memoir-guide companion

June 30, 2010

Short story techniques in the structure of a memoir chapter (6)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Genus @ 5:05 am

Life as art

It is only a couple of blocks from the heart of the Wayne State campus to the Detroit Institute of Arts, a museum that often gave me relief from the pressures of undergraduate life. I had my favorite stopping points there — in front of paintings, murals, sculptures — which would transport me from the present back to an earlier period of time and off to another place. But one of my most vivid memories of that building is not of art at all. It is of an inscription over a doorway that reads “VITA BREVIS LONGA ARS.”

In the sixty or years since I first saw those words and inquired about their meaning, I have never lost my sense of the contrast between the brevity of life and the durability of art.

Plowing through the dense prose of Henry James or Marcel Proust, as you read about the experience of a single moment spread out over several pages, and then perhaps in only a few lengthy sentences, it is possible to wonder whether the moment will ever end — the moment you are reading about and the moment you are living. Most authors are much more selective about what they put on the page. Their choice of details determines a story’s denseness or looseness, its intimacy or distance, its familiarity or strangeness.

In fiction, there is no end of such choices. By contrast, memoirists are not entirely free to decide what elements will make a good story. What they write is constrained by the reality of what they remember and tempered by what they may have learned between then and now.

As much as I try to give the chapters of my memoir their own integrity, they are best understood as they fit into the structure of the whole. Many of the multiple strands, sideroads, and diversions in Chapter 9 depend on elements introduced elsewhere in the memoir. This already makes the chapter different from the traditional short story, which has a single focus and economy of expression. If I had been writing short fiction, I would have done everything I could to emphasize the emotional plunge of the central character. I could easily have dispensed with the discussion of Judaism; the story would not have needed many of the characters who now round it out.

To be a memoirist, you have to be a creative artist. You must convert the raw material of events into sequences of cause and effect, of pattern, of something that will make sense to readers. But life is not art, and memoir is not fiction. My leisurely way of getting to the denouement is more a reflection of the fact that what happened at Lanark actually happened to me, and of its importance in my life, than an attempt to fit into any literary genre.

No event or period of life is automatically interesting just because somebody has endured it or witnessed it. Things just happen. They come and go. Vita brevis. But your story is more likely to be read widely if it is approached with the skill and attention of a master story teller, if you superimpose meaning, structure, and pattern onto it. Understanding how the structure of fiction treats events, you can make your memoir feel like a work of art.

June 23, 2010

Short story techniques in the structure of a memoir chapter (5)

Filed under: life lessons, self-revelation, writing techniques — Genus @ 2:23 pm

Life lessons, other voices, recurring themes

The story you write about an experience today is not the same as you would have written when you lived it many years ago because the haze of distance gives memoir a number of advantages over life as it is lived. Now that you have had time to think about what happened, you can recognize the warning signs you overlooked then, and you are far enough away to acknowledge and accept the shortcomings of the less experienced person you once were.

Because Chapter 9 represents the major crisis in my life, it is rich in life lessons. My distress during those years taught me that life on the inside is often not what it appears to be. The rural hippie life, which seemed to outsiders to be free of cares and responsibilities, turned out to offer no more fun and games than any other life. When at my father’s funeral I heard others describe a man I did not recognize, I learned that you never know everything about anything or anybody. There is no such thing as “the rest of the story.” It is hard to know when you are seeing beyond the surface.

The main thing I learned from my socially isolated life was that happiness in paradise depends less on the environment than on how a person approaches it. And as a final, painful lesson, I found that you can’t recapture an old self once you have slammed the door, so it’s important to have an escape plan in mind when you make a dramatic life change. The future was only a vague abstraction to me until the middle of this chapter. Without plans or ambitions, I was more the pawn of circumstances than in control of them. Even after I realized the importance of knowing how I wanted my future to develop after I emerged from the wilderness, it took me years to get back on track.

That’s quite a miscellany of life lessons. They are not explicit in the chapter but no reader can miss them. They show up less as a catalog of tedious platitudes than as a natural outgrowth of the narrative. Again, it‘s a matter of showing, not telling.

Life has a way of piling on the lessons in times of crisis and change, when you are too busy with life to think about them. The real learning takes place only later, such as when you are writing about them. At that time you can incorporate the perspective of your new self and that of others; you can describe what you and they remember of an earlier period and take account of the lessons that may have been discovered since.

The perspective of others is a luxury that comes only with time. It is difficult to take advantage of the experience of others when you are going through a crisis, but you can benefit from their approaches and attitudes and points of view when you recall what you have been through. On one level they can help you get the facts straight — a number of details that were confused or mangled in earlier drafts of the memoir were explained or corrected by people who knew me then — but the memories of others can also add a fresh dimension to your own recollections.

