shutting down schools, mocking and denouncing teachers, and shipping students into the country to work in fields. This social movement was known as the Cultural Revolution.

Xujun Eberlein was an educated girl, living in a small city in China during that period. Her father was the president of an educational institute and her mother was a school principal so the Cultural Revolution wreaked havoc on their family. Both parents lost their jobs, her beloved older sister died, and Xujun was taken from home and inserted into a rural village to live and work with peasants. After the fanaticism waned, she returned home, then moved to the U.S. and earned a doctorate from one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the past kept calling to her, and in the fall of 2001, she began to write stories about growing up. After several years honing her English writing skills, she started winning awards and placing pieces in competitive literary magazines. Recently she published a book of short stories “Apologies Forthcoming” based on her experience.

When I first picked up Xujun Eberlein’s book of fiction, I hoped it would offer me deeper understanding of the task of turning life into story. My hope was richly rewarded. Like any good story, her tales lifted me out my own world and offered me a glimpse of hers. I read about a little girl seeing her father on his knees on a stage, being forced to denounce himself in front of his community. In another story, a young woman tried to adjust to her new life of poverty in a rural community. In still another, the protagonist reached out to men for friendship, and for the first time confronted the complexities of sexuality. In every story I felt two things: the pleasure of losing myself, and a sense that I was witnessing a period of history through the eyes of someone who was there.

Surprisingly, my suspension of disbelief gave me the freedom to enter that world without picking it apart for historical accuracy. To learn more lessons about this connection between her stories and her history, I read one of Xujun’s memoir essays, available online in the literary magazine, The Walrus. You can read it here. It’s a wonderful and tragic story, and another window into her heart and into those times.

Like the Rosetta Stone, I tried comparing these two different versions of the same events. My comparison of Xujun’s multi-dimensional attempts to tell the story of her life gave me some of the clearest understandings I’ve had so far about how story and memoir intertwine.

While fiction can freely break loose from actual historical fact, the story must give the reader an emotionally authentic compelling experience. One of the best ways fiction writers can tap into such authentic emotions is by drawing on the realities of the world around them, and especially the world they have experienced themselves.

On the other hand, nonfiction writers must adhere to historical facts. Even though this seems to offer fewer choices, a nonfiction writer has an almost unlimited supply of raw material contained within tens of thousands of days of memories. To transform these historical facts into an engaging story we must draw on fiction techniques, such as pacing, language arts, suspense, and surprise.

As I ponder these observations, I wonder what lessons I can learn from Xujun herself. She has poured enormous amounts of time and energy in the pursuit of good stories, so I asked Xujun to discuss some of her own experiences as a writer, and what it has been like to return to an earlier time, to awaken and review her memories.

In my next blog entry, I will publish the first part of the interview I conducted with her.

—

Notes:

For more details about Xujun’s life and writing, including more information about her book, awards, and other publications, see her website. http://www.xujuneberlein.com.

She also blogs about her observations about life in the United States, about China, and about life in general. http://www.insideoutchina.com

To read more interviews with fiction writers about the relationship between fiction and life see:
Interview with Naomi Gal
Interview with Jonathan Maberry

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (497)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Book Review, Cultural community, Storytelling | 3 Comments »

Follow that car! How drama reveals the inner story

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

by Jerry Waxler

(You can listen to the podcast version by clicking the player control at the bottom of this post or download it from iTunes.)

Six mornings a week, my dad commuted to his drugstore in North Philadelphia. By closing time, he had been there for almost 14 hours, but I never heard him complain. He enjoyed his work, and it may never have occurred to him that there was anything to complain about. When I was in high school, I started working with my dad at the store. Every Friday afternoon I took the subway, and on Saturday afternoon drove with my mom. My job was stocking shelves, serving customers, occasionally counting pills to help fill prescriptions, and eating lots of candy bars. Sometimes mom packed dinner, and sometimes I walked down to the Horn and Hardarts cafeteria at Broad and Erie and brought back a hot meal to eat at the store. By the end of the day, we were all ready to go home. Around 9:30 I mopped the floor, then descended rickety stairs to check the cellar door. Finally we positioned bars across the windows, set the alarm, and went outside.

One Saturday, we drove south on 17th Street, turned left on to Ontario, and started east towards Broad Street, when a large man ran out between two cars and flagged us down. He knocked on the window, yelling at us to open up, gesturing down the street towards some unseen quarry. It was a cop, fiddling with his holster, preparing to draw his gun. As my mother reached over her shoulder to unlock the door, the strangest thing happened. Her hands grabbed wildly at the latch as if she was pulling up, but time after time her fingers missed and the door remained locked. I watched in growing horror as precious time slipped away.

