Category Archives: Cultural community

Interview with story writer Xujun Eberlein

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by Jerry Waxler, author of Memoir Revolution: Write Your Story, Change the World

I recently read “Apologies Forthcoming,” a book of short stories by Xujun Eberlein, who grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. ( Short Story Fact or Fiction) I highly recommend her book for anyone interested in that period, or interested in converting life into story, or simply looking for a good read. In this exclusive interview, I ask her about the project of converting her memories into stories. Her answers offer insights that could help anyone who is interested in the relationship between memory and story.

Jerry Waxler: When did you first start thinking about writing your memories of growing up in the period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution?

Xujun Eberlein: If ever I had a mid-age crisis, I think it started in the fall of 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. As I wrote in a personal essay, “The Camphor Suitcase,” which won an award from Literal Latte recently, several things came to my attention in that fall triggering the desire to write about my sister’s death and those days. (This essay will be available on line in the near future, at Literal Latte‘s site.)

JW: When did you actually start writing?

XE: Checking my computer, I see the earliest file is dated December 16, 2001. That was an attempt to translate one of my old stories into English, trying to warm up with the idea of writing in a second language.

In the spring of 2002, I took an unpaid leave from work and revisited my hometown, Chongqing. During that visit two things hit me hard: my big sister’s tomb could no longer be found, and my mother had lost all my diaries from age 12 to late 20s. On the other hand, I retrieved my sister’s diary, which contains entries from her final three years of life. Upon returning home I began to write a memoir piece about my sister’s death from memory. It took many reincarnations to become what you see today. In the summer of 2004 I attended the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference, and workshopped the piece there. It was my instructor, Bill Roorbach, who suggested the title to “Swimming with Mao.” In late 2005, I submitted a modified, longer version to Walrus and it was accepted and subsequently published in the magazine’s 2006 summer issue. (You can read this article by clicking here.)

JW: During those initial attempts, when you were deciding between fiction and non-fiction, what criteria pulled you one way or the other?

XE: I started to write nonfiction mainly because I thought this genre would better preserve my work’s historical value. However I soon realized the limitation of nonfiction on the range of subjects I would like to write about. I guess I write fiction also because I’ve had my heart set in that genre for much longer time. The two genres use different craft techniques; both interest me. It is a challenge to do both well and I like challenges.

JW: In your fiction, was it hard to steer between facts and imagination? Did you worry that fictionalizing might disturb the memories?

XE: It never occurred to me in writing fiction there exists a choice between facts and imagination, nor have I ever worried that fictionalization might perturb my memory. If I had any worry, it was that I might limit my imagination to personal experience. For some writers, it takes a big leap to transcend experience-based stories. I think I am like that. In my collection, about half of the stories can be said to be based on my own experience. The other half came from attempts to transcend and broaden that experience.

JW: When writing fiction, do you draw mainly on life experience or do you branch off into pure imagination?

XE: To continue from the previous answer, it is often a stage in writing maturity to unleash oneself from one’s own memory. This said, even writing with pure imagination one can’t avoid using elements from memory. It’s like in a science fiction movie, an object as a whole may look completely alien, however if you dismantle it you’ll find that every component has its origin from an earthly object.

JW: The non-fiction piece, “Swimming with Mao,” contains an account of your search for your sister’s truth. And yet it also conveys a sense of intimacy and sorrow. What sorts of dramatic devices did you apply to achieve the emotional effects?

XE: I wasn’t consciously applying any fiction techniques. Partly because this was my first attempt in English writing (if you don’t count my scientific dissertation at MIT); at the time I hadn’t written any fiction since my maiden days in China. Even after I began to write fiction in English, I found my mindset would switch with the change of genre, as if a button were being automatically pressed. My non-fiction pieces are more of the essay style, even though my storyteller’s nature tends to head for entertaining anecdotes.

JW: Reading about the loss of your sister I am overwhelmed by the complex grief one little individual had to endure. How did you feel about writing such a painful memory?

