Lee Martin's Blog, page 31

To Cherish the World: A Christmas Wish

I was back in my native southeastern Illinois last week, and I happened to have a little dust-up with a stranger at the local fitness center. Let’s say we should have agreed to disagree and left it at that, but we didn’t. She, a very nice elderly lady, broached a subject she shouldn’t have brought up if she really wanted to know my opinion. I tried to warn her. I said, “I’m not sure you want to start this conversation with me.” Nevertheless, she persisted.

She was soft-spoken and polite. Her white hair was neatly coifed, and she reminded me a bit of my own mother, who’s been gone now for 31 years. My mother would have held her tongue. She would have swallowed her own opinion for the sake of harmony. I have just enough of my father’s fire in me, though, to keep quiet sometimes. You have to push me a good ways for me to sacrifice accord for the sake of what I’m convinced is right, but there are just some things that require an expression of opinion, and this was one of those things.

So our argument progressed, and in public no-less, each of us thinking—and saying as much—the other was horribly misguided. My mother would have been ashamed of me. My father would have applauded. I’m still convinced I’m right, but even so, I feel just a tad guilty because, in spite of my warning the lady not to go down this path, she did, and I followed her, and we ended up in a tangle, each of us unwilling to concede.

I wonder now whether she, like I did, left the fitness center that morning and thought about our blowup throughout the day. I don’t know what she thinks about me, but I’m still convinced she’s a good person. Good people can be misguided. Good people can be wrong. Good people can abet the depraved, the immoral, the cruel, and the ethically hampered. Like all of us, good people can carry a touch of evil with them just as evil people can be capable of goodness.

This is why I keep writing—to try, time and time again, to figure out the mysteries of what it is to be human. Flannery O’Connor once said, “It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.” This is why I write. This is why I get interested in the come-and-go of all of us. This is why I create characters and set them into motion. I want to use both fiction and nonfiction to dramatize the struggles of people who sometimes come up against the truth of who they are and sometimes swerve away from that truth. Each thing I write, if I’m lucky, will offer a temporary clarity to what it means to move through this world. At the same time, the mysteries of the human heart run so deep, each attempt to define them is doomed to fail.

This is my Christmas wish to all of you who write, or otherwise create and attempt some measure of understanding—that you will accept that in some way your efforts will always come up short, but each try will take you further in your striving, as Flannery O’Connor also said, “to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”

That’s my wish for all of us, even the stranger in that fitness center—that we humble ourselves to the difficult task of being alive, that we interrogate ourselves and those around us while also appreciating the noble effort we all make to know more than we did the moment before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Are You Writing What Matters?

My father used to tell me, when I was a small boy who liked to think he knew a thing or two about a thing or two, “You’re just talking to hear yourself roar.” Or sometimes he’d use a variation, “You’re just talking to hear your head rattle.” I’m remembering these sayings here at the end of another semester of teaching as well at a time later in my life than makes me comfortable to consider. It’s a time when I watch another group of my students entering their adult lives. It’s a time when I begin to wonder just how many more books I may have the good fortune to write. Don’t get me wrong. Here at age 64, I still feel young—too young, my wife Cathy would tell you in those moments when I let the twelve year-old boy I carry inside me express himself with corny jokes and downright silliness. All that said, the writer in me who’s always believed in realism knows the years are dwindling and thinks about how he wants to spend the writing time he has left.

Which leads me to this question: Are you writing the things that really matter to you, or are you merely moving words about on the page? Are you writing that which is complex, or are you settling for the simple? Are you writing about what makes you uncomfortable, or are you merely writing to entertain yourself? Are you facing the mysteries of what it is to be human, or are you avoiding that in favor of the familiar, the cheap, the plain? What does your writing cost you?

