Memories and Memoirs Newsletter | October 2009
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
Welcome writers, memoirists, and journalers
It's now the season when we turn to contemplation and meditation as the days darken early into night. This season is a transition from the bright light
of summer into the colors of autumn and the winter of long nights cuddling into blankets near a fireplace with a good book. It's a time for buying new
journals and pens, a time to think about your writing with fresh eyes. Notice how novelists and memoirists that you read keep you drawn in--how they do construct paragraphs, sentences, images? How do other writers make you feel? All my life I have been an avid reader, even now reading several books at once, marveling at all the ways words create whole worlds.
In my writing life, we are getting ready to celebrate the release of my new book The Power of Memoir in January. Stay tuned for more about the book, excerpts, and events! Though I have written other books, I learned so much more by writing this one. I reflected on how much I've seen memoir writing change people's lives for the better, and examined the ways healing happens through writing your true, authentic stories. You will hear more about the book and events on these pages!
More positive news about writing: It's important to invite your creative self to appear every day, even if for a simple entry into your Gratitude Journal. Research has shown that one post a day for 30 days changes your brain!
Okay--here's my Gratitude Entry: I'm grateful for the play of sun on the autumn leaves today, and the crisp invitation the season makes for me to enjoy its bounty. I feel enlivened and ready to write.
Keep writing, and enjoy the colorful autumn days.
Linda Joy
Truth or Lie: How Memoir Writers Can Approach Truth and Healing
The flurry about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and other memoirs that admittedly were made up hit the media with a big bang, bringing the age-old debate about what is acceptable when writing memoir—a “true” story. Every time a memoir is released that gains media attention this debate is raised. Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club, Jennifer Lauck, Blackbird, and Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments, all defended their memoirs in various publications. Each of them said that some recreations of actual reality had to occur in order to write their story and make it interesting.
As a memoir coach, I find that people are worried about the ethical issues involved in memoir writing. For example, writers ask such questions as, “What if I don’t remember the exact conversation when my mother died,” or “I don’t know what clothes I was wearing the day my father went away.” I’m always moved by these innocent, caring questions, because the writer is trying very hard to be truthful and accurate, and not leave any room to be accused of dishonesty.
As I write in my new book The Power of Memoir, a memoir is a creation of a story from memory using writing tools to create scenes and story that’s entertaining and puts the reader in the scene. In order to reach out to the reading public and go beyond private journaling, a memoir writer must create a story that has a story arc and use dramatic structure, bringing the story alive with what we call “fictional tools.” However, the story being told remains as accurately her version of what she experienced as she can make it. This may mean constructing a scene that conflates time, or creating costumes for characters to wear that we can’t be sure they wore, but our job is to be accurate and as honest as we can be about the emotional truths and as many facts as we can manage. If we change the plot of our lives because another plot would be more interesting, we are writing fiction. If we say we had relationships we didn’t have because it would make a better story, we that’s fiction.
A memoir writer needs to write a first draft that sifts through the happenings, feelings, and challenges and get them down on the page—a draft that is healing and purging—and important. Publishing is yet another stage. The writer must ask many questions of the work—how much to include, and how to write it so others can understand the story. It’s important to write a first draft that delves into all the conflictual emotional issues to clear them out of the mind, then write another draft that looks toward publication, if that is the goal.
A few years ago, Mary Karr wrote a piece in the New York Times about memoir writing:
"Call me outdated, but I want to stay hamstrung by objective truth, when the very notion has been eroding for at least a century. When Mary McCarthy wrote 'Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood' in 1957, she felt obliged to clarify how she recreated dialogue. In her preface, she wrote: 'This record lays a claim to being historical - that is, much of it can be checked. If there is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right.'"
Mary went on to talk about how much she learned, and how healing it was when she didn't make passages in her book more "interesting" or shape them into a slightly different story. "If I'd hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I'd never had to overcome - a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties - I wouldn't have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth."
As we write memoir, we’re reaching for something beyond our conscious selves. In the river of creativity and the search for truth, there are forces beyond us moving us along to a place we didn't even know about, a place of healing and resolution. We can hope that James Frey also has found a resolution for his suffering, and that all memoir writers do the same, by wrestling with what their truth is and writing it out with confidence. Allow the first draft to say all the hidden things that need to be said, then turn toward “the reader’s” needs after that.
Harvesting Our Wisdom: Napa Valley Writing Retreat
Join us November 6th through 8th, 2009
Schedule: Friday from 6:30 PM to Sunday 12:30 PM
28 CEU units
Location: Calistoga, CA
Fee: $625 | Add to cart
Autumn: the earth releases its fruits into harvest turning toward the silence and reflection of winter darkness. In this silence, we dig deep into our inner selves, and the poetry within.
Calistoga: steam arises from ancient pools of mineral water inviting busy urban souls to relax into healing waters, to find silence in nature, to spend time with the self that is often forgotten. Join us in this bounteous place for a writing retreat. Reserve your space now–retreat limited to 10 participants!
Linda Joy Myers, President of the National Association of Memoir Writers offers a retreat twice a year, an opportunity to work with Linda Joy in person, and at a wonderful location–the heart of the Napa Valley wine country north of San Francisco.
In this retreat you get to immerse yourself in writing from your heart and exploring where your stories come from—memories, dreams, and “moments of being,” as Virginia Woolf calls them. You can think of it as a spiritual retreat, where you get in touch with that “still small voice within” or a way to connect with other writers. Perhaps you would like to write for three days without the distractions of the family, the house, and the world disturbing you.
In this retreat you can write in whatever style you prefer, whether it is a memoir, fiction, or poetry. This special retreat time invites you to focus on yourself and and tune into the inner source of the stories you want to write. Click here to learn more.
California Writers Club- Marin Branch Special Centennial Event
Sunday October 18, 2009, 1 to 5 p.m.Book Passage, Corte Madera
Fee: $45.00*
As the California Writers Club celebrates its 100th Year Anniversary, and Marin branch as a 10 year charter with CWC, join us as we host your favorite authors in an afternoon celebration of music, food and wine, readings and books, agent interviews and more. Read More.
Soul-making Literary Competition
Deadline: November 30, 2009
The annual Soul-Making Literary Competition is open to everyone, everywhere and looks for original, freshly creative and finely crafted works that embrace all creative interpretations of English poet, John Keats' statement: "Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making"**
SOUL, in general, in many religions and philosophies, is conceived as the animating and vital spiritual principle in human beings; an inner, immaterial element that, together with the material body, constitutes the human individual.
MAKING is the act of one that makes; the process of coming into being; of realizing potential.
The Soul-Making Literary Competition invites multifarious works that address soul-making in innovative and expanded expressions. Learn More
Stories from the Heart V
Story Circle Network
Fifth National Women's Memoir Conference
February 5-7, 2010
Wyndham Hotel, Austin, Texas
Stories from the Heart V will bring women from around the country to celebrate our stories and our lives. Through writing, reading, listening, and sharing, we will discover how personal narrative is a healing art, how we can gather our memories, how we can tell our stories. We welcome readers, writers, storytellers, and any woman with a past, present, and future. There will be opportunities to explore difficult or hidden issues, expand our relationships with other women, and discover different modes and media—such as art, dance, and drama—for sharing our stories. Come, learn, share, celebrate with us as we honor our stories! Click here to learn more.
Rabindranath Tagore: Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