This is exactly what always bothered me about my mother, and here was yet another proof. She was a klutz, and just in the most urgent moment, she failed to come through. I cursed the luck that gave me such an incompetent mother. Losing patience, the cop ran to a taxi that pulled up behind us. The driver of that vehicle knew how to open his door. The cop jumped in and they pulled around us and drove off in pursuit. Meanwhile, I was filled with wonder at how my mother who had been opening car doors her whole life could have failed at such a simple task, and fumed the whole way home.

At first glance, such intense moments appear to be excellent material for a memoir. Jeanette Walls’ wildly successful memoir, “Glass Castle,” seems like a collection of such experiences. But taken as a whole, her book is more than a compilation of zany moments. Each episode contributes to an intimate, compassionate portrayal of real human beings. Memories are simply the raw material for memoirs, like pigments for a painter or clay for a sculptor, and shaping them into the story is not an exhaustive collection but an artistic synthesis. So no matter how many high powered incidents come to mind, I still don’t necessarily end up with a readable book that authentically portrays my life. To turn anecdotes into a life story, there is much creative work to do.

For one thing, I must place the experience in context. We didn’t just appear on that street. We arrived there through the natural course of our daily lives. So I back up and explain what we were doing there in the first place. That episode with the cop makes the whole night come to life — the drugstore, the neighborhood, and my relationship with my parents. As this anecdote falls onto paper, I begin to see the world of that teenage boy, broadening my insight into the night and also expanding my understanding of how it fit into my whole life.

For example, I’m not very well coordinated myself, and during my teenage years I was especially disappointed by my lack of agility. Feeling my frustration with my mom that night awakens the recognition that neither of my parents nor any of us three kids were athletic. I have recently been reading about hereditary factors that cluster together the characteristics of nerdiness and lack of physical coordination. (see my Asperger’s article). The incident with the car lock suggests that this might help explain the Waxler family. I file that observation for future consideration.

The incident stirs up an observation about my relationship with my dad. He was a loving man, and always treated me with kindness and respect, but we never talked much. I don’t remember having had a single conversation with him, which made him seem distant. Now that I am reading about us as two characters in a story, a fact jumps out. Working in the drugstore with my father, gave me an opportunity to spend large swaths of time shoulder to shoulder with him, helping him in the store that supported the family. Now I realize we were partners, in a manly sort of way. I’ve envied other boys who worked with their dad on the farm or the family business, and now I realized until I was 18, I was one of those boys.

The fact that we had to put bars on the window and set the alarm, and that a cop was running around chasing criminals, foreshadows the fact that a few years later, corner drugstores would become targets for violent crime. When I went away to college, dad’s good friend, Sam Dreidink, who owned a drugstore a few miles away, was held up at gunpoint. On the way out, the robbery completed, his assailant shot Sam in the stomach. He lived, but in terrific pain for the rest of his life. A few months later, my dad was held up. During the robbery, he was forced to his knees with a shotgun pointed at his head. They stole his money and whatever narcotics he had in stock. When they left, he was still whole in body, but that incident ended his years in the drugstore.

My mom lived 70 more years, during which I discovered her apparent lapses in “common sense” often moved conversations in unexpected directions, offering the people in her life zest and interest, cleverness and fun. Her lack of predictability turned out to be one of her endearing traits, and instead of feeling manipulated or confused by her approach, I became one of her many admirers. Forty years after that night in the car, I knew that behind a thin facade of silliness, she was an authentic, fascinating person. Which makes me wonder as I read my story if she knew exactly what she was doing, and in her own klutzy way she was protecting her family from a man with a gun.

Writing Prompt: Write an anecdote from your life that has dramatic intensity. Using that anecdote as a core, backtrack and describe what lead up to it. Also, go forward and see what happens afterward. Try it a few times, or with a few anecdotes, to see if you can find a beginning, middle, and end. Could this be a chapter in your memoir? Could it become a standalone short story?

—

To listen to the podcast version click the player control below:

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (460)

Writing Prompt
Take one of your written dramatic anecdotes. You now have three different points of view about the same event. One is the memory of what it felt to be back there. Another is a reader, reading a written story about characters in the incident. The third is an adult, with a much broader understanding not only of the incident but who the people are, where they’ve been, and where they are going. Dance amidst these three points of view find new thoughts and connections that help put it in place. Consider what the people wanted. What were they thinking when they performed this particular action? What other episode does this story remind you of? How did your or their flaws influence the course of events? How have you or they changed since then?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Drama, Family, My own life, Writing Prompt | No Comments »

« Older Entries