Archive for March, 2009

Last night I finished reading the book, The Orange Wire Problem and Other Tales from the Doctor’s Office, just off the presses, written by Dr. David Watts. His first book of stories, published in 2005, was Bedside Manners; you may have read it. This new book is another delight, a treasure, comprised of vignettes shedding more light on the doctor-patient relationship. Watts is not only a doctor, he’s a gifted writer and poet, and his brand of storytelling comes across elegantly on every page of his book.

I’m not suggesting you write like he writes. Don’t. To take on the style of someone else is the best way to choke your story.  If you attempt to write by imitating the technique and voice of someone else, you will kill the authenticity of your story. Find your unique voice by trusting yourself and the process. To be sure, the stories I’ve collected for the TellTale Souls’ anthology, written by “ordinary” people, are beyond compare.

The Orange Wire Problem review I wrote is relevant to our focus on writing bio-vignettes. In this review, copied below, I give a couple examples from Watts’ book on how he gets his points across succinctly to the reader; the first speaks to writing with honesty about the fallibility of science and the mystery of healing; the second illustrates the art of dialogue and thought comingling to a humorous conclusion.

The author, David Watts, is a medical doctor friend of mine. If he can write, so can you. You know how doctors scrawl illegibly, and I don’t know about a scientist capturing character, but I’ll be darned, he did it!  In case you’re not sure, I’m spoofing here when I question his ability to write, as you’ll see when you read what I wrote about his book.

 As I’ve often said, writing a bio-vignette will prove to be the journey of a lifetime for you, but I know it’s not always so easy to begin your tale. David Watts confessed of being afraid to write when he first began his journey, and look where it took him. Yes, maybe you are, indeed, inspired to write a short memoir to honor a loved one, but you just can’t seem to get it started – the task can be daunting, but it is well within your reach. You can do it and join the ranks of hundreds of TellTale Souls, even doctors, who have gone before you.

Review:

David Watts charmingly reveals the challenges of both doctor and patient in thought provoking essays (bio-vignettes) that you can’t put down or easily forget. He brings unabashed humor and poignancy front and center from behind the door in the doctor’s office as he tells the tales of decades of his ministering to the sick. 

Throughout The Orange Wire Problem and Other Tales from the Doctor’s Office, Watts speaks reverently and poetically about the human condition when confronted with disease or just the maladies of being human. He is refreshingly honest and serious about the mysteries of science and healing when he says, “I see the mysterious in the way some people heal faster than others. I see it rise in us and bend us certain ways as we are confronted with illness or mortality, as if it waits for this, as if mystery always intends to rise up when we least expect it.” 

Looking at another side of him, Watts’ sense of humor sparkles in an incident when a somewhat irrational female patient manipulatively turns the tables and is concerned about Dr. Watts’ prostate, after he’s reluctant to order the irrelevant enzyme tests she demands. She says, “You know, sometimes when men…well you know, the men they have prostate problems like women have menopause and sometimes men have, well you know, prostate mental problems…”  He’s thinking, “…she was diagnosing my prostate by way of my brain, the culprit responsible for the glitch in the orderly procession toward her beloved enzyme tests.”  In his inimitable way, he sums up, “Learn a little somethin’ every day. Prostate mental problems, yes indeedy.”

 And then there are the beloved insurance companies: Ya gotta love him for the 17cent check from MediCal, labeled “full payment for services rendered,” he has framed on his wall, as well as his unwillingness to fight big government for payment. You can almost see Watts shrug his shoulders as he moves beyond the bureaucracy to give his patients what they need.

 We should all be so fortunate as to have Dr. Watts as our personal physician, after all he’ll prescribe a pill that he suggests you don’t swallow, just keep it in your pocket or in a locket around your neck – most likely your symptoms will disappear. And we’re right back to mysteries.

 Thank you, David Watts, for a bit of your soul.

Daughters and sons write bio-vignettes to honor their mothers & loved ones.

The Story Woman says, “Don’t do it!”

IT’S DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH TO PUT YOUR GIRLFRIENDS ON THE BACK BURNER

UCLA STUDY ON FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN
By Gale Berkowitz

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special.
They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It’s a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research—most of it on men—upside down. “Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible,” explains Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study’s authors. “It’s an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just “fight or flight.” “In fact,” says Dr. Klein,”it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the “fight or flight” response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men”, says Dr. Klein, “because testosterone—which men produce in high levels when they’re under stress—seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen”, she adds, “seems to enhance it.”

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic “aha!” moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. “There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded”, says Dr. Klein. “When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.”

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the “tend and befriend” notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. “There’s no doubt,” says Dr. Klein, “that friends are helping us live.” In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increase d their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses’ Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidantes was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight! And that’s not all! When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate.

Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That’s a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of “Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls’ and Women’s Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). “Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women,” explains Dr. Josselson. “We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they’re with other women. It’s a very healing experience.”

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight

Daughters and sons write short essays about their mothers and loved ones.

Since I’ve received so many questions asking me how to get more passion and emotion into writing, in general, and “Mother Memoir,” in particular, I’m hoping the following thoughts will shed more light on the subject.