As an example of this, after my final reflections on the lost life from a vantage point five years later, I offer a poem written by Lianna at about the same time, when she was a teenager. These two final quotations serve to show that life goes on even after confusion and loss that seem to be the end of the world.

The continuity of life is also echoed in this chapter through a number of items that were introduced earlier in the memoir. What happened to me in the country did not happen to a fictional character who lived only between 1973 and 1979. This narrative shows me engaged with the same issues as earlier and later, but against a different backdrop. Notably, the discussion of Judaism continues the question of identity that made up a large part of the first few chapters. It also emphasizes the issue of freedom, which is the focus of the entire chapter. My references to the Passover seder were especially apt because that Jewish festival commemorates the biblical exodus from Egypt. Feeling less than free in the woods, I continued to contend with the meaning of freedom, a struggle that later chapters make even more vivid.

June 16, 2010

Short story techniques in the structure of a memoir chapter (4)

Filed under: selection of details, writing techniques — Genus @ 7:38 am

Making the background complete

If you have the courage to face the past honestly and to share it in writing, how you recall and order events will help readers go back over that road with you. The story will contain some essential part of you. It will show the growth of your soul, and it will affect readers.

The most effective life stories show how the writer has changed or been changed. What should remain in the reader’s mind at the end of a memoir is not just the sequence of events. The inner journey through pain and joy should be just as memorable.

To explain how rural life in Canada affected me during the 1970s, the narrative steps away from personal reflection and focuses on the challenges of living in a wild environment and on the people who were trying to survive around me in the parallel Lanark universe. For long sections at the beginning of Chapter 9, Carol and I and our family are mentioned only in passing. As I detail the circumstances of our life, I use a trowel to smear on the background before I work with a fine brush to overlay the details that will remain in the foreground. I interweave two elements: my road and me trying to pass through it.

My sense of being in an alien environment, my ultimate decision to leave everything dear to me in order to restore some deep part of myself that I had vaguely felt to be missing — these things did not occur in a vacuum. It is impossible to understand what happened to me without revisiting Lanark. Knowing that time and that place is as crucial to an understanding of what happened to me as any other factor, including my personality and training and talents and shortcomings.

It was only by balancing the inner and outer experience that I could keep the chapter from descending into mawkishness. If I had compressed the first half of this chapter, or skipped it altogether, and focused on my emotional collapse, I would have told only the self-centered part of the story. Its theme would have been me poor me. But the story happened a generation ago, far more than enough time for spilled milk to become spoiled milk, far more than enough time for me to make my pain a consequence of the story, and not the story itself.

You start writing a story with a batch of notes and impressions. It takes time for the elements to mature and become palatable. You must transform the raw pain or bewilderment into a narrative whose elements entertain and enlighten readers — and, above all, interest them. If you can impress readers with images of where you were, with your thoughts at the time, even with the responses and thoughts of others, the images in the tale you spin will be as vivid and memorable as first-hand experience.

June 12, 2010

Short story techniques in the structure of a memoir chapter (3)

Filed under: selection of details, writing techniques — Genus @ 9:56 am

Language and emotion

The sinking sensation felt by readers of Chapter 9 comes from more than the incidents described in the narrative. Tone and imagery are literary devices that contribute to this effect as well.

Interaction with living beings The references to animals at the beginning of the chapter are so frivolous that they would have been appropriate in a children’s story. There’s a fox playing at the chicken house, rumors of bears climbing trees, then a family of cubs playfully dancing along the road. The informal tone gives no hint of danger, even in an untamed environment. The wild animals seem about as menacing as my goats, and I describe them with serene detachment.

In contrast, by the end of the chapter, my world is disintegrating. I am dragged along a gravel road and almost killed by a runaway horse.  Even cows seem marauding beasts in our woods. When I am kicked in the shins and wounded by a dying calf, the pain is not out of place. Nature, which had so benign, has turned against me.

Struggle with the land There is a similar example in the description of the property itself. I imagine myself moving into a kind of rural paradise, a land almost as beautiful as a national park. It is a wild, capricious, commercially worthless, uncontrollable forest, where a person can get lost just by turning around; but it offers our family sustenance and growth and inspiration and entertainment.

As time goes by and we try to convert some of the wildness into a garden, threats emerge. The image of the snake in the garden recalls the story of the Garden of Eden, and the dream of human perfection fades. I handle illegal crops, I become the target of gunshots.

