Archive for September, 2009

Update: Some people are emailing their comments, so that works, too, if you’d rather: lynn(at)telltalesouls(dot)com.

Tell me how Using COMMON SENSE Makes Perfect Sense

THE STORY WOMAN’S TWO-PART COMMON SENSE CONTEST 

Social, Intellectual, Religious, Political– you name it!

Winner of Part 1 receives my “how-to” book, Give the Gift of Story: TellTale Souls’ Essential Guide to Tap Memory & Write Memoir in Five Acts, since learning to capture the character of a loved one in story makes Perfect Sense.

Winner of Part 2 receives $25 USD from The Story Woman™, since my Common Sense tells me people like cash; it’s as simple as that.

Threads of Common Sense run throughout the Mother Memoirs of TellTale Souls, but collecting pieces, examples, or bits of Common Sense is not the purpose of the bio-vignettes that daughters and sons write about their mothers.   However, the purpose of this contest is to do just that.

This is a very simple contest with very simple rules because it’s all about Common Sense. What could be simpler than to use Common Sense when going about our daily lives? When interacting with others, employing critical thinking, finding solutions to problems, figuring out which path to take, teaching children right from wrong, or deciding to spend money or save it using Common Sense makes Perfect Sense.

 EXAMPLES OF COMMON SENSE, some of which have become cliché:

• Borrowing money from a friend could end the friendship
• If you don’t want a speeding ticket, don’t drive over the speed limit
• Stay alive, don’t drink and drive
• If you don’t have the money to pay for something, don’t charge it
• What you show or tell on the internet will follow you forever
• Wear layers of clothing if you’re visiting San Francisco any time of year
• Don’t be duped by politicians, think for yourself
• Don’t jump off a bridge just because your friends are jumping off

And don’t think too hard about what is meant by the term Common Sense; we’re not going to get philosophical, scientific, or psychological here. This contest is to have fun by sharing our Common Sense.

Rules for Common Sense Contest Part 1 & 2 are easy:

Part 1   Send the best piece or most interesting bit of Common Sense you have. Simply enter your comment below.

Part 2   For a chance to win $25 USD you’ll have to work a little harder.  Write an essay of no more than 500 words using your interesting bit on Common Sense combined with the 5-Ws:

1. Who gave you that piece of Common Sense
2. What good has come from using Common Sense
3. When did you last use Common Sense
4. Where could we use more Common Sense in today’s world
5. Why is it important/valuable to use Common Sense

Simply enter your essay in comments below.

I know the value of collect and using Common Sense, so this contest will run until we have 50 legitimate responses. After the 50 are in, the entries will be judged by The Story Woman and friends, the winners will be announced, and the prizes sent.

More thoughts:

• You can also write about what you wish you’d been taught about Common Sense AND why it would have benefitted you
• Where did you get your common sense (mother, father, teach, etc.)
• Essays on importance of common sense
• Essays on positive examples of using common sense
• Ethnicity & common sense
• Age & common sense
• Do our politicians use common sense
• Consequences of not having/using common sense
• Do we use common sense today, if not, why not
• Does our educational system encourage common sense – or just the opposite
• More ideas from you…

NOTE: By commenting and/or sending replies to this contest, you automatically give The Story Woman™ Blog and Lynn Henriksen the right to use what you say for publication, promotion, or as she sees fit. If you don’t want your name to be used, say so. We respect your privacy: your email address will not be sold or given away.

I was lured into Blair Kilpatrick’s memoir, Accordion Dreams: A Journey into Cajun and Creole Music, the moment I saw the charming cover depicting a happy little girl holding her accordion, although I was surprisingly unprepared for the extent of the adventure she’d lead me on in this extraordinary musical memoir.

Before I even opened the book, a small voice in the recesses of my mind encouraged me to find my BeauSoleil album, Bayou Cadillac, which I hadn’t listened to for ages. Find it I did, and as the first beats of Bon Temps Rouler resounded,  I settled back in a comfortable chair and darn near didn’t get up until I’d read this entire, enchanting book.

To my delight, within the first dozen pages, Kilpatrick talked about how she had excitedly ripped the plastic from her newly purchased BeauSoleil cassette, which shows off the battered red Cadillac convertible, upended in a swamp. Now the hook in me worked itself deeper and deeper. Her compelling, obsessive journey into Cajun-Creole music progressed with her quest to learn to play the accordion, and pay it well, after she fell in love with all things relating to Louisiana’s famous folksingers and musicians, whose French lyrics tell stories through song and melodies merge souls through accordion, fiddle, guitar, and triangle.

In, what I consider a love story, Kilpatrick shares the secrets she learned from the fathers of this genre from learning to play “by ear” to knowing you must practice a tune 100,000 times, if you want to succeed.  From her illuminating prose, I now understood more of the nuances of this music I love. I learned to hear the fiddles talk in their call-and-response style and to feel the easy contracting and expanding bellows of the accordions, as those who played their pearly keys lead the tunes.  Moreover, the commanding personalities of the giants of Cajun-Creole music came to life as Kilpatrick peeled back the layers of developing friendships with her friendly, though passionate, conversational style of writing.

