Muddling Memoir: Photographs

I've spent the past week looking at slides of my Mexico years. I didn't set up the projector and screen, though I still own both. Instead, I used a small slide viewer. I set in a stack of thirty to forty year old slides and pushed them through the lighted cavity. One by one images of Mexico slid before me. The long dark hair and sad eyes of a young woman on the cliffs above the Pacific just before leaving Santa Cruz, California. The images of peasants and children who populated the street corners not only of Mexico City, but of villages from the northern border along both coastlines and south to Oaxaca. Images of farmers tending their fields and construction workers building the vast Mexico City subway system, humble churches and elaborate cathedrals, fortress-like museums and open-air markets.

In the early 1980s, long before digital cameras or cell phones, I splurged on a small 35 mm Olympus I carried with me wherever I went. What I didn't capture and develop in black and white, I recorded on color slides. I have hundreds of photographs of strangers, and even a few of myself. What I have in limited quantity are photos of the people who populated my life. I have Cathy in Santa Cruz, but not in Mexico City. I have Evelia and Judi, a few of friends at my Mexican wedding, and even a shot of my ex-husband painting our apartment for my sister's visit. But most of the time my camera recorded strangers and the places they inhabited. Does this show where my heart lay? Were culture, place, and local inhabitants what felt important? The extremes wealth and poverty what struck me?

Waves of memory wash over me. I am drowning under those waves, yet I need to stay in the turbulence, work within it until words make sense and memories fit together with the perfection of a jigsaw puzzle. I must give myself time to feel the joy and pain, the adventure and loss. I jot notes, scribble startlines, set a timer, put pen to paper. And repeat. From the muddled mess of memory I trust a story will emerge.

Prior posts in the Muddling Memoir series: 
Beginnings

Journals 
Letters 
Perspective
A Timeline

Closure? Never.

La Flor de Noche Buena

Greats and Guides

Vinyl

So Here's What I Did 

Why? 

Muddling Memoir: Why?

The thing about memoir is that whatever you write, someone is likely to disagree with you, someone may be angered, someone might be hurt.

To write memoir, you need a clear understanding of why you write and why you publish. Odds are you will be asked, perhaps even attacked for your story.

To read memoir, you need to be aware that you are reading a single version of a story. If each character in the memoir were to pen their own story, they would see the events through different prisms. If you were to rewrite your story, the versions might differ as you wrote from new perspectives of age and experience.

I believe in honesty and truth.

I believe I cannot be a complete human without examining my life with a clear eye and, at times, brutal honesty. I write memoir because I need to understand myself and my past, my decisions and my motivations. I write to know who I am and where I stand in this crazy world.

Some may say, "Fine. Write. But why publish?"

That's a tough question, made more so if you believe your memoir may cause distress or that your version of life lived differs from that of those you cherish.

I publish because without publishing, I deny my voice. If I stash a manuscript in a drawer and try to forget it's there, I am censoring not only my words, but my essence, my life, my value. If I allow myself to be swayed by letting others dictate what I can publish, I forfeit my voice. By forfeiting voice, I forfeit self.

This is a tough challenge for the memoirist. No matter how careful and sensitive, honest and kind, you try to be, no matter how deeply you dug to find your personal truth, there's a good chance someone will call you a liar. Someone will deny your right to tell your story.

Are you strong enough? Can you withstand the pain?

Why do you write memoir? Why do you read it? Why are you reading this blog series (I'm glad you are - thank you!)?

I read memoir for truth. I read memoir to see the world of another and understand the decisions made, the how and the why of their choices. I read memoir just as I read fiction, for the poetic beauty of a story well-told.

Some value spoken over written word. Some can express themselves best through conversation. I am not one of them. I struggle to express my thoughts and ideas, my truths and passions, orally. I need pen and paper to organize my brain, to put words to passions, to find my own truth. It is that truth that I believe makes me a better human being even as I recognize that truth changes, that memory itself changes truth. I know I must continue to write even when the path is blurred and full of emotional potholes. To do less is to deny my humanity.

Prior posts in the Muddling Memoir series: 
Beginnings

Journals 
Letters 
Perspective
A Timeline

Closure? Never.

La Flor de Noche Buena

Greats and Guides

Vinyl

So Here's What I Did 

Muddling Memoir: So Here's What I Did

After my last post, I realized I'd gotten ahead of myself on this project. I did exactly what I've taught should not be done. I focused on structure before story. I created a timeline (or tried), before I knew the spine. I needed far more exploratory writing before I could make the most basic, fundamental decision: am I writing memoir or fiction or some kind of hybrid?