We each see people and actions in a special light – a light stemming uniquely from the very core of each of us.  As a collector of stories, I revel in this light; it is this reflection of ourselves that ignites the radiant glow of the prismatic colors making up the spectrum of our collective souls.

The best way to write passion and emotion into your stories is to put yourself in your characters’ shoes.  In each particular circumstance, take yourself to that place where the character you’re writing about is. With a little practice, you will learn to use your innate powers of imagination to feel what the other person is feeling, so that you will infuse your story with emotional intensity and enthusiastic passion. By envisioning the scenes, you will come up with ideas and feelings that may not have occurred to you before and, in so doing, create the mood of your story.

Just think, through actively engaging your imagination, you are getting to the heart of your character, what makes her tick, not just what’s on the surface, but the inner workings of her character.  Perhaps the most important aspect of writing a “Mother Memoir” is to remember that to convey on paper how you see your mother will bring her alive with all the passion and emotion you are feeling. People reading your story don’t know what’s in your mind and heart; they can only feel and realize what you bring to life about her through your written word – so the responsibility is yours alone.

You set the tone of your story by injecting passion and emotion as you see it, as you feel it. My book, Give the Gift of Story: TTS Essential Guide to Tap Memory and Write Memoir in Five Acts, is full of ideas and exercises to help you do just that, so you can allow these feelings to well up within you. We all have emotional memory, and it is best illuminated through the power of imagination, when we recall the emotions we felt at the time an incident occurred.

I suggest you go to a quiet place, close your eyes, and let your mind drift to the particular scene in your mind that you want to write about. We create mood by recreating the memory through all of our senses – sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste. Yes, you will taste the frosting on your 7^th birthday cake, or smell the freshly cut grass in your backyard, or listen, once again, to the melody she often hummed; you can even see her face change before your eyes when you bring to life through your imagination the time she became furious or saddened by something or someone she perceived did her wrong.  If you would like more details on making your story come alive, go to the recent interview I had with the International Nonfiction Writers’ Association.

Now that you can begin to get in touch with the emotion and passion of your character, to set the scene, write your heart out. Get that raw emotion down on paper – make us laugh or make us cry, and portray, in writing, the passion you’ve conjured up like never before. This is how you begin your powerful story. Down the line, I will go into more depth about adding the finishing touches, but this is enough to work on for now.

Some types of questions to consider:

• Is her hair blonde or strawberry-blonde?
• Were her actions the result of anger or was she acting out of deep concern?
• What does this scene look like from her point of view?
• What does it feel like to be in her shoes?
• Is the kitchen the room to place my story or is it on a sandy beach?
• If I were looking at this scene for the first time, would it be different from the memory I’ve carried around with me for 10 years, maybe 50 years?

I’ll leave you with this thought: Is there something I’ve left out, overlooked, or buried that would make my story convey even greater emotion and passion?

Daughters & Sons Write Bio-vignettes as Mother Memoir

From my position on the worn, overstuffed chair, I can see outside the window and through the bars of my second story balcony to a wall of similar Chinese apartments beyond the narrow alleyway.  A neighbor across the way has an identical balcony, only the rusted bars of her confine support a few potted plants and the door to their kitchen is flanked by two red Spring Festival banners with gold letters – another banner is pasted horizontally across the top.  A caged bird flutter-jumps from perch to the top the cage to perch to bottom and back again.

The woman of the house is slight, middle aged and gentle looking – neatly bobbed hair frames her round, expressionless face.  Sometimes I see her sweeping the balcony floor or watering her two plants, while the husband watches television at a deafening volume.  A small window reveals images shouting from the screen in 1 to 2 second intervals. It is always on, and he is always sitting in front of it, his presence exposed by clouds of cigarette smoke during the day and the glowing tips of cigarettes in the night.

I look up from my book as the woman appears on her deck. I begin to pay attention as she reaches for the cage. Leaning forward in my chair, I see her slide her hand through the tiny door.  In one quick movement her hand appears outside the bars of her own cage, and I watch as the bird catches flight.

A lovely smile animates her face as she puts her hands together and bows in the direction of the freed bird.

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The author of this beautiful story is Colette Hosmer, my friend, a sculptor, and a contributor to TellTale Souls’ “Mother Memoirs,” with her bio-vignette, entitled “My Mother’s Wash.”  I love this View From a Cage story written on her travels through China, where she is often an honored guest sculptor.

And I loved the quaint image of the laundry strung across the balcony by the gentle Chinese lady in the picture above.  I realize it was probably out of necessity that she dry her family’s clothes in this fashion, but it also struck me funny, as I immediately saw it another light. In Colette’s story in my book, she relates how her North Dakota mother took the art of line-drying laundry to another level with her sun-dried whites, even though she had a clothes dryer.

The sun works it’s magic for mothers the world over, whether out of necessity or not, and mothers work their magic on us from one culture to the next, with very similar spirits they are birds of a feather.

Thank you, Colette, for being TellTale Souls’ first guest blogger. Please follow this link to Colettehosmer.com. As I promised my readers in my first blog, I’ll bring you blogs and interviews from a wide range of artists, this is just the beginning.

Daughters and Sons Write “Mother Memoirs” that Connect Us All