I think of the late Kent Haruf who finished the revisions for his last novel, Our Souls at Night, just before he died. Ill with advanced lung cancer, he’d promised his wife he’d finish this book before he had to leave her, and that’s exactly what he did. In the final scene of that novel, the aged lovers, Addie and Louis, separated now—she in Denver, and he in Holt County, Colorado—because of a fall that broke her hip and led her son to move her closer to him, speak on the telephone. Addie tells Louis she doesn’t want him to call her because she’s afraid someone will be in the room with her and she won’t be able to hide the fact it’s he who has called. “It’s like when we started,” Louis says, referring to the way their romance started one evening when Addie walked across the street to Louis’s house and said to him, “I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.” She makes it clear she’s not talking about sex. She says, “We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.” So here at the end of the novel are some of the last, if not the last, words Haruf would write:

It’s like when we started. Like we’re started out new again. With you being the one to begin it again. Except that we’re careful now.

But we’re continuing too. Aren’t we, she said. We’re still talking. For as long as we can. For as long as it lasts.

What do you want to talk about tonight?

She looked out the window. She could see her reflection in the glass. And the dark behind it.

Dear, is it cold there tonight?

Imagine a writer who knows his death is imminent typing those words. What words, out of the thousands Kent Haruf must have written, could possibly matter more? Here, as we move closer to the end of another year, we should all ask ourselves—Are we writing words like that?

 

 

 

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Story Starters: Some Prompts

Often ideas for stories can come from things we overhear people say, things that make us curious. For example, I once heard a woman say, “I’m just a drunk girl in stilettos.” Okay, I confess the woman who said it would one day be my wife. The actual facts of the story don’t matter, What matters is the instant I heard her say that, I thought, hmm. . . “Drunk Girl in Stilettos.” Now there’s an interesting title for a story. I set out to write one that would be completely different from the kind of story you’d expect from such a title. The only other time I wrote a story to fit a title came from something else my wife said. She showed me a photo from someone’s Facebook page, and she said, “Now that’s a cat on a bad couch.” The music of that caught my ear, and so I wrote a story titled “Cat on a Bad Couch.” I was curious about the story of the cat and the story of an ugly couch that my main character bought in spite of knowing it was hideous.

Today, I want to offer you some story starters in case you need something to jumpstart your imagination. We all have those fallow periods when we don’t quite know what we want to write. Here are some ideas.

The first asks you to come up with your own still life title like “Drunk Girl in Stilettos” or “Cat on a Bad Couch” and then let your imagination lead you to a narrative. Challenge yourself to make that narrative something opposite of what the title would suggest.

Last night, I heard someone say, “One time I started drinking grappa, and I ended up in an Indian restaurant and I didn’t know where I was.” Now how in the heck did that happen? Write a story to find out. Feel free to substitute something else for the grappa and the Indian restaurant if you’re so inclined.

Today, I heard someone say, “A protective wallet? I don’t need a protective wallet. My information is so secure no one would ever be able to steal it.” Oh, yeah. Write a story to prove this person wrong.

So there are three story starters for you. Feel free to create your own prompts or to modify mine however you’d like. Just keep in mind that the good story isn’t so much interested in what happens; it’s more interested in the why and how. The former takes us to plot; the latter takes us to character. I know I’ve passed on this quote from Faulkner a number of times, but it bears repeating. Stories should be interested in what he called “the old verities and truths of the heart.” We get to those via the contradictions and mysteries that make up our characters. The plots for stories come from the choices those characters make and the consequences they create.

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Black Friday: What If?

Cathy and I were in Home Depot on Black Friday, looking at items for our front porch Christmas display, when an elderly woman with an empty shopping cart said to me, “I used to play Santa Claus.”

It was a dreary night, cold and damp, but there in Home Depot surrounded by the artificial trees with their bright white lights and the animated Santa that delighted children when it moved its head and spoke to them, and the good cheer beginning the holiday season, it was almost cozy.

Cathy and I were frustrated, though, because we’d spent the day decorating, only to discover that the small artificial tree we put on our front porch just wasn’t going to work this year which called into question the entire display. Don’t even ask me about the time I spent unwinding lights from the old pre-lit tree—trust me, it got personal—only to decide the best display spot for that particular tree was our trash can. We were out on Black Friday just looking, trying to get ideas.

Then that woman started telling us her story. She told us how she used to put on a Santa suit and visit hospitals handing out candy. “Oh, I loved doing that,” she said.

Cathy asked her why she stopped. “I got too skinny,” she said, “and I had to stuff pillows into my suit, and, well, now I’m eighty years-old, and. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she looked into the distance, either recalling a past or staring into an uncertain future, or both, and she said, “I used to make my voice deep.” Then she demonstrated. “Ho, Ho, Ho,” she said.

We told her that was wonderful. We said, “Good for you.” Somewhere in our conversation there came a point where we wished her a happy holiday and went on with our browsing. A few minutes later, as we rounded the corner of an aisle, we found her telling another couple her story. “I used to play Santa,” she said.

We all have our stories. We carry with them with us wherever we go. Sometimes the pressure gets so great—the loneliness, the fear, the overwhelming love—that we can’t help ourselves; we have to tell someone.

The lesson for the writer is a simple one. What do your characters want to say, but can’t? How could you use that to either set a narrative into motion (what might happen if a character told their most secret story to someone?) or to form an ending moment of illumination (what plot pressures might bring someone to this point?).

So much of writing fiction is a game of what if. Trial and error. What if this happened? What if this character said this or did this? What if a lonely elderly woman told a story to strangers in Home Depot on Black Friday night? How might that story resonate through each character’s life? The old wounds, the memories, the parts of ourselves we leave behind, the uncertain futures we all face—they’re all the stuff of stories. I, for one, am thankful that this woman who used to play Santa Claus reminded me of that on a cold, damp night.

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Trouble Resonates: How to Use It in Fiction

Please don’t tell the folks who sign my checks at The Ohio State University, but my wife Cathy has always been a fan of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team. She’s always wanted to see them in person rather than on television, and today, thanks to a game here at OSU, this was the day.

So we went to the game, and we had good seats, and it was a close game until the fourth quarter and then UConn was able to pull away at the end. After the game, Cathy and I stopped at one of our favorite restaurants for dinner, and then we came home where Stella the Cat was waiting for us, and now I’m typing this blog, and, as I do, I’m thinking about the fact that no one, unless they have an odd fascination with the comings and goings of Cathy and me and Stella the Cat, will have any interest in the story I’m telling. That’s because it isn’t really a story. Oh, sure, it has events narrated in chronology, but really it’s just an account of a portion of our day. Accounts don’t make good stories. Accounts record events and not much more. Ours was a most pleasant day, and why should that be memorable for anyone but us?

A story is memorable because of the characters involved. Cathy and I were just two people—I being happy to give her something she always wanted, and she being happy to receive the gift. Nothing went wrong today—nothing to give the story any chance of being memorable. Well, there was the fact that the restaurant didn’t get my order right, and if I’d been a more unforgiving sort, I might have said something to the waiter that would have embarrassed Cathy and caused her to say something to me she’d never be able to take back. Who knows where that story might have gone? Or the fact that we ended up with four unused tickets and gave them to a stranger at the YMCA this morning. We were surprised when three people showed up at the game to sit next to us but not the man we’d given the tickets. There’s surely a story in there somewhere, something that would make an impression on readers. The key, of course, is trouble, and if it’s trouble of your main character’s own making, all the better.

Trouble can be particularly interesting when a character does something (kindly gives free tickets to a stranger) which leads to trouble for that character (what if the stranger had to come to our house to get the tickets and ended up being an unkind man).

Another way to use trouble in a story is to let a character do something to get exactly what he or she wants only to find out it’s led to something dark and disturbing the character never could have seen coming. What if Cathy had rooted shamelessly for UConn and a rabid OSU fan had taken objection to that? What if that fan had been dangerous, or what if he’d said something hurtful to Cathy—something she’d never known to be true about herself but, now that it’s been said, has the ring of something authentic? What if she blamed me for never having made her aware of what she now assumes to be a fact?

The lesson in all of this for the writer? Find something beautiful, something pleasant, something joyful, and then muck it all up. Let your characters find themselves in trouble (again, it’s always better if it’s trouble they unintentionally create for themselves),and then see what they’ll do to find their way back to safe ground. I’m thankful Cathy and I didn’t have to deal with anything like that on this most excellent day. We went to a basketball game. Nothing went wrong. We enjoyed each other’s company. Ho-hum. Not an interesting story at all until I, in some future writing session, decide to use my imagination to make it one.

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August, 1974

I was eighteen years old the summer Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. I was between my freshman and sophomore years of college, and I worked as a sales clerk at Sherman’s Department Store in Olney, Illinois. Each afternoon around three o’clock, my manager sent me to the drug store across the street to buy him a pack of cigarettes (Kent Deluxe 100s) and an afternoon newspaper. I brought the cigarettes and the paper and his change back to him, and then I went on about the business of straightening stacks of sport shirts and trousers, whisking a feather duster over the display shoes, retrieving layaway parcels from storage at the back of the store, sweeping the floor, and from time to time, actually selling something to a customer. In this way, the days of that summer went by, and I tried to get over the shyness I felt every time I had to deal with a customer.

“Walk right up to them,” my co-worker Norm told me. He was a young man with a wife, and he worked hard at his job. “Look them in the eye,” he told me, “and say, ‘Welcome to Sherman’s. How can I help you?’”

I didn’t have the confidence that Norm had. I was just a kid from tiny Sumner, twelve miles to the east of Olney. I was on the verge of my adult life, but I still had years to go until I turned into the man I am now. I had no idea about the direction my life would take. I was just working to make a little spending money, and all the while Richard Nixon was facing impeachment for his role in the Watergate break-ins and their cover up.

I didn’t know my manager’s politics, but I had suspicions. Then came the afternoon of August 9. I walked into the drug store and picked up an Olney Daily Mail. The banner headline of bold black type read, NIXON RESIGNS. Keep in mind these were the days before instant news—no CNN or MSNBC or Fox News; no Internet with which to find breaking headlines. I felt certain that my manager didn’t know about Nixon’s resignation, and because he’d spent a good deal of time that summer telling me how much I didn’t know about salesmanship, I was pleased to know something he didn’t, and I was even more pleased to be the one to tell him.

When I got back to Sherman’s, I slapped that Daily Mail down on the counter behind which my manager was manning the cash register, and he saw the headline, and he picked up the newspaper and brought it closer to his face, and then he said, with great disapproval and disappointment in his voice, “The bastards finally got him. I hoped he’d hold on.”

Of course, Nixon couldn’t hold on once he had to turn over the oval office tape recordings that proved his guilt. The truth of his actions came out, and he chose to resign the office rather than face certain removal.

This was the biggest news story of my young life, and here’s what it taught me.

One day that summer, a childhood friend of mine and her mother came into the store. Her mother, I knew, had recently been diagnosed with cancer. She wanted a pair of shoes, she told me. A pair of comfortable shoes. “Sandals,” she said. “I want to feel the air on my toes.”

I picked out what I thought might be a comfy pair of sandals.  A pair of red sandals with wedge heels and a few straps that crisscrossed the top of the foot.

“Oh, red,” she said when I showed them to her. She seemed so weary. “I’ve always liked red,” she said to her daughter.

“Would you like to try them?” I asked.

She would indeed.

I asked her size and excused myself so I could go to the stock room and find the appropriate pair. When I came back, shoebox in hand, I slid up my fitting stool, and sat facing her. I lifted her foot onto the slanted surface of the stool and untied her canvas Keds sneakers. What could be more comfortable than them, I thought. Then I lifted her foot, cupping her arch, and I slipped it down into the sandal and I buckled the strap. I did the same with the mate.

“How do those feel?” I asked, the way Norm had taught me.

She closed her eyes an instant. I wonder now if she might have been imagining all the places in the world she might walk.

“Heavenly,” she said. “They feel heavenly.”

“Would you like to try walking in them?”

“That won’t be necessary.” She turned her foot to each side, admiring the sandals. “I’m sure they’re perfect. Just perfect,” she said.

So I took them off her and put them back into the box. I helped her on with her sneakers, and I tied the laces into bows, and all the while, I was aware that her time among us was short, and she knew that. She knew she might have few opportunities to wear those sandals, might never wear them, but they were the color red—a bright, bright red—and she was glad for that. I got a little ache in my throat because she’d always been such a sweet lady, and she didn’t deserve what was happening to her.

Now, forty-five years later, I’ve thought a good deal about that day from August, 1974, when a dying woman showed me the importance of the singular life lived in the shadows of the political, the life that becomes resplendent, if, like a good writer, we’re watching closely enough. I’ve thought about those who are corrupt and those who aren’t, and how the lives of ordinary people go on in the background of the news headlines, and few people take notice. I’ve thought about how, despite the importance we give the stories of politicians, corrupt or not, the real stuff of our living is the turns and ticks of the heart. It’s a dying woman buying red sandals, and it’s a daughter and a shy shoe clerk—a boy who would never forget the feel of that woman’s foot in his hand—pretending she would wear them for years and years.

 

 

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Urgent Motivation: Putting Your Characters into Motion

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Olive, Again, begins like this:

In the early afternoon on a Saturday in June, Jack Kennison put on his sunglasses, got into his sports car with the top down, strapped the seatbelt over his shoulder and across his large stomach, and drove to Portland—almost an hour away—to buy a gallon of whiskey rather than bump into Olive Kitteridge at the grocery store here in Crosby, Maine. Or even that other woman he had seen twice in the store as he stood holding his whiskey while she talked about the weather. The weather. That woman—he could not remember her name—was a widow as well.

And so a narrative begins in a most unspectacular way—a man getting into his car, buckling his seatbelt, and preparing to make an hour’s drive in order to buy a gallon of whiskey. The questions of who, what, where, and when are answered easily—not much fanfare, and nothing much to remark upon at all: Jack Kennison, a drive, Maine, an early afternoon on a Saturday in June. The question of why, though, gets interesting. Jack can’t buy his whiskey in his hometown because he fears he’ll run into Olive Kitteridge or “that other woman,” the one whose name he can’t recall. So he has to drive to Portland where he can be anonymous. This wrinkle is what makes the story worth telling. It makes us curious about what history Jack shares with Olive and this other woman, and why he would drive an hour just to avoid them. This little spark of tension is enough to keep us reading, sensing, as we do, something simmering just beneath the surface of what’s otherwise a very quiet opening.

It takes so little to begin a narrative: a specific person, in a specific place at a specific time, engaged in a specific action, from a certain motivation. The motivation is where the real story lies. The rest merely gives the motivation a context within which to dramatize itself. A character in a particular world acts out of desire or fear, and just like that we have the makings of a story. If writers can’t make something out of the small and ordinary, they’ll never be able to make anything out of the large and sensational. The ability to observe closely in the real world makes for a resonant story. In order to do so, one first has to catalog the important details.

Notice in the opening of Olive, Again how Strout includes the detail of Jack’s large stomach. Look at what she does with that detail in the second paragraph which describes Jack walking near the water in Portland while all the people passing by take no notice of him:

No one seemed to even glance at him, and he realized what he had known before, only now it came to him differently: He was just an old man with a sloppy belly and not anyone worth noticing.

Because Jack s closely at those around him, we do, too. Because he’s able to make something of what he sees, we are, too. Because Elizabeth Strout uses the detail of the large stomach to lead Jack to the observation that he’s “not anyone worth noticing,” we start to live inside his skin, to understand what it is for him to move through the world. We also start to care about him because he’s taken the time to care about himself.

The lesson in all of this? It’s easy to get a story into motion. Someone does something. Maybe like Jack they get into a car to drive somewhere.  Maybe they have a specific reason for doing so. Maybe they’re going to see someone, or maybe they want to avoid someone. The object of their desire need not be grand (a bottle of whiskey), nor does their action have to be sensational (a drive in a car). Their motivation, however, needs to be urgently felt even if does reside barely beneath the surface of the narrative. That motivation announces to the readers that here is a story and a character worth following. The detail—the big stomach—becomes the entryway into the character’s consideration of his own life. Now we have a man who’s painfully aware of his insignificance in the world,  and we have the character of Olive, whom he wants to avoid, and we wait to see how his drive to Portland will create events that will put pressure on him and lead to a final action of some consequence.

A character’s motivation need not be sensational. It only needs to be urgent.

 

 

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One Fine Morning: Rededicating Ourselves to the Craft

I hope by now you’ve turned back your clocks an hour and enjoyed your extra sleep. Here in central Ohio, it’s a beautiful sunny day—a little on the cool side, but, hey, it’s November. Let’s enjoy the sun and not think about the fact that it’ll set at 5:27 pm. Yes, we’re making our final turn toward the cold and dark of winter, but instead of despairing, let’s give thanks for the reminder it gives us that time is short and pages don’t write themselves. Let’s use this time change to rededicate ourselves to time spent on improving our craft. Here, then, are some pledges we can make as we enter our days of shorter light.

We can make a commitment to a weekly minimum number of days we’ll spend putting new words on the page.

We can set aside a minimum amount of time for this writing, even if it’s as short as thirty minutes or even fifteen. If we’ll stake out this time and stick to a regular schedule, we’ll be surprised by how the pages begin to add up.

We can give ourselves permission to pay attention to our writing. We shouldn’t expect the world to understand, but we must claim our time and we must protect it. We have to accept the fact that we deserve these periods of time to close out all distractions and to focus on the writing.

We can vow to stop looking at e-mail, social media, etc. during the time we’re dedicating to writing. Sometimes we create our own distractions because it’s easier to be on the Internet than it is to be facing what we’re doing on the page.

We can also make a vow that we’ll spend some time daily reading the words of others, and I mean reading them the way a writer reads, with an eye toward how the piece is made. We can study more fully the artistic choices the writer is making and the effects those choices are creating.

While we’re talking about reading, we can promise to seek out what other writers have said about the craft, whether that means reading good craft books, or blogs, or articles in such publications as Poets & Writers, or The Writer’s Chronicle. Let us enter into the larger conversation about the craft of writing. Such entry will validate our membership in this community of writers.

Above all, we can promise to forgive ourselves when we fall short, as we surely will, of the expectations we’ve set. As Nick Carraway says at the end of The Great Gatsby, “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—”

In the larger scheme of things we all know our time is short. Each season—each trip around the sun—reminds us that this is true. We have to make the most of the time we have. So on this day—this fine morning—let’s rededicate ourselves to the work we want and need to do.

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Leaps, Associations, and Connections

It starts, as so many stories do, with a bottle of bourbon. The brand is Angels Envy, and our friend Deni says it should be the title of a poem. We know, by the end of the night, our other friend Roy will write it. For the time, though, as we sit around a table in Roy and Gloria’s kitchen with Sherry, and Deni and her husband Mark, and my wife Cathy, we tell stories. It’s a rainy autumn afternoon, a perfect day for bourbon and stories and the talk talked between old friends.

Roy tells a story of youthful indiscretion. His poem, when he writes it, will start with that story, the poem’s title, “Angels Envy,” leading into the first few lines:

isn’t only a good whisky rescued from the

liquor store in the Kroger in Pataskala, Ohio.

It’s also a story of me drunk and passed out

 

by the curb in front of the L & K restaurant,

so close to concrete I confess that I smelled it.

 

I apologize to Roy if the formatting of this blog has wreaked havoc with his line breaks and spacing, but lordy, aren’t the words wonderful, no matter the form? That detail, “a good whisky,” has led Roy to this memory from youth. The poem then sets the context—the telling of the story to this group of friends—which leads to the connection between the bourbon and the telling of stories by which “we refill our glass.” Follow the leaps and associations of the poem: from a bourbon called Angels Envy to the telling of stories, an act the cherubs, seraphs, and archangels must envy, a similar envy to the one Roy felt the night he saw a high school football player run a kick-off back 87 yards, to the hope Roy has that we, his witnesses, will be able to say, “Whatever else, Roy was happy that particular day,” back to more information about the story of youthful discretion that started everything, to the final lines of the poem:

this is what we have around tables in Ohio in autumn.

Deni gave me the title to this poem. Big-heartedness

angels may have remarked on ghosting around us.

 

A multi-layered poem made possible by Roy’s openness to the associations unloosed by that bottle of Angels Envy, the story it invited, and all the destinations it made possible.

This is the way a writer works, no matter the genre, opening out and opening out, trusting the leaps and the connections, refusing to settle for the first thought, or the simple one. Where we begin is not where we end. Let the first step onto the page give rise to the ones you didn’t know you’d make. Create a textured world. Our living is too large to deny it its reach and breadth and depth. No matter what you’re writing—poetry, prose, play, screenplay, song—embrace the world, dive down through its layers. Immediately do the following:

 

Start simply. Any detail will do. A bottle of bourbon called Angels Envy, the rain-slicked streets, the scent of wood smoke. Anything at all.

Recall a memory that the detail causes to surface.

Call forth other memories.

Make leaps unannounced. Trust the air you fly through to hold you up. If you crash, leap again.

Or announce your associations. The angels must envy us the way I envied the speed of Ed Laurienzo on the football field.

Make your metaphors. The bonding of friends over drinks and stories must be something so special even the angels envy us as they hover over us at that table, “faces lit by rain-dreary Licking County afternoon.”

Make your statement: “. . .it occurs to me this is how we refill our glass.”

 

One thing is never solitary. It’s merely an invitation to connect. If we accept that invitation, we can travel deeper into the lived life and find all sorts of things we didn’t know were waiting for us to arrive.

 

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Giving a Memoir Resonance

Facts alone do not a memoir make. First this happened, then this happened, then this happened. A sequence of memories is easy enough for anyone to recall from a particular period of time in his or her life. It may even be easy to see the causal links between the events on a timeline. Because this happened, this next thing happened, and on and on. Sometimes, though, events in a life can be random. This is one difference between the narrative of a memoir and that of a novel. In a novel, events usually connect. In life, the oddest things can happen without reason.

That said, the memoirist can still find the relevance in even the most haphazard narrative. The memoirist’s job is to not only reconstruct an external narrative arc, but also to follow the interior arc of the person he or she was at the time everything was happening. What literally happened is a sequence of facts. What those events meant to the memoirist and the other people involved—well, that’s a matter of looking closely. The slightest detail may signify loudly. The way your mother ran her fingers down the folds of the drapes just before leaving her home for the last time may speak volumes if the writer is paying attention. Your father’s love may be present in his gruffest voice. Characters come alive in memoir when the writer finds the surprising words or actions lurking just below the surface of what they say or do. Our job is to be astute observers of people and their worlds.

In order to be able to interrogate our experiences, to ask questions of what they meant or continue to mean, to speculate on answers, we have to be able to notice the things that other people don’t. We have to accept the fact that we are all made up of contradictions and the lives we present to the public are rarely the entire truth. Our deepest identities leak out sometimes in large things we say or do, but sometimes they make their appearance in the commonplace and the seemingly mundane. Often they appear and then quickly go back into hiding. In the moment, we may have only a few seconds to take note of them, but in retrospect, we have all the time we need to turn them over, looking at them from this angle and that angle, seeing the truth that at the time may go unnoticed.

Memoirists have to embrace this reflective voice, the one that thinks, analyzes, questions, interprets. So it’s not enough to tell the story of what happened first, second, third, and so on. We have to look for the story of the interior that the external events are announcing. We have to be able to make something of those events. Vivian Gornick, in her craft book, The Situation and the Story, says each memoir has a situation—Let’s say it’s the year I my family moved back downstate from suburban Chicago and bought a house in a small town—and a story. The story, Gornick says, is what the writer has come to the page to say. To my way of thinking, we often don’t know what we’ve come to the page to say until we say it, but we should know what question, or questions are guiding the writing. Why did my father rent a post office box when we made that move? Why did he spend that money when he could have had free home delivery? That question never appears in the writing I do about that time, but I know it’s there in everything I put on the page about what my family tried to hide from the world as we went about making a new life for us in a new home. That’s the interior I’m touching—that attempt to hide the violent life my father and I often had, that attempt to believe in redemption. I can’t get to that without a clear sequence of specific events, but the events alone can’t do the job of exploring what I have to say about forgiveness and love. I, from my perspective now, can do that work. It’s the reflective persona that gives a memoir its significance and resonance. We look back, not only to tell, but also to think.

 

 

 

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