At the moment, I'm feeling a strong pull from Jeannette Wall's "true-life fiction." I like the logic of a fictionalized story of lives lived. In Half Broke Horses, Walls writes of her grandmother. She didn't live her grandmother's life but bases her story on a lifetime of family lore.

The years I'm exploring for my own project are more recent, yet many of the characters are either no longer with us or impossible to access. To complicate matters, memories of my life in Mexico seem overshadowed by those of the traumatic years that followed. I find myself struggling as I write, questioning if something happened as I remembered it happening or only as I remember the memory of it colored and shaped by the intervening years. Can one look back and claim to still see clearly through the eyes of a forty-year-younger self?

In her essay, "On Keeping a Notebook," Joan Didion wrote, I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

So here's what I did this past week. I put aside the timeline, and journal transcripts, and beginnings of a manuscript. I took up pen and notebook (this very pen and notebook where I scribble these thoughts while sipping cappuccino at the Frye Art Museum Cafe). I made a list of startlines - sentences based on a single flash of memory that can be used to jump start a timed-writing session. A technique I learned in 2002 from Robert Ray and Jack Remick when I first began writing. A technique that led to the completion of The Thirty-Ninth Victim. A technique I allowed to slip from my practice.

I wrote every day last week. Sometimes before work, other days at work, still others after. I wrote when I had 30-minute moments. As I wrote, new fragments of memory emerged - long forgotten faces, places, events - and I jotted new startlines. I can't guarantee that all I wrote really happened or "merely might have happened," but for now it doesn't matter to me. What matters is to continue writing until the story and genre reveal themselves.

Prior posts in the Muddling Memoir series: 
Beginnings

Journals 
Letters 
Perspective
A Timeline

Closure? Never.

La Flor de Noche Buena

Greats and Guides

Vinyl

Trusting the Process 

Muddling Memoir: Trusting the Process

Okay. I'll admit it . I'm feeling a bit lost. The holidays ended and winter quarter began. The skies are gray and the days are cold. I've got another miserable cold I can't seem to beat, but what I don't have is a story. I'm not writing. There, I said it. I'm not writing. Sure, I'm reading and thinking. I'm tippy-toeing around the periphery of faded memory, but I haven't found the door yet. I haven't entered, and I haven't discovered the story that lies within.

Is this what some refer to as writers' block? Or, am I just tired, bored, lazy? Or perhaps Pretense finally caught up with me, now tapping a gnarled finger on my forehead repeating: "You can't write. You have nothing to say. Just give it up and go watch the Seahawks game or a Hallmark movie."

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the Seahawks and Hallmark brings back warm memories of watching with my mother, explaining the simple plot lines to a brain befuddled by dementia. But neither Seahawks nor Hallmark, teaching myself to sketch nor learning what I can about marketing, or even repotting house plants and dreaming of future home remodels should pull me away from the writing. They never have before.

I've lived through a lifetime of gray, depressing Seattle winters. I've started a good ninety new college terms in my long career, and I've dealt with more head colds and sinus infections than reasonable for a healthy woman. So what gives? Why am I struggling with this story? Why can't I find it?

The thing about writing memoir, about muddling around in the past, is that sometimes it hurts. Sometimes we just don't want to go there and our brain and body put up every roadblock imaginable to avoid it. Some folks manage to navigate through life with little more than a glance over the shoulder. Others spend large chunks of time examining the past, trying to make sense of life lived, decisions made, people and places experienced. Unless life has been fairytale-perfect, that examination can be tough. We go through life hearing things life "you think too much" or "you're too self-absorbed" or "it's not your problem." Maybe all of that's true. Maybe it's not. Maybe we're memoirists and we have stories to tell.

So why am I struggling to find that story? Why the avoidance? Maybe I'm just a lazy sod who wants nothing more than a snorkeling vacation in Hawaii or the Bahamas. But as I read the signs and examine the more recent years - the last thirteen since I began writing by penning my first memoir - I know this is just a phase. I need to trust the process. That same process that has given me other stories. I need to put pen to paper for thirty minutes every morning and see what shows up on the page. The story will emerge if I trust the process. The alternative? Toss pen and notebook in the trash and walk away. But I know where that would lead me and it's not a pretty place. 

Prior posts in the Muddling Memoir series: 
Beginnings

Journals 
Letters 
Perspective
A Timeline

Closure? Never.

La Flor de Noche Buena

Greats and Guides

Vinyl