Kilpatrick had me “vibrating in some kind of universal rhythm lock” by the end of the book; and by then, too, I wanted to play in her band, Sauce Piquante, even though I know how to play not a one of those beckoning instruments.  She has a way of expressing in writing exactly what I think I’d feel if I had been so fortunate as to have taken this journey into the heart of Cajun-Creole music.

She even includes a ‘mother memoir’ within her Accordion Dreams memoir, when in chapter fifteen she gives us a look at the women in her Eastern European family, as her “mother laughed and cried as the memories came back.” For me, that’s the beauty of writing ‘mother memoir’ because you can’t help but be taken back to your beginnings, just as Kilpatrick couldn’t help but be taken back to the roots of Cajun music. “And you find yourself back at the beginning, at the place where you began.”

I fell in love completely with the “laughter and tears, love and loss.  Holding on and letting go. The mysterious dance of memory linking past and present – and carrying us forward, into the days ahead.”  The resonance of Accordion Dreams: A Journey into Cajun and Creole Music will stay with me for a lifetime.

Link to Blair Kilpatrick

The Story Woman asks men and women to write  bio-vigettes capturing the character and spirit of their mothers to join the ranks of TellTale Souls.

I’m posting this book review on an historical novel by C.W. Gortner because I think The Last Queen is a great read and highlights the difficulties women have had throughout history attempting to be taken seriously whether they are royalty or not.  Gortner will be honored this October 15th at an event for National Reading Group Month by Women’s National Book Association, San Francisco Chapter. See links below for more information.

Juana’s courage, strength, and passion amazed me as The Last Queen came of age so vividly under C.W. Gortner’s admirable pen. This historical novel is fraught with crushing battles of power and chilling intrigue throughout the courts of her parents, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, and of her husband, Philip of Flanders, as the Infanta of Spain attempts to take her rightful place on the thrown she inherited from her mother.

My soul was struck as I witnessed, through Gortner’s well paced story, the agony Juana endured as her faithless husband raped her night after night, as she was forced to leave her first born behind in Flanders and another child taken from her breast by her father to raise as his own, and as she ultimately succumbed to the captivity that often befell women of royalty in those times. Had she been driven mad by her treacherous husband and her scheming, duplicitous father as they vied for her position or had Juana la Loca, as she came to be known, been wrongly labeled and shut away by the two men she learned to loathe?

That question is one for which we don’t have an answer, but I felt compelled to honor her sanity and believe she would overcome the perils in her path to rule over the people of her beloved Spain.  Her fate was sealed in loneliness and sorrow with no escape. I felt her loss as well as my own.

Women’s National Book Association, San Francisco October 15th event. Our partner, Whole Foods Mill Valley, is graciously supplying specialty foods to promote “Shared Reading.”

C. W. Gornter

Two other fabulous authors will also be reading for this event: Tanya Egan Gibson, How to Buy a Love of Reading, and Kathi Kamen Goldmark, And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You.

The Story Woman asks men and women to write a bio-vignette about a loved one to become a TellTale Soul.

Teresa LeYung Ryan’s, Love Made of Heart, is a stirring look at the intricacies of familial relationships, including mental illness and abuse, that for Ruby Lin, the narrator, have taken the bright, clear color from her world as she struggles to grow up as an American girl drowning in a sea of distinctly Asian values.

Although the intricacies of the mother-daughter bond are the overall theme of this heartfelt story, there is a convoluted push and pull in Ruby’s psyche as she clashes with her father, her Chinese husband, and in-laws, while leaning heavily on the powerful goodness and understanding she discovers in her sister and an adopted Jewish grandmother who has become her beacon in this violent coming of age saga.

LeYung Ryan has Ruby slowly awaken through self-reflection to a universal truth as she works over time with her psychologist. Dr. Thatcher encourages her to unravel the conflicts and mysteries within by speaking with a clarity that resonated with Ruby (as it does for all of us), “Your mother wears a pair of funny glasses which have been tinted by her personal experiences. They’re her special glasses to view and cope with the world.”

So, you see, this story goes beyond the confines of culture and speaks to both the dark and the light sides of love at work in the very heart of all human relationships.

Teresa LeYung Ryan’s link.

The Story Woman encourages all sons and daughters to write a short, true tale (a bio-vignette) about a woman who had a significant impact on their lives for possible submission in the TellTale Souls collection.

I close my eyes; I’m back there banging fat felt eraser blocks together making chock dust clouds slide down the slanted rays of sunshine coming through the open window on this golden afternoon the first week of 3rd grade. I try not to breathe that fuzzy stuff in, but it doesn’t really matter because I am elated with my elevated position.  I feel special.

Close my eyes again to travel back even further; I smell the suffocating odor of steaming hot wool as the nurses at Good Samaritan Hospital wrapped my paralyzed limbs in these cooked blankets rather than let me start 2nd grade with my friends. Hot packs they were called; the doctors said if I was a good girl and let them wrap me up as though I were a sausage several times a day I might someday wiggle my toes again. Well, did I have a choice? I was a good girl, but try as I might, not one of the ten moved. But that didn’t really matter because I wasn’t in an iron lung like some of the kids – I could breathe on my own. (Jonas Salk’s miracle was yet to come.)