The end of the world The isolation of our land — it would be inaccurate to call it our farm — was as real to us as any other aspect of our existence. The whole chapter takes place within half an hour’s drive of Flower Station, thought by many locals to be the end of the world. But at first this is just an offhand metaphor for remoteness. Nobody could have been serious about it.

Toward the end of the chapter, references to the end of the world become darker and the metaphor becomes ominous. First, a number of people are so convinced that the end is inevitable that they actually prepare for it. Then the crash comes, with the end of our family’s world. Not to lose the point, I repeat two or three sentences from the earlier situation. In the middle of it all, my father dies.

A caveat: The multiple descriptions of the end of the world I have just described were intentional, unlike many of  the literary devices I have been describing. The creative process is mysterious; words and images get poured out onto the page in ways we cannot understand. Much of composition must be more instinctive than conscious. I did not even think about most of the things I have described here until I began to write this essay. Too much planning of images and patterns could make a memoir seem contrived and mechanical.

June 8, 2010

Fiction and memoir and truth again

Filed under: fiction and memoir — Genus @ 6:10 am

A comment on yesterday’s post offers a link to a tantalizing discussion of truth in journalism and fiction. If you’re looking for that elusive quality in your writing, you should take a look at it.

June 7, 2010

Short story techniques in the structure of a memoir chapter (2)

Filed under: fiction and memoir, selection of details, writing techniques — Genus @ 5:50 am

Interaction with the land

You may be the center of your own universe, but you are a bit player in the story of everybody else you meet, and of every place you visit. If you can capture the essence of those encounters and describe clashing points of view, your memoir will have more dramatic tension and will be less of a solipsistic rant.

All memoir involves confrontation and change. You were or thought or felt one way, then you came through a significant experience and you could never be the same again. Memoir is a story of what happened to you, first externally, then internally. It may reflect the insights you learned, or it may echo the wisdom or resignation or bitterness you left behind.

On the simplest level, when Carol and I moved from the nondescript farm country of eastern Ontario to the wooded hills of Lanark, we were moving our home and our herd to a more primitive setting. The land would finally put to rest the pretense that we might be farmers, and we were thrown back onto ourselves in ways we could never have imagined.

But moving involved other dimensions. Our displacement also brought us into contact with everything related to an isolated piece of property. As residents of the old Gray homestead, we stepped into the history of the place. The packet of letters we found when we tore down the back shed and the foundation stones of an ancient church just down the road would not let us forget that we had stepped into a sequence of events — a history, a mythology — that were the story of the land and the house.

We could only imagine what might have happened when a church from Alabama set up camp on that property during the 1920s. Those summer meetings created part of our sense of the place as much as the stories told by neighbors about bears climbing our apple trees. Our experience of life near Maberly was enriched every time we interacted with an animal, from whatever distance — whether it was a blue heron on the lake, a bear on the road, or a fox next to the chicken house.

What we encountered does not resemble what many people remember of the alternative communities they lived in during the seventies. That is because, except for a few pockets, such as Brooke Valley, the Lanark experience was not really communal. It brought a bunch of individuals together to live out individual dreams in the same place and to encourage their neighbors to do the same. It was an ironic, paradoxical effort to fashion a better society out of anti-social elements.

Others had come to that land before, and others would follow. But now it was our turn to try to adjust to the wildness, both natural and social. We had to learn to cope with plants and animals in our own way, and to interact with others who were doing the same.

My story — our story — interweaves the historical and the geographical background of the place with its mythology. It makes those elements a part of our memory and creates our own mythology. That, remembered, is the recipe for my memoir.

I could have skipped the first half of Chapter 9 and simply said that we moved to a different farm, where I began to feel uneasy because of my increasing restlessness and lack of direction. But if I had not introduced all the people and myths I knew then, the memoir would have lacked much of the fullness of what I lived. It would have left the reader grasping for details. It would have been to assert a simple fact, which was not really so simple. What I have done instead is fill in the outlines and the shadows. I have left less to the imagination of readers.

The point is to show what happened rather than to say that something happened.

June 3, 2010

Short story techniques in the structure of a memoir chapter (1)

Filed under: selection of details, writing techniques — Genus @ 6:31 am

When I started this web site fifteen months ago, one of the things I expected to do was to use my memoir as an object lesson for people who were thinking about writing their own life stories.

Some of my essays have examined particular passages in my own writing, even judging my success or failure according to various criteria. I have tried to justify the use of certain details, or to explain why I use particular techniques, such as quotations and dreams. And I have also illustrated my sometimes inept command of the English language by showing why I chose to delete some passages altogether.

