Falling in Love with Patchwork by Memoirist Mary Jo Doig
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Mary Jo Doig
” A quilt is a work of heart”
I am very pleased to feature memoirist Mary Jo Doig in this guest post about her new memoir, Patchwork: A Memoir of Love and Loss. Mary describes how she used a patchwork quilt as a metaphor for telling her story. Years ago when I first started out writing memoir, I remember thinking of vignettes as patches of material that would eventually be sewn together to create a story. Mary’s description of her process fascinates me!
My reviews of her memoir can be found on Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThings and Riffle Books.
Welcome, Mary Jo!
Memoirist Mary Jo Doig
Falling in Love with Patchwork
Finding patchwork. Although I was an incurious, distractible student during my first eight years of school, as I look back, two outstanding moments top an otherwise unremarkable list. I learned to read in the first grade and learned to sew in my seventh-grade home economics class. Both became lifelong pleasures. After high school graduation and a bumpy ten-year voyage through college, I married and moved to a small, upstate New York Catskill mountain community. The art of quilting was a vibrant part of the approximately 400 eclectic residents’ lives there and had been since the town was settled in the early 1800s.
I had never seen a handmade quilt and was fascinated with the craft. There, in tiny rural Bovina Center, Marilyn Gallant, a life-long friend and quilter, taught me to make a friendship quilt. That occasion marked my easy fall into love with patchwork and the creation of more subsequent quilts than I can count anymore. I could not have dreamed how this passion for patchwork became the perfect venue in later life to both frame and tell my layered story.
Layer 1: Threading light stories with dark ones. A life changing moment in my fifth decade returned me to my long-dormant writing practice, in particular, journaling. A decade later, when I began to write life stories from those notes, they eventually transformed into chapters. While I enjoyed scribing the happy stories, I avoided the dark ones. I drafted them out, but didn’t return to edit them. Fortunately, time awakened me to the notion that viewing each chapter as an individual piece of patchwork, when gathered together, comprised my life’s story.
But what about those dark stories? I finally realized a quilt could hold dark squares along with the light ones and still be beautiful. Yet could that concept work when viewing a life heavily mixed of both? I believed it could, and returned to those painful dark stories, with new understanding of how integral they were to the entire whole.
Layer 2: Titling each chapter with a patchwork pattern name. I researched the names of mostly old and some new patchwork creations to see if I could use pattern names to not only title my chapters, but also reflect the content of each. I soon grasped that I could and the exploration became a delightful adventure. For example, I titled Chapter 6 “Shadow Play,” an account of our family life when I was 6-8 years old. My father had gotten a new job that changed our lives. As I wrote the chapter I easily saw the background shadows that preceded his eventual step through a doorway into life’s dark side. When I found the “Shadow Play” pattern, I knew it was the perfect title.
Not long after, I completed my list of 30 chapter titles. Energized and excited, I decided I would create the patterns, make the squares, then craft a quilt. The quilt would become my cover.
Layer 3: Threading clues to a long-time mystery behavior. In a re-read of Carol Smallwood’s “Lily’s Odyssey,” I remembered how much I’d liked the way she created a mystery within her story. A life-long mystery-lover myself, I saw that my story was, in part, a mystery. I threaded clues throughout Part I, showing the decades of my quiet and unnoticed, yet troubled behavior. When a crisis arrived in Part II, it was beyond belief, but unfortunately true. The mystery was solved.
Then, of course, a problem. After creating several squares, including Baby Blocks and Hands of Friendship, I made the complex, lovely Sunshine and Shadow for an important chapter. The pattern was difficult and suddenly I realized, with 24 squares remaining, my wonderful project was trickier and more time consuming than I could spare. With sorrow, I ended it, not knowing what to do. A few months later Sherry Wachter, a wonderfully talented graphic designer, created the squares as graphic illustrations. I was delighted.
Layer 4: A solution to the cover problem. When the time arrived to choose a professionally-designed cover, I sought a patchwork theme. Several beautiful choices arrived, except for one. It was gorgeous. The longer I gazed at that cover, the more layers of my story I could see in it. The darkly-shaded outer edges lightened into a center that was warm and golden. In our lives we move from darkness into the light, I reflected. Within the center light, a gorgeous growing plant – my tree of life, I call it – held heart-shaped leaves that symbolized for me the treasured people who had accompanied me through my life. In the end love is all there is.
I was so moved I decided to make a wall-hanging quilt that emulated Patchwork’s stunning cover, designed by Leah Lococo.
Layer 5: The final threads: I searched my memoir and made a list of each person I’d written about who had been a significant part of my journey. There were 35, along with several strangers whose names I’d never know and so many writers I’d worked with through the decades. I tenderly stitched a leaf for each on my tree.
And, so, below is the quilt that holds my heart leaves on my tree of life, fashioned after my book cover design. I am grateful to you, Kathy Pooler, for hosting me here and so happy to post the first-ever photograph of the quilt that now hangs on my office wall. Always close to me and visual whenever my eyes look up from my work, my tree of life graces me with gratitude for my odyssey and for each person who traveled with me.
Mary Jo’s patchwork quilt
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Thank you, Mary Jo for sharing your insights and wisdom about memoir writing. Your patchwork quilt is a treasure!
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Book Synopsis:
A wife and mother of a grown son and two teen daughters, a woman enjoying her career and life, Mary Jo Doig wants nothing more from life than to live out her days embraced by the deep roots of family, friends, and her community. Tightly wrapped in a life-long protective cocoon, she has no idea how wounded she is―until, on one starless night following the death of a relative, she has a flashback that opens a dark passageway back to her childhood and the horrific secrets buried deep inside her psyche.
Part mystery and part inspirational memoir, Patchwork is the riveting story of one woman who strived to live a life full of love, only to endure tragedies with two of her children and struggles in her marriages―the consequences of a mysterious life-long behavior unnoticed by her family or teachers. Like a needle stitching together a quilt, the memories Mary Jo recovers following her first flashback show her why her early years were threaded with a need to be invisible, as well as core beliefs that she was stupid, not good enough, and vastly different from her peers. Shattered by these revelations, overcome by depression, hopelessness, and a loss of trust in others, Mary Jo embarks on a healing journey through the underground of her life that ultimately leads to transformation.
About the Author:
Mary Jo Doig is a life-writing enthusiast who has been coaching women to tell their truth for twenty years. She is a book reviewer, editor, and facilitator of women’s writing circles and legacy workshops.
Her stories have been published in Inside and Out: Women’s Truths, Women’s Stories and Kitchen Table Stories. Mary Jo writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she treasures quilting, cooking healthy food, hiking with her rescue dogs, and spending time with family and friends.
website: maryjodoig,com
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How about you? Have you thought of memoir writing as piecing together of a patchwork quilt?
We’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
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ANNOUNCEMENT: October 22-31 sale
In honor of National Domestic Violence Awareness month, my memoir, Ever Faithful to His Lead : My Journey Away From Emotional Abuse will be on sale for $.99. Let’s stop the silence surrounding abuse.
This Week:
October 2018 Newsletter: Updates, Memoir Musings and Max Moments.
“The Winds of Change”
Thursday, 11/1/18:
“Memoir Writing Month: Is Writing a Memoir Worth Your Time? by Denis Ledoux”
Next Week:
Monday, November 5:
“Building as Character by Memoirist Marianna Crane.”
Marianna is the author of Stories From the Tenth-Floor Clinic, A Nurse Practitioner Remembers “an honest and compassionate look at what it takes to care for some of America’s most vulnerable citizens.” (Kirkus Reviews)