XE: It was very difficult emotionally. My big sister was my idol and mentor in my childhood. Our parents were always either busy at work or being denounced or detained; whatever problems I had, I took to my sister and she was always able to help. Her death created a big hole in my mind and life, even after I grew up it still wasn’t easy to look back. That was partly why it took me so long before attempting to write about it. I constantly cried when I was writing.

Adding to the emotional difficulty was the desire to give myself a conclusion about her death. Was it an accident? If so, could it have been avoided? If not, was her action meaningful? Was it a wasted sacrifice? For several drafts I really did not know what the conclusion was. In this sense this time-consuming writing did help me sort out feelings and thoughts. As to whether it gets easier, I don’t really know. It is still hard for me to reread what I’ve written without being teary again.

JW: How has the passage of time helped or hindered your understanding of those disturbing events?

XE: I think at the time a significant personal event happens to us, we are living in it and we are not spectators. We are either overwhelmed by it or unable to see its significance. To sort out feelings and find meaning we need distance, both in time and in space. Sometimes it takes a recurrence in history for us to understand better. In my case, if I hadn’t left China and lived in the United States, I might not have dug open this old wound. Even if I did, I might have different thoughts about it.

In Part 2 of this interview, I ask Xujun more questions about the creative process, of turning memories into written words.

For my blog entry about what I learned about fact and fiction from reading Xujun’s two different representations of the events surrounding her sister’s death, click here.

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.

Keep your memoir in touch with changing gender roles

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by Jerry Waxler

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

After high school, instead of going to college Jancee Dunn looked for work. She got a job at Rolling Stone magazine, and became a celebrity interviewer. As I read her memoir, “But Enough About Me” it struck me that this book was completely different from the books I read when I was younger. For one thing practically all the books I read in high school and college were by men. I started reviewing books that influenced me at different periods of my life, and discovered remarkable patterns, both in myself and in the culture around me.

Sensitivity to current gender roles
In the 60’s, I knew a few things about feminist issues, but those issues took a backseat to my male-oriented questions. For example, would I end up fighting in Vietnam, and how in God’s name was I supposed to form a relationship with a girl when I was too shy to talk to her? Decades later, my relationship with women and feminism have evolved. In addition to outgrowing my bashfulness, I have come to expect women in leadership roles in every walk of life. Women are professionals and business people, warriors, politicians, and of course, writers.

Once I focus on these changes in gender roles, both in individuals and in the culture, I understand so much more about how to write to today’s audience. It turns out I have to toss away many of the lessons I learned while I was growing up. For decades, I’ve eliminated the obsolete “him” to refer to the “universal man.” That’s a given in our present culture. Now, looking more carefully, I see additional nuances that need to be adjusted.

Increasing sensitivity to the role of women as consumers
When people talk about movies now, it is common to hear some categorized as “chick flicks.” The publishing world has its own version of this called “chick lit” routinely mentioned at writing conferences by the editors and agents who decide what books are hot. Just a few years ago, I didn’t understand these terms. Now I would describe them as stories with greater emphasis on relationships, feminine success stories, and in general presenting the world through a feminine point of view. The culture has become sensitized to the variety of ways men and women are looking for information and entertainment. And this collective discussion has helped me tune in, too.

So how does this realization help a memoir writer?
As I make the journey from being a reader of books to a writer, this line of thinking offers me additional insights. I was already looking at my audience as a collection of cultures, and generations. Now I add genders to the mix. To learn more, I turn toward the memoirs I am reading.

In John Robison’s memoir “Look Me in the Eye” he reaches out to his mother later in life to try to sort out their memories. And Jancee Dunn in her memoir “But Enough About Me” portrays her respectful connection with her father. These comments about relationships to an opposite sex parent provide a glimpse into the way gender begins to affect us from the time of birth. The presence of our parents in a memoir can share these attitudes with readers.

Just as I am striving to catch up to the current feminine role, some women my age are trying to do the same. In a writing group, one woman fretted that her voice sounded too “personal.” I didn’t understand her concern. Since we were discussing her memoir, I assumed “personal” was exactly what she was trying to achieve. Then I realized she may be struggling with some of the same issues I am. During her education, she too read mostly male writers. Now, writing her memoir in the twenty first century, she needs to update her sensibility to the modern acceptance of a feminine literary voice.