Now at a crucial point in the memoir, I am about to do with Chapter 9 what I once thought I would do with many other chapters. In a multi-part essay, I intend to explain the structure of the narrative in detail. By discussing my writing techniques, I hope to show how I have tried to make form and content match each other, to take the chapter from serenity to chaos — that is, how the style and subject matter of the text convey the downward emotional pattern of my life during the late 1970s.

Structure and theme About the first third of this chapter describes the environment I found in 1975 when Carol and I moved to a plot of land some five miles from Maberly, a village on the edge of Ontario’s vacation country. The main theme of the chapter is separation, and this wild, forested country helps convey it perfectly. The chapter begins with geographical isolation and it ends with emotional disintegration.

The eeriness of rural quiet was described in an earlier chapter; here I go further, depicting a psychic distance from the world that makes even deafness seem palpable and desirable. The extended family, my profession, and the country of my birth were already out of reach. In this chapter, my religion loses its hold on me and I walk away from the focus of my existence, my wife and children.

Another reason for describing Lanark in detail is that it is as much a factor in my story as are any of the people I met. I try to vivify our farm life for readers who have heard of the alternative communities of the seventies only in passing. And I could not provide this backdrop for my personal memoir without including the people who shared that life: the crazies and the lazies; people hiding from the outside world, dreamers, and altruists; the individualistic, the anarchic, spiritual pretenders and wannabes.

Finally, I wanted to express the isolation and distance I felt living in Lanark. The first third of the chapter describes it as a kind of paradise, where Carol and I and our children could explore nature and learn about life in whatever way the woods might teach us. Gradually, the nature of our paradise became more complex and problem-laden, as any earthly paradise will, no matter how pleasant at first.

May 27, 2010

The nature of truth

Filed under: life lessons, memory, perceptual filters, reason for writing — Genus @ 5:42 am

As my father lay in his final hospital bed in 1978 following a second heart attack, I was more of an observer than a participant. I had been away from Detroit for long enough to feel disconnected from what was happening in front of me. And when I heard my father (him sixty-nine, me forty-one) tell my mother he loved her, words I had never before heard pass between them, I felt as if I had stepped into an alien existence.

I had not shared daily life with the family for sixteen years, and I had accepted my father’s departure from my life many years before. I did not know him as a living presence, as my brothers or my sister did, and certainly could not view him in the same way as the hospital staff, who are trained to deny the reality of death and who see every encounter with it as a defeat.

He had moved to Israel for a time, then returned when my mother complained that she missed her children and grandchildren. He did not want to leave his new friends or his lemon trees or the desert climate, and he told my mother that going back to North America would kill him.

Now visitors were trying to tempt him back to life by describing how much was happening outside the hospital walls, but he was looking forward to the light on the other side of an even higher wall and he had accepted the end with serenity.

My main lesson during those days was that death is a unique and private experience for everybody — not only for the people who die, but for those who survive as well.

In my previous post I wrote, “We can only share the present, but each of us can nourish an idiosyncratic and idiopathic past.” Reflecting on the death of my father, my first intimate encounter with death (the passing of my grandparents seems casual by comparison), and then writing about it, I have begun to question whether we can share the present any more than we can share the past.

Dying may be isolating and lonely, but in some ways so is living. There is little beside simple fact to link the experience of the man who lay dying, the family who came to see him, the hospital staff who hopefully lied about the years of vitality that might await him. We all have our own perception of an event, and as a result we have our own memories of it as well. Events happen differently to everybody who lives through them.

In one of her short stories, Cynthia Ozick observes that some people filch their fiction from life and others filch their life from fiction. The focus of Chapter 9 of the memoir is isolation — geographical remoteness, lack of professional enrichment, the lack of meaningful community, finally a break with the family I had helped create — and death has a kind of literary aptness in it. This chapter describes the beginning of a rapid downward spiral in my life. If it had been fiction, this would have been a good place to fabricate a death.

There is no single truth about any experience. Life has multiple points of view. What was does not exist, and what we remember as having existed is only a part of what was. Our perspective is our only reality, our memory the only record.

May 19, 2010

On sharing experiences but not sharing memories

Filed under: memory — Genus @ 7:18 am

I had the extraordinary experience last night of running into an old friend in a restaurant after more than fifteen years, recognizing him and being glad to see him, having him recall my name immediately and knowing that he was happy to see me as well.

So often, when people reconnect after a lengthy period of time, even if they knew each other well, there is a mad scramble in the mind of one or the other as a creaky mental file system rehashes the past: Who is this, and why does he know me so well, and why does he think I will recognize him; he seems so familiar, I must have known him, but where, and how, and how long can I keep up the conversation before he gives me enough clues to clear things up.

