Archive for the ‘Relationships’ Category

I feