My Journey to Memoir by Lyndon Back
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Lyndon Back
“ The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver
Sarajevo, 1997
I am pleased to feature memoirist Lyndon Back in this post about her journey to her memoir, Treading Water at the Shark Cafe, published by Open Books Press on July 3, 2018. When I read her story about a Quaker woman who traveled to war-torn Yugoslavia to help young adult students, I felt like I was in a movie.
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Welcome Lyn!
Author Lyndon Back
My Journey to Memoir
Photo Credit: Unsplash Free
I started writing as soon as I got back from the war in Yugoslavia, trying to quiet the noises in my head. I wrote to clear a path through the anger and confusion I felt about the war, about my country bombing friends and colleagues. I wrote to ease my conscience. There was urgency in my writing, but no direction. I wanted people to know my story, and at the same time I found it almost impossible to tell the tale. Writing wasn’t the problem. Words poured onto the page like water gushing from a hose that’s been tightly coiled all winter in the cellar. But most of the words swirled around and disappeared in a puddle on the floor. I couldn’t get at the real story until I’d found a structure to hang it on.
Everything seemed important at first. There were no boundaries, or priorities, and I would sail my memories down every tributary that offered itself. At a writers’ workshop I learned to create story boards, made up of scenes and characters as I remembered them. Then I tried linking the scenes into creative narrative, and I learned you have to throw out your best writing, your favorite scene when it doesn’t move the story along. That was an important lesson and I had trouble sticking to it.
Belgrade in flames
Finding My Voice…
I couldn’t find my voice, or even who the story was supposed to be about. The young people I’d met during the war were constantly on my mind. I wanted to honor them. I thought the story should focus on them. But I was writing a memoir, so the story had to be about me as well. Then in another writing workshop about ‘telling the tale,’ I discovered there were several kinds of memoir, and I realized mine was an immersion memoir. While the setting was the war, and the focus was the young people, the structure of the story was my journey; how I took a leap of faith, left my safe and quiet life in suburban Philadelphia and landed in a war I knew very little about. I found myself, an American woman alone in a foreign country, trying to navigate in a broken society, destroyed by catastrophe and violence.
My journey was both spiritually and physically challenging, so there was already a built in expectation, a readymade dramatic arc. It was also clear I would learn something in my travels, and what I learned; about the war, about the young people, about the fascinating and complicated culture of Yugoslavia, and eventually about myself; those particulars would provide a bridge to a wider significance for the reader.
The young people were to be guides who moved the story along, brought drama and inspiration to the narrative. Their personalities and unique voices provided rhythm and tempo, which would rise and fall, speed up and slow down as their wants or needs or intentions became clear. It was musical in a way, especially in dialogue. If I described the characters vividly, gave them form and substance, the reader would care about them as I did.
I found my own voice as well, when I realized this was an immersion memoir. My voice was one of inexperience, of curiosity, of good intentions. Telling the tale in this voice of inexperience soon confronted a formidable barrier, the problem of self-censoring. I had to make decisions about what to reveal about myself and what to keep hidden. I had to ward off my insecurities about what people would think if I exposed my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities, and my less than heroic self. And yet I knew I had to be honest. Without authenticity the story would be wooden, without any heart, and nobody would connect or care about me or the outcome.
Unreliable Memories…
Then came the issue of memory, which is what memoir writing depends on. Memory is not always reliable; the facts spin round and round. I quickly discovered that memories are layered, and sometimes confused by more self-censoring, and the need to tell a good story. Memory is also difficult when you are dealing with historical events, with war, with trauma, with conflict, and especially with guilt. I could easily get lost in the descriptions of places I’d seen, the beautiful landscapes, the heartbreaking destruction, the feelings those scenes evoked in me. Yet too much detail could slow the story to a crawl, and lose the reader’s interest. Always there was temptation to skirt the darkest moments in writing, to make the story pretty, or at least presentable. I had to face myself and my characters without flinching. We were human, not idealized heroes, or victims.
Vedran and Zoran looking at the remains of Stari Most
I’d kept journals through the years, and I wrote constantly to friends and family while I was in former Yugoslavia, so I had many resources to stir my memory and recreate events, but often I would get lost in those letters and journals, overwhelmed by emotion. Sometimes when writing particularly painful memories, I would distort them, lose the thread in an attempt to analyze or over-explain. But memories don’t leave you. Painful memories and the voices of people I’d know in Serbia and Kosovo kept pushing me to write. What was I trying to say? What was the truth? What was the story really about?
Making it to the Finish Line…
The process of writing is not linear. It’s no surprise that it took me years to complete the manuscript. The first version, written soon after I got back to the U.S. was a stream-of-consciousness jumble. It was part of my healing process. At times I’d step away and distance myself from the sadness and guilt I felt about the war. For a few years I tried writing poems, essays, and short stories. All my projects circled the same themes: women traveling to foreign lands, young people, and war. Meanwhile my own story seasoned in the back of my mind, memories pushing at me, the kids wanting attention. Ideas came when I wasn’t thinking about writing. When I was washing dishes, or working in the garden. New ideas would bubble up, an insight, or a different perspective. I’d sit down again, energized and refocused to try and move the story forward. More than twenty years after the day I first saw the beautiful old bridge in Mostar, Bosnia blown to smithereens, which was the start of my journey, I finished the manuscript. Getting it published is a story for another day.
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Thank you, Lyn for detailing your journey to memoir. You bring up many pertinent points about the rigors of finding and writing the story that reflects your authentic self. Congratulations on the publication of your compelling memoir,Treading Water at the Shark Cafe!
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Book Synopsis:
Treading Water at the Shark Café is an American Quaker woman’s extraordinary journey of witness and discovery from her suburban Philadelphia home to the war zones of the former Yugoslavia. Set against a background of violence, her story focuses on young people—often forgotten in times of war—who lived outside the spotlight.
Like the Freedom Riders and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the United States, the student activists in the former Yugoslavia envisioned a better world, taking incredible risks to make their dreams come true. Optimism, energy, and imagination conjure new possibilities, even in the midst of chaos. Told with honesty and deep conviction, this memoir will resonate with a growing audience of readers who are tired of political warmongering and share a longing for effective nonviolent alternatives.
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About the Author:
Lyndon Back received a B.A. in History from SUNY Oneonta, and an MPA from SUNY Albany. She holds a CELTA/TESOL certificate from the School of International Training in Brattleboro Vermont, and a certificate of competency in Serbian from the Azbukum Language School in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Lyndon served as Director of Planned Giving at the American Friends Service Committee from 1984 to 1998, where she was responsible for marketing, soliciting, and gift/estate planning. In 1998 Lyndon left the Service Committee to join the Balkan Peace Teams, an international consortium of European peace groups. She lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia and Prishtina, Kosovo before during and after the NATO bombings, working with students who were seeking alternatives to violence. She worked with the youth group Otpor that was largely responsible for the nonviolent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
In 1999 Lyndon returned to the U.S. and taught English as a Second Language at Delaware Valley Literacy Council, and Oral Communication at Harcum College. She served as Program Coordinator for Refugee Resettlement at Lutheran Children and Family Services in Philadelphia for seven years. Now semi-retired Lyndon’s writing continues to be influenced by her experience in former Yugoslavia. Her essays, articles, and poems have appeared in several literary and academic journals. “After the War, Notes from a Balkan Journey” appeared in Gemini Magazine. “Balloon Head” appeared in Forge.
Lyn can be reached on Facebook
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How about you? If you are writing a memoir, how is your journey going?
We’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
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Next Week:
Monday, 8/13/18:
“A Sacred and Tender Time: A Memoir Moment”