Another memoir rich with this historical unfolding of the relationship between the sexes, “Navy Greenshirt: A Leader Made, Not Born” by Diane Diekman. The author enlisted in the Navy in 1972. When she started, it was a man’s world, by almost any definition. And yet she brought an attitude of relentless mutual respect, expecting to be treated with dignity and insisting on treating others the same way. Her focus on the high road broke barriers. By the time she left, she had advanced to the rank of Captain.

I was never a woman and I was never in the navy, and so all of my ideas about what such a career would have been like were formed from lurid headlines, snap generalizations, and simplistic assumptions. Reading Diekman’s memoir I traveled territory that was inaccessible in my own experience. Through the author’s eyes, I witnessed an honorable group of men and women, devoting their lives to serve their country, while at the same time doing their best to keep up to date with the evolving sexual mores of our times.

Kate Braestrup, author of the memoir “Here If You Need Me,” is a member of the State Game Wardens Service in Maine. Despite her bullet-proof, or more correctly “ballistic” vest, she doesn’t attend crime scenes to catch bad guys but as a chaplain, she brings her natural warmth to provide spiritual support. She did not claim that only a woman could do this job. In fact, the previous chaplain was a man who moved on to offer spiritual guidance to motorcycle gangs. So her effectiveness was not because of her gender, but in harmony with it. She let me feel how her femininity contributed to the pleasures and wholeness of being human.

When Jim McGarrah, author of the Vietnam war memoir “A Temporary Sort of Peace” told his dad he was joining the military, his dad tried to stop him. “All I thought when my father argued violently to keep me from enlisting was that he must be jealous because his war was over and I might win more medals in mine. I don’t think I ever considered he had learned through experience that the word man was just the back half of the more important word human, or that being a better human rather than a better man might be a loftier and more beneficial goal.”

McGarrah spent a lifetime recovering from his 1960’s teenage assertion of “manliness.” And as he struggled to regain wholeness, he was hampered not only by the backward drag of post-traumatic stress, but also by his attitude towards women. Overcoming his training that they were subservient was part of his psychological journey, and like Diekman, and for that matter all of us who lived and grew through these decades, his personal maturing of relationships between genders paralleled the culture’s.

As I research my own memoir, I too look across these decades and see how my understanding of the two genders during this period has deepened in step with the awareness of my culture. By exploring these evolving relationships I am treated to another profound truth. That is that memoir writing is not a static snapshot, but a moving story that sweeps across time, showing who we were, how we have grown, and how we continue to keep step with an evolving world.

Marketing prompt: To turn your writing from a journal for yourself to a written communication that will be enjoyed by readers today, ask who are they, and what will they get from your writing. Write a sketch of a typical reader. How old? What have they learned so far? Where are they heading next?

Writing prompt: Who are your favorite authors? Write about the different payoffs you get from the male versus female authors?

How will your gender affect your own story? How do you think key moments would be different if you were the other gender? (Use this insight to consider how each gender might respond to your story.)

Note: Gender in my life reading
If I read books by women agonizing over meaning, I don’t remember them. All my writers were men. Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Ferdinand Celine. Surely there were women authors who also agonized. They just didn’t come under my scrutiny. About 15 years ago, I read my first book by a feminist, “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem” by Gloria Steinem, a book I found to be informative more about self-help than about being a particular gender.

One of the best books I have read about memoir writing is called Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by literature professor Louise DeSalvo. She offers many important insights into how writing your story can change your life. While the book did not emphasize feminist perspectives, DeSalvo is a world expert. Earlier in her career, she made her name as a top scholar on Virginia Woolf, one of the first of the modern feminine writers.

Podcast version click the player control below: [display_podcast]

Lessons for memoir writers from my first year of blogging

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by Jerry Waxler

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

One of the speakers at last year’s Philadelphia Writers Conference was veteran news reporter Daniel Rubin. Fewer people are reading newspapers these days, so Rubin’s bosses at the Philadelphia Inquirer went looking for readers online. They asked him to write a blog. This experiment in new journalism achieved two goals. First, inquirer.typepad.com let the Inquirer participate in what turned out to be a robust stream of Philadelphia blogs. And secondly, it changed Rubin’s writing style. Like any newspaper reporter, Rubin had been taught to leave himself out. As a blogger, he had to put himself in. His two year stint transformed him from a silent observer to an engaged one.

Newspaper reporters aren’t the only ones trained to keep themselves out of their writing. My high school English teachers taught me never to write the word “I.” And for many years, I earned my living writing technical manuals that sound as if the author doesn’t exist. When I wanted to tell my own story, I couldn’t figure out how to write in a livelier, more personal style. Then I discovered blogs. Blog audiences expect to know the writer, personally. To fulfill that expectation, I’ve learned to insert opinions, observations, and anecdotes.

Blogs give everyone in the world the opportunity to share themselves. Some bloggers include pictures of their kids or their garden or the view from the window of their vacation home. While many of these online scrapbooks are frivolous, others offer serious memoir information, tips, and insights. People who sell services also use blogs to create a personal connection. It’s the modern equivalent of the corner store, when people actually knew the family from whom they were buying.

Experiment to find the best blog topic and material
A blog gives you the opportunity to experiment with your material, and since blogs are free, you can start as many as you like. After several attempts, I decided to write a blog about memoirs. I speculated that book reviews and interviews with memoir writers would keep it interesting for readers, and informative and engaging for me as well.

When I started I didn’t know how any of this would actually work out. Would I be able to generate fresh material? Would my vision stay focused enough to entertain and inform readers? Would it become repetitive or trite? Now for the past year, every month, I’m previewing 15 books, finishing five, and posting essays about several. I’ve done interviews with memoir writers, and have networked with a number of bloggers and other internet denizens. I have figured out how to keep the material fresh for me and hopefully my readers. It was only through the test of time that I could learn these lessons, and the knowledge I gained by doing it empowers me to do more.

You can accumulate more than a writing style
If you are reading this article because you want to gather material for a memoir, then you are already looking for a way to bring your own life experience out into the open. A blog is a perfect place to explore and experiment. Gather snips of experience, whether from years ago, or from yesterday, and see how it works. This can be intimidating, at first, for a variety of reasons, one of the most common of which is “why would anyone want to read this stuff.” That’s a great question, and perhaps the ultimate question, but here’s the twist. Instead of using the question as a doubt that drags you down, use it as fuel that drives you forward. Really, honestly ask, “Why would anyone read this stuff?” and as you passionately search for the answer you will gradually transform your writing from material that only interests you to material that will interest others.

Writing a blog means taking the story you find inside yourself and placing it out in the open, where anyone can examine it. Putting it out there is half the job. The other half is to figure out if it makes sense to anyone. That’s what makes blogs so powerful. They generate a low volume conversation with those visitors who want to let you know what they think. It’s a little like stand-up comedians, who find out if their jokes are funny by listening for laughter. As a blogger you find out if your posts make sense by reading the comments. By paying attention to this feedback, you can tweak your writing in a direction that works for this group of people, who like any focus group represent a larger audience.

These readers become part of your micro-community
After blogging for a while, I occasionally hear from repeat visitors. This means that through my writing, I’ve tapped into a micro-community of like minded people. By blogging within a particular focus, my blog has become a sort of forum where people interested in this topic can stay connected.

Many of my readers share similar desires to mine. They want to develop community, find their voice, organize their material, and become accustomed to reaching towards the public. These shared desires bond us across space and time. We become both an audience and a community. So if you are wondering how to hook up with readers and writers, and develop your writing skills in the process, then jump into the blogosphere. Tell your story, and offer feedback about the ones you find.

Note: This year’s Philadelphia Writers Conference will take place June 6, 7, 8, 2008. See this link for details.

Podcast version click the player control below: [display_podcast]

My niece reminded me I’m getting old

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by Jerry Waxler

Author of Memoir Revolution: Write Your Story, Change the World and How to Become a Heroic Writer

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

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

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

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

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

To listen to this blog, click on the podcast link below.

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

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

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

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

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

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

Listening Is An Act of Love

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by Jerry Waxler

Last week, when I was visiting WHYY studio in Philadelphia I saw the mobile StoryCorps van and interviewed facilitator Mike Rauch about what StoryCorps does. It intrigued me so much, I went back to Philly last night to hear Dave Isay the founder of StoryCorps speak at the National Constitution Center. He was explaining StoryCorps, talking about is own path, and sharing some of the stories from his book. StoryCorps is a non-profit corporation, and according to Dave Isay, it’s the fasting growing nonprofit corporation in the country. Now, if that’s not a trend, I don’t know what is.

Learning about other people’s lives, through their stories is gripping the national imagination. I think it’s because we’re tired of watching sitcom actors play out their perfectly scripted lives. We want real people. In my opinion, this is the reason for the scrapbooking craze, the blogging craze, and the memoir craze. Now we’re poised for the audio story craze.

At the current rate, the StoryCorps is gathering 7,000 stories a year, and it’s growing exponentially, with new facilities and programs coming online all the time. During the question and answer period, a schoolteacher asked if the stories ever become repetitive. Dave Isay said, “No. At first I also had that fear, that we would start hearing the same story over and over. But it never happened.” He added that in his opinion the most important recipient of the story was the family member who was in the recording booth hearing intimate details for the first time. More often than not, people break down and cry in the middle of the telling. These are touching, intimate moments that open up pathways among people.

Before the age of electronics, say in the nineteenth century and before, people had to use each other for entertainment. They told stories, played the piano, participated in parlor games. This gave them time to get to know each other. When I was growing up, that all changed. We glued ourselves to the tube and let others do the entertainment for us. That’s been going on long enough, and we’re growing weary of being strangers to each other.

Dave Isay’s book is called “Listening is an Act of Love.” As a therapist, I have found his title to be true. Part of my training was to keep my mouth shut and listen. It doesn’t sound like much, but sometimes it’s the most generous, caring, healing thing you can do. Now, Dave Isay and the StoryCorps want to show everyone that same power. Dave Isay’s book “Listening is an act of Love” contains a number of stories as told by people in the StoryCorps booth. Remarkably, all profits from the book go to support the mission of the StoryCorps.

The stories are not edited, nor do they provide much backstory. After reading memoirs, it’s easy to see the many differences between oral and written life story. But rather than focus on the differences, here are a few ways that oral storytelling fits in with the charter of writing your life story.

  • Use story listening to help you learn about yourself. To research his memoir, Foster Winans interviewed people in his life to ask them how they remembered him.
  • Use story telling as a way to dredge up material. It’s amazing how much comes to mind when you are telling a story. Sit with someone who really cares. Ask each other questions. Let the story emerge. You’ll find material you had not thought about in years.
  • As you write your memoir, you will become more sensitized to the variety of human experience. By seeing your own story from the inside, you will want to know other people’s stories. And this will open you to the inner lives of the people in your family and beyond.
  • As you read memoirs, do the same thing a listener would do in that recording booth. Slow down, and listen. You will realize that everyone has an inner life, and reading about it will expand the range of your understanding of the human condition.

For more information about this piece, see this links:
Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center
StoryCorps
WHYY Philadelphia’s Public Television and Radio Station
My previous essay on StoryCorps

Boomer memoir is a step towards social activism

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by Jerry Waxler

Terrorism! Melting ice caps! Another traffic jam! When is someone going to do something about this mess? While I am waiting for “them” to change the world, “they” are waiting for me. It’s time to break this impasse by taking action. But how? I already tried to bring about world peace by disrupting a campus when I was in college in 1968. It was scary confronting a mob of police, and I don’t believe the world has become more peaceful as a result of those actions. Now that I’m older, I’m looking for better methods. I recently became inspired by a talk hosted by the “Coming of Age” organization in Philadelphia. The main speaker was the CEO of AARP, Bill Novelli, who echoed the sentiment of his book, 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America in which he claimed that I can join an army of new oldsters to help move the world in a positive direction. A week later I went to another Coming of Age event and heard similar ideas eloquently delivered by Marc Freedman, author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America.

When I was a kid, I thought that older people were the problem. They seemed so invested in the status quo. Now that I’m one of them, I find old people aren’t so bad after all. In fact, I feel just as passionate about changing the world as when I was 20. While Novelli and Freedman spoke of a variety of ways that others have chosen to pitch in and move their own little corner of the world, I have a grand idea. It seems to me that the missing element in modern civilization is that we don’t seem to be doing a good job of learning from our mistakes. And in my opinion, that’s where the army of us oldsters can help significantly. We’ve seen the world go by for more years than others have, and have gained an appreciation for what matters in the long run, and what fizzles out.

It’s not that I have all the answers. But if there is any wisdom at all to be gained from experience, and my experience tells me there is, then I’d say we need to communicate more of our life story. And we’ve been born at the perfect time. Just as boomers are reaching “that certain age” technology has provided new opportunities for us to collaborate. The printing press brought ideas from individual minds out into the public, broke us free from a layer of oppression, and opened the way for the Renaissance. The internet makes the printing press look like an old relic. We’re ready to take this thing global, and who knows what rebirths we can bring about?

By developing a community of thinking people who talk about life in an inquiring way, we can learn from each other. Your wisdom is contained in your life experience. Share it with the world! Even if you don’t know how writing could change your world, start writing anyway. Your experience turns into stories that are authentic, in a voice that is authentically yours. That’s all that matters now. Find the authentic voice and share the authentic experience. As you go, you’ll discover the sense you’ve made of your past, and then discover the impact your experience has on others. By writing and organizing your story, without even knowing how, you are already beginning to serve. And like any service to others, you’ll be the first to reap the rewards.

Writing about life will give you more energy. Even if you already have plenty of energy, writing will give you more. And if you are too tired to write, writing will wake you up.

Writing will make you more knowledgeable about how to write and how to tell stories. You can press these enhanced skills into service as you discover things you want to share with the world.

By writing about your own life experience, you open up parts of yourself to others. This makes the world a friendlier, more intimate place to live.

Write for a cause, write for a community, write for posterity, write to share yourself. Write to change the world.

More memoir writing resources

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

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

To learn about my 200 page workbook about overcoming psychological blocks to writing, click here.

Check out the programs and resources at the National Association of Memoir Writers

Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, transforms life for boomers

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by Jerry Waxler

I drove down to attend a Town Meeting in Philadelphia. The meeting was called “Coming of Age, Ignite the Revolution” for the over 50 crowd. I loved the meeting’s slogan, so appropriate here a few blocks from Independence Hall. Igniting revolution seems the right thing to do, in these times when the status quo seems to be sliding in the wrong direction. I wanted to be reminded that people really do change the world. The meeting was hosted by Philadelphia community organizer Dick Goldberg, a Director of Coming of Age. His guest was the CEO of AARP, Bill Novelli, author of “50+ Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America.”

I found Novelli to be charismatic, speaking with enthusiasm and conviction about how AARP was founded 49 years ago by Ethel Percy Andrus, an individual who wanted to help older people, and at the same time saw them as an army of social activists, using their experience to make the world a better place. He had my attention, because I’m hoping that I can direct my own energy towards changing the world, and looking for ways to join with others to do it. Even though  it’s so much easier to meet people online, it was great to be face to face with people who are interested in making the most of life after 50.

The meeting was held at the convention center across the street from the studio of public television station, WHYY, and was being recorded for televising in the fall. I’ve never been to a televised meeting before, so that was a new experience. And when it came time to ask questions, I walked over to the microphone, an amazing feat for me, considering I would have been too shy to ask a question in public before I went through the Toastmasters program. So I really am getting better as I grow older. Thank God for Toastmasters, and the life long development of new skills.

I said to a room full of strangers, “I just celebrated my 60th birthday last week.” This was funny because in that room being 60 was a credential, and so I was actually bragging about it. I continued, “But when I think about what defines me as a boomer, I don’t think about my age now. I think about trying to stop a war in 1967 by sitting in a university building. I’m not interested now in protest, but am interested more than ever in making the world a better place. I came here tonight looking for institutions that can help. I always thought of AARP as an instrument of social self-defense. It sounds like you’re saying that AARP can also be an institution of social development. Is that true?”

In Novelli’s opening remarks he had talked about AARP as such an institution, but he kept coming back to individuals doing it on their own. I want institutions that can pull people together and create change, and wasn’t sure how much he was assigning to me alone, and how much his institution can help people work collectively. At least now I know the intention is there, and want to learn more about how it is helping.

After the meeting I met a couple of people involved in the Center for Intergenerational Learning, based at Temple University, and learned about their programs. Robert Tietze, Executive Director of Experience Corps, a program in which senior volunteers mentor school kids, including a branch at my old elementary school, Pennypacker, in West Oak Lane. And Aviva Perlo, Peer Counseling Coordinator of Intercommunity Action, Inc, a program in which seniors coach other seniors

My original goal was to learn something that I could write about in my blog about memoirs, and I thought the evening was wrapping up a little skimpy in that area. Then a woman asked me what school I had been protesting at in 1967. I told her it was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She said, “I was there, too.” I studied her face, trying to imagine if I ever saw her pass me on the campus. Every once in while, the wind blows and the veil of time flutters. Forty years ago, 1,000 miles away, I was hoping to change the world, and now, here in Philadelphia is a woman from that same time and place, trying to work towards social change, at Temple University’s Center for Intergenerational Learning. Ahh.. There was the lesson I was looking for. This coincidence reminded me that life is one unified flow. But I don’t need to passively wait for coincidences. I can do it myself. Memoir writing is a form of personal activism, that links together the past and present, and makes the journey of life more whole.

Barack Obama’s memoir ends with a homecoming

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by Jerry Waxler

I finished Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my father.” I had been concerned earlier in the book that his emphasis on ideas might dull the edge of his memoir. So it was with some surprise when I got to the last third of the book, and found him shifting away from ideas, and switching into pure storytelling mode. That is a fascinating literary device. I wonder sometimes how conscious an author is of such stylistic development, transforming from his style in the beginning, a memoir mixed with an essay, into a strictly story telling style at the end. In any case, it worked, and I found that the ending was quite satisfying.

What impressed me about this story was that it was a Homecoming. Homecomings are the classic ending of the Hero’s Journey. This idea of homecoming turns up a lot in stories, but each story has its own spin on what Homecoming means. In the Odyssey, Ulysses really returned to his ancestral home. In the first Star Wars, Luke Skywalker came “home” to Princess Leah, who later turned out to be his sister. So it was a return to his “true home.” Obama’s homecoming also has an interesting twist. It was not the home he was born in, but the place his African father was born. When you have roots in more than one place, where is your home? It’s a question all travelers and transplants face. I think Obama raised this question beautifully, and without answering it, let the story do his work for him, by showing us what it was like for him to visit his African family, and let us feel it, see it, hear it ourselves through the art of storytelling.

In Alex Haley’s famous novel and mini-series, Roots, the author went back to Africa to look for his own roots buried in history, highlighting the longing and the frustration to see backwards through time, through layers of generations, and lost history. This attempt to find deep, ancestral roots has universal elements, as many of us wonder where we came from, and can’t ever quite scratch that itch. Take me for example. My grandparents fled Russia during the pogroms, a horrible period in Jewish history, in which Russian thugs and militia pillaged Jewish towns, a sort of state-sanctioned vigilante movement to terrorize Jews. When my grandparents came over to this country, they went through the Ellis Island immigration process, and some clerk on Ellis Island gave them an English spelling for their Cyrillic name. In their case it was Waxler, in others Wexler, Wachsler, Wechsler. Who knows what the original name was? Over time, the area where they left was subjected to the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s and Hitler’s massacres, and the German invasion, shrouding my ancestry deep in the fog of history. But I still wish I knew what it was like, who those people were, how they lived.

