Memoir Writing is Not For Sissies by Robin Gaiser
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Robin Gaiser/@RobinGaiser
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver (Dream Work)
Robin Gaiser is a Certified Music Practitioner (CMP) who wrote a stunning memoir about ministering to hospice patients in their final days. Musical Morphine: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time. She shared her journey in this previous post. I’m thrilled to feature her again as she prepares to launch her second memoir, Open For Lunch, a collection of encounters with a dozen strangers in casual lunch spots from upstate New York to Asheville, North Carolina. Today she will share the challenges she faced in writing her memoir.
Welcome back, Robin!
Memoirist and Certified Music Practitioner Robin Gaiser
Memoir Writing and Publishing Are Not For Sissies
Just the other day I was having a conversation with a new friend who knew I was an author with a second memoir, OPEN FOR LUNCH (Pisgah Press; 2018), recently launched at a reading, signing and celebration at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, our city of residence. She was picking my brain about how to move forward with her own writing. Somewhere in the conversation she said she thought writing memoir was “the easiest of all the genres.” I nearly leapt across the table when I told her memoir writing was possibly the hardest to write, definitely not for sissies.
Photo Credit: Unsplash.com
I am a writer whose arms and hands shake when I am uncovering a new or never told truth about myself or my life. Sometimes I have to lay down my pen and notebook, get up from my writing desk and take a walk, preferably outdoors in nature, or swim laps where I breath rhythmically and deeply. Sometimes I can settle with meditation or praying, but I know I have to re-set my emotional compass to continue my writing. When this happens I know I am down in my personal well, exposing my vulnerability. Here’s where it’s tempting to go easy on myself, easy on my subjects and leave out the hard parts, the stories that sting, that do not hold up the image we project to the world. Here’s when I cannot sleep worrying “What will they think? Have I gone too far?” But I know a good reader can tell when an author is withholding information, a fact I learned as an early writer. And perhaps more important, I know I am essentially a liar if I leave out the truth.
In my first memoir, MUSICAL MORPHINE: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time (Pisgah Press: 2016) at first I was afraid to tell all. Shame, self-doubt, denial, fear of reactions from family and friends eventually gave way to much trembling as I told all: all I knew to tell. In OPEN FOR LUNCH I discovered there was even more to tell.
Robin with publisher
When I sat down to write OPEN FOR LUNCH, I expected to turn out a collection of short stories about my fourteen years (and counting) of asking perfect strangers to eat lunch with me. My publisher and I discussed a host of dining tales, experiences, characters, interactions with my lunch partners. I delivered those stories. But there was more. OPEN FOR LUNCH sprang from a short story collection into a full-scale memoir.
It happened this way. Fellow writers and my professor Elizabeth Luytens in four semesters of a master prose class at University of North Carolina Asheville in the Great Smoky’s Writing Program, began asking keen, probing questions. The first question had to do with chapter one. “When you write the phrase ‘something shifted in me’ after you see the face of the woman in line in front of you at Subway and ask her to eat lunch with you, what was that ‘something that shifted’?” they asked. I didn’t know how to answer them.
My classmates pressed on. “Who are you? And what is it about you that invites strangers to eat lunch with you? Why are you doing this?” Again, I didn’t know the answer. I assumed asking strangers for lunch was nothing out of the ordinary; anyone could do what I was doing. Simple, just look around for someone who is alone, then ask.
“Oh, no. Not me. I could never do that.”
Nearly everyone in class along with others outside of class who heard of my practice responded this way. I began examining myself in light of these questions, these responses to my lunches, and along came a heart–pounding dive into who, what, why, when, and where. I became the reporter reporting on myself. Soon the stunning stories of my lunch mates took me deeply into my own story.
As the oldest of four children and the only girl, with a span of fifteen years between me and my youngest brother, what I experienced as a child lived its own uniqueness. My brother closest in age to me and I can reminisce about a similar childhood, although being a male in the fifties, provided him a mightily different experience in so many ways. But my two younger brothers grew up in a household I did and do not recognize. Our memories and our individual ways of dealing with them surprise us when we get together and talk about our childhood. Some of my truths have shocked, even displeased them since they were either too young or as yet unborn when the events occurred.
My relationship with my mother, in particular, was tangled. Counseling nearly all my adult life has assisted me in understanding my enmeshment with my mother along with the unrealistic expectations I carry for myself, learned at her knee. My current counselor when hearing about my writing of OPEN FOR LUNCH said, ” Well, you know, this is about your mother.”
I overreacted. “No! I thought I dealt with that.This isn’t about her.”
My counselor was right, at least in part. What mother/daughter relationship, the most difficult of all pairings in family life I think, cannot stand another delving into, another fine-tuning? OPEN FOR LUNCH is by no means all about me and my mother, but my pen hijacked me several times to look around the next corner and see her lurking. In fact, I nearly ran out of ink discovering more about her and my father as well as generations of family, a literal three-way mirror among my lunch mates, myself and my family. We were so alike; but then, we weren’t.
I changed the real names of my lunch mates (some even chose their new names) for privacy since their stories are personal, some never told before. However, Helmer Twoyoungmen (Koskanuba), my dear Stoney Nakota lunch mate insisted his story be shared without altering any facts. The stories are faithful to what occurred with my lunch mates and locations for our encounters are true to their actual settings. You may have even unknowingly seen me at a local eatery having lunch with a stranger since my dining habits have taken place in many states, and even in Canada.
It is my hope that OPEN FOR LUNCH provides a feast for readers to pick and choose from. When I selected the title with help from my friend Carol Even, I promised myself I would not get too corny with food puns and metaphors. But I can’t help myself. So, may readers be filled, nourished, satiated from reading OPEN FOR LUNCH. And enriched, fortified, delighted from the full menu of stories and insights I have cooked up. And most of all, may readers hunger to learn more of their own stories, in the restaurant called life.
***
Book Synopsis:
In her new book, Open for Lunch, Robin Russell Gaiser writes of her encounters with a dozen strangers in casual lunch spots from upstate New York to Asheville, North Carolina. She began these encounters almost by chance when she invited someone in line with her at a Subway restaurant to share her table. But as she pursued such encounters over the years, she gradually became “the reporter reporting on myself. Soon the stunning stories of my lunch mates took me deeply into my own narrative.”
Open for Lunch speaks from the heart, both about the moving, fascinating stories of the people she meets, but also about herself. In the words of Lois McMahon, PhD, “Gaiser is a survivor who has overcome personal tragedy and found healing and the ability to reach out to others to share her wisdom and strength. This book holds invaluable lessons for us all about pain, suffering, redemption, forgiveness, healing and love.”
A former teacher and counselor, a singer and musician, Gaiser is a Certified Music Practitioner (CMP) who provides therapeutic music to the ill, the elderly, and the dying in hospital, nursing homes, and hospice settings. Her first book, Musical Morphine: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time, described her work in that field and was a finalist for the 2017 Best Book Awards in Alternative Medicine.
About the Author:
Robin Russell Gaiser, MA, CMP, holds degrees in English literature and psychology and a certificate in therapeutic music. Her previous book, MUSICAL MORPHINE: Transforming Pain One Note at a Time, was
a 2017 finalist in American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards.
Gaiser is a regular presenter before book clubs, bookstores, and professional groups, including her March 2018 TEDx Talk, “Good Vibrations: Less Drugs, More Music.” She has performed widely and recorded numerous CDs, and she provides live vocal and instrumental music to the chronically ill and those in the last stages of life. She and her husband live in Asheville, NC.
Author Contact Information:
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Monday, 11/26/18:
“Gratitude as a Pathway to Healing”
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