Why We Write Memoir by Charlene Jones
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@KathyPooler with Charlene Jones/@CharleneJones18
“One day you will tell your story of how you’ve overcome what you’re going through now, and it will become part of someone else’s survival guide.”
Please join me in welcoming my dear friend and memoir colleague, Charlene Jones who will explore the reasons we write and read memoir. Charlene has generously featured many of us fellow memoirists in podcast interviews on her Soul Sciences website to help us all promote our memoirs. Now it’s her turn to be featured in this guest post on her own memoir writing experience. I hope you enjoy her valuable memoir writing tips as much as I have.
Welcome, Charlene!
Memoirist Charlene Diane JonesWhy We Write Memoir
The above quote appeared on my FB thread. I asked the person if these were their words but heard nothing back. Yet this quote speaks to what memoir creates—a vital enhancement of our own lives.
Memoir is story carefully unwrapped within time and space. It reveals how one person lived through their suffering. Its importance lies beyond the exercise of imagination required with fiction. Memoir tells us what did happen.
As readers, we imagine partaking of the memoirist’s life journey.
Imagine. Consider what neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual Leone proved in his elegant experiments with imagination. Pascual Leone, Chief of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre part of Harvard Medical School used a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine to mark the neuronal pathways of novice piano players. Here’s what happened.
Pascual Leone divided the group into two parts, one part sitting at a physical piano, learning to play a particular piece of music. The second group imagined sitting at an imaginary piano and imagined their fingers playing the exact same piece of music. Results demonstrated those who had only imagined playing were proficient to about 2/3 the extent of those who played physically. (The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.)
Clearly memoir provides us with an imaginary practice session at the emotional and behavioral scales required by life. Although fiction does the same it responds to the concept of imagination alone. No one sat at the piano, so to speak and practiced. It is all imagination and may be dismissed or further imagined as such.
With memoir we exercise our imagination knowing all the while the events took place in time and space. From Ulysses through Confessions by Saint Augustine or The Book of Marjorie Kempe (1436 or so) we read about the lives of others. And if you have any doubt about the power of the tales told within those books consider how Saint Augustine’s work has helped shape Western civilization.
One of the favorite stories we tell in our time is that of our collective ancestors, sitting by a fire at night. We imagine them regaling each other with stories of their heroic feats, of their trials and triumphs as others listen, nod their heads. Why?
Photo Credit: Pixabay Free Image “Storytelling around a campfire”The power of listening to or reading about lives lived by elders resonates within our cells. We recognize how they made their way against troubles, defeated struggles, stepped around problems or ran through them. This recognition provides each of us with a sense of increased stability and belonging. We begin to see our own struggles are not so different. Or they are very different, but that someone else overcame something similar or even more harsh.
From reading the trails and paths of those who have gone before we learn how to overcome suffering. We learn we are not singled out by life to experience tragedy but that suffering arrives in every life. In this our suffering evidences our communion with life itself. We suffer because we are alive.
For the writer, memoir is a release, a further examination and an offering. Every one of the many memoirists I’ve interviewed over the years say the same thing: they wish to help others.
My memoir writing began within a year of my return from being held hostage for three days by two armed criminals over 50 years ago. That first version had none of the horrific events that later spilled from within but was as careful a notation as I was able to make at that time.
Through several decades of body work, breath work, dream work, meditation, dance and singing I accomplished the laborious task of sieving all the bad memories. I learned to listen as my body spoke, releasing her unbearable burden of memory. Then I learned to release those memories, so they stay in the past.
I so prize her, that young me, with her courage and determination. Her life, my life had fallen already into tiny pieces. As I grew able to write all the details, including the very difficult parts, I felt the young one within me finally sigh and let go. Her story, her truth, helps create the power of my life, now.
Writing and finishing this book My Impossible Life demonstrates the psychic container in which I now hold, and have released, my suffering.
Memoir delivers this power: to put boundaries about the most difficult parts of life in the past and in that to make clear the joy and contentment, the genuine gifts of today’s life.
This does not guarantee no more problems. It does help us focus on the positive love of today. And that is a large gift.
Book Synopsis
Initiation in a Tibetan temple in the north of India with Chogya Trizen and the Sakya? Sailing the Gulf of Mexico in tornado season? Meditating in silence for three months in New Zealand? Wherever Ms. Jones sets foot on the planet more adventures spring to life. Her adventures are not simply outer world. Thrust about by forces that provide her with Angelic interventions and visionary experiences, Jones continues to do the only thing she knows how: put one foot in front of the other every day while focusing on her main quest, healing. She knows despite outer appearances she is living a half-life with her senses bound and numbed. She knows she is one move away from total psychic collapse. What she does not know is why? What happened in her past that pushed her beyond her limits? Using neuroscience, descriptions of her night dreams and their intelligence, and recounting her experiences in deep Tibetan Buddhist meditation, Ms. Jones’ offers readers a glimpse into healing, even when life has been pulled in half, even if what is left is what Jones’ calls My Impossible Life.
About the Author:
Charlene lived through a boisterous, chaotic, brutal and loving family of origin, where love fell from mother’s hands along with a leather whip, where picnics and punishments dotted the psychic landscape, and from which she eventually ran.
Only to get into a car driven by two armed criminals who held her hostage for three days.
When she returned a brief stint with drugs and the expected outrageous behaviour known as PTSD did not prevent her leaving again, this time on the whim of a vision of her contentious teacher, recognized by the Tibetans for his meditation achievements if not his humanitarianism.
She spent time twirling beads in a Tibetan temple in the North of India, drank chang with Mongol men, flew to New Zealand and completed a three month intensive meditation retreat.
Her continuing adventures in a life that refused to settle down, to take it easy, to walk the way others walked have resulted also in her books, Medicine Buddha/Medicine Mind and The Stain to be followed soon by her memoir: My Impossible Life.
She is a performance poet with many poems published internationally, a podcaster at www.soulsciences.com, a meditation teacher at Stouffville Yoga Life through which she also co-leads retreats, a grandmother, a partner, and a soul guide for the life destroyed.
M.Ed/M.A
Self-published: The Stain (fiction)
Medicine Buddha/Medicine Mind
Bliss Pig (with Linda Stitt)
Performance Poet, Meditation Teacher, Soul Guide for Distressed People
Links
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlene-jones-65864046/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlene.jones.104
Website: https://www.soulsciences.net
How about you? Why do you write memoir? or read memoir?
We’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
Charlene has graciously agreed to gift a copy of her memoir, My Impossible Life: trauma,travel. transcendence to a commenter whose name will be selected in a random drawing.
Next Week:
Monday, November 18, 2019:
“The Best Laid Plans…”