Everyone knows by the time they’re in 3rd grade that it’s teacher’s pet who has the honor of cleaning the erasers, wiping down the blackboard, and replacing stubs with fresh, long white pieces of chock that felt amazingly smooth as your fingers slid lightly over their cool hardness as you placed them neatly in the chock tray. Mrs. Conroy smiled at me as she arranged the pages of each student’s best cursive writing on the bulletin boards flanking both sides of the clean blackboard. We had everything in place for tomorrow. It would be a great day. And I was, indeed, a good girl who had learned the hard way to wiggle her toes a few months ago with the encouragement of the physical therapy heroes.

It’s tomorrow. It’s recess. I’m standing at the bottom of the high slide on my trusty crutches because my friend is climbing the scary stairs to the top so she can make the exhilarating glide down and land triumphantly at my feet. We will both giggle at the fun of it all. Just before my friend’s turn to slide down, the boy who was climbing the stairs ahead of her stopped at the top and hollered for everyone on the playground to watch him. As we all watched expectantly, he dug deep, with both hands, into the pockets of his blue jeans. Next thing I knew rocks were careening pell-mell down that high slide at me. I was the target. I was an easy mark, since I hadn’t yet mastered the art of nimble crutching. Above the cries of my friend waiting to come down to me, he yelled out, “That’s what she gets. She’s fat and crippled and retarded and has rocks in her head.” There was a lot of laughter.

I eventually learned to walk well – no braces, no crutches, post-polio syndrome in check. Hurray! I’m special. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” I only think about that grade school high slide incident every ten years or so when something or someone reminds me how mean a few bullies can be. Mostly, I have nothing but positive memories of precious school days – mine and those of my three children.

August meant back to school shopping with my kids and was something I loved – or think I loved. “Do you really have to have a new backpack, what’s wrong with last year’s pink one?”  “Mom, I need eye shadow, all my friends are wearing it.” “A car. Are you nuts?”  New clothes that don’t look new, fresh books that I hope they’ll crack, magic markers that smell like fun, binder covers beckoning to be graffitied, and ruled paper awaiting critical thoughts, poems, problems, images, and answers to questions.  Now it’s whiteboards and rainbow colored markers and too much home work. My ‘baby’ in tears, “That crappy girl in the popular group stuck her foot out so I’d trip and fall down in front of the entire math class. Everyone laughed.”

Rock-Paper-Scissors.

TellTale Souls: Keeping Spirits Alive One Memoir at a Time by Lynn Henriksen

Simply do this: 

1.  Write a short, true story of 600-1500 words in answer to my trademark question: “If you could tell just one small story that would capture your Mother’s character and keep her spirit alive, what would it be?” In other words, the story I am encouraging you to write embraces a special kind of memoir that takes a look at the heart and soul of an important woman in your life by looking at her as an individual.

 2.  Mother is meant in a broad way; write about any woman who has/had a significant impact on your life, e.g., grandmother, aunt, mentor. Not all memories are positive, nor are all mothers; that’s the way it is in life. If you find portraying your mother’s character brings to mind mostly negative images, write about those memories since they are every bit as real and honest as positive ones, and writing about them is cathartic and brings about greater understanding and healing.

 3.  When writing your story you want the reader of your story to come away feeling like they have a good idea of what your mother is like through your writing about an incident, an event, or moments in time that reveal her character and spirit. This honest tale is not a history or a time-line, but rather your illumination of a small slice of life where your mother takes center stage. Remember it is the ordinary things in life that we most clearly relate to.

 4.  After you’ve chosen the woman you will write your true tale about, find the memory you will elaborate on by immersing yourself in thoughts about this woman in a meditative manner. Look through old photographs and letters, think back to where you were raised, or what happened at different ages or stages of your life with your mother. Think of the events or anecdotes associated with vacations, work, music, books, cooking, rituals, and family gatherings. Discuss old times with a sister or brother, cousin, or grandparent. When a memory or thought comes up, jot it down immediately so you can come back to it later (you don’t want it to vanish like a dream that’s not been written down).

 5.  Using passion and emotion and setting the scene through descriptive storytelling that makes use of all of your senses (seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, & touching) will make your memoir rich and powerful. Write a rough draft not worrying about grammar and punctuation – there will be time to smooth the memoir out later.

 6.  On top of everything else you must believe in yourself and your voice. Write like you talk. Writing the story as though you were telling it to a friend or relative is very important so that the authenticity of your voice comes through. Keep in mind that you, and only you, can write this particular story about your mother, and her character can best be remembered if you write it down. I believe, “If we don’t write it down, it will be lost. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”

Write your true tale that captures the character of a loved one using The Story Woman Method for possible inclusion in new book, TellTale Souls: Keeping Spirits Alive One Memoir at a Time (working title).