In Obama’s case, unlike the vast majority of African Americans, he had a chance to actually visit the land of his African father. That is fascinating! Obama’s life represents the cross roads of black and white, African and American. What a GREAT story. When he meets his own extended biological family, he acts as a sort of representative to explore the tragedy of black ancestors being kidnapped from African villages, forcibly resettled, and then put in forced labor for a couple of hundred years to help other people succeed. We can’t change the past, but hopefully through the telling and sharing of the story, we can empathize, learn, grow together and heal.

I don’t know Obama’s future as a politician. But I do know that by opening a window into his own experience, he has helped me grow richer in understanding. By sharing his story, he has already fulfilled one of the roles of a leader.

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Click here to read the first part of my review of Dreams from My Father.

Memoirs – self-indulgent or connection to the world?

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by Jerry Waxler

When the blogging craze first started it looked “self indulgent” – who wants to hear people talking about themselves? But this craze had legs. It turns out people love to talk about themselves, and to hear about each other. There is something oddly soothing about hearing another person’s tale, whether it’s about a daytrip or romance or hobby. And so, blogs continue to be popular, giving people a chance to come out from behind their barriers and share more than ever. It is a modern form of intimacy.

I suppose people who lived in a small village might have had more intimate connections, where everyone grew up together and knew everything about each other. We don’t live in those villages anymore. But we do have the internet, and this is letting us create our own customized community, a really big one, just like that crazy visionary Marshall McLuhan said. When I first read Marshall McLuhan in the 60’s I thought his ideas about a global village were cool, but unrealistic. That was the era of television, when you sat back on your sofa, and passively watched slick, over-produced shows. Television created a passive, almost zombie-like public. But now the internet is taking over. A recent study found that college kids are online 3 hours a day! Inside their dorms they are getting to know each other around the campus and around the world. As we settle in to the twenty-first century, the world is starting to take on some of the qualities of McLuhan’s vision of a village.

The internet has given our voice a global reach. Free blogging, forums, email, podcasts, video posts, photos, online communities, and yes even those old tried and true websites. We have so many more ways of touching each other. Much of the communication through these media focus on the tales of the day. Blogs often resemble diaries. That’s a start, but you can push that intimacy much further by writing a memoir. Instead of dashing off snips of thoughts from a day, share your whole story.

I love face to face writing workshops, opportunities to meet and teach and learn with real people, seeing their expression, feeling their presence. But it’s hard to gather people together in one place. They are busier than ever. It’s expensive and time consuming to go across town, let alone across a region, and we are all juggling obligations, including the desire to just stay home. But on the internet – Ahhh. You can dance and bob, jump and swirl, through the pages, like lightening, looking for images, ideas, people, places. It sets the mind free.

While I continue to enjoy personal contact, with each passing year I can see that the wave of the twenty first century is moving the village out of the face to face realm, a loss of one kind of intimacy, but in exchange it reveals a new kind of village at a distance. That’s okay. We’re people and we need each other. We’ll take what we can get. And when we look at these changes as opportunities, it turns out that by by applying the ideas of memoir to reveal your own experiences and turn them into narrative, you can get to know other people, not as faceless conversations, but as fully engaged actors sharing the stage of life. My goal is to provide a cross roads, and encouragement and insight that lets people share their story.

From the simple space of my desk, at 5:00 AM, a cup of coffee by my side, in front of a bank of fluorescent lights to jumpstart my morning, I am ready to communicate with the world. To do so, I need to find what works. What do people want to know? What do I have to offer? I can experiment, and learn by blogging. Blogs are good practice, to help me learn the art of talking about myself in a way that is useful and interesting to others.

When I’m near home in my physical “village” if you can use this term on a modern, automobile driven neighborhood where most people are strangers, I want to look normal and bland. But on the internet I can show how I am unique. By sharing my own journey, and encouraging you to share yours, we can individually and together, story by story, reverse the falling apart into isolation, and turn this world into a global village. I think when people get to know more about the person inside the shell, we’ll start appreciating each other more, and learn how to help each other in new ways we have yet to imagine.

Memoir of 9/11 reaching out along memory lane

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 by Jerry Waxler

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

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