Last December I recognized the name of one of the artists at a craft fair that Catherine and I attended. She had been a graphic artist working for a local design company when I was production editor for a government agency. We had worked together on a book for the better part of a year, sometimes over lunch, often at my desk, trying to satisfy both the picky author I represented and her finicky manager.

We survived the ordeal, but we often had to commiserate with each other about fighting against our professional instincts. It was more uncomfortable for her than for me, but the working relationship had been so stressful that when I tried to give her a copy of the published book, she told me she never wanted to be reminded of the title again.

When I introduced myself to her at the craft show, all I got in return was a blank stare — and her empty expression did not change even when I told her the name of the book we had worked on, the name of her old manager, the company she had worked for. I could have told her much more — I even remembered her discomfort from endometriosis during the months we worked together, and the name of the opera she was listening to when I went to her house to offer her the book — but there was no point in bringing up those details from her past. She had long ago decided to suppress any trace of the experience, and she was not going to acknowledge me.

It is not uncommon for people to share an experience, even for an intense period of time, and for the memory to die on the one side but to remain vital on the other. When I went to my first high school reunion, thirty years after graduation, I was looking forward to seeing a number of people. Some chose not to come, and some others did not remember me, even though they were among my best friends. I was also ambushed by a woman who claimed that she and I had spent lots of time together at Central.

I have seen her once or twice since in Detroit, and I have learned that there is no point in questioning her memory. We nod and speculate about a life that could have been, but my speculation is based on a mind that creates fiction, and hers, presumably, on memory — though I sometimes think it too could be a fiction created out of ancient hopes and dreams.

We like to imagine we share the present with others, but each of us ends up nourishing a unique past, idiosyncratic and idiopathic. And that seems to be a psychological necessity, the basis of our sense of where we came from.

May 14, 2010

Individuality and community

Filed under: life lessons, meaning — Genus @ 6:02 am

It has been a long time since the memoir dealt with community, mulled over the difference between Us and Them, rubbed against the thorny questions surrounding personal responsibility, allegiance to family, religion, country. The issue has always been alive, but it is one of the areas that I have never fully resolved.

In an earlier post, I quoted Jean Vanier’s assertion that our need to belong is as basic as any human need. I have never understood this and have felt myself comfortable as part of a group only on rare occasions. I have usually found that more is lost than gained by joining a group. To be accepted into the club requires losing a measure of autonomy, being willing to accept the values of group members and even their scorn when I fall short. Joining a group has normally brought me more disappointment than fulfilment — such as in Madison, when I first discovered that groups exist for themselves, not for the individuals they comprise:

Encouraged by Yudi to join a community of like-minded Jewish people . . . I joined the Organization of Orthodox Jewish Scientists . . . . I sent a number of letters in their direction, desperately asking somebody, anybody, to show me how serious Jews in small towns could retain deep feelings for the Jewish community at large. The letters went into the void. . . . As a result, I began to feel even more isolated and convinced that I shared very few life goals with any Jewish community.

In Chapter 9, far from conventional groups, I give it another chance. The word “community” appears fifteen times within a few pages. But that brief experiment too is doomed to end in failure:

[The Lanark counterculture] was a community that did not care whether there was a Them, because the question of Us was so much more important and the question of Me was supreme.

I vacillate between describing community as one of the false gods we choose to worship, and as one of the forms of voluntary slavery we choose again and again in the futile hope that it will help us become fuller individuals. It becomes a touchstone for our behavior; to gain its approval we accept its judgment. It colors the way we think about money, politics, religious systems.

The part of me that incorporated American Transcendentalism keeps reminding me that we might as well kiss personal freedom goodbye altogether if we surrender our willingness to think independently about any of these things. In this highly abstract sense, I see little difference in how our souls are twisted whether we give our energies to the Chicago Cubs or to the Taliban.

I sometimes think I wouldn’t waste time on these questions if I were living alone. At the extreme end of my fantasy imagination, I go to a small town far from anyone who ever mattered to me, take a final journey into the psychological desert and spend the rest of my life lost in appearances, without thinking about whether any of it matters.

But people really do matter, and their acceptance is a crucial element in our own sense of value. Our social circles, from the families we are born into to the friends and families we choose, remain hard realities, always reminding us that there is no escape from ourselves.

The hopeful end of the memoir comes with a claim that there is no Them. A more qualified ending at the same time wonders whether there is an Us. It is all part of an endless exploration of community and my effort to find meaning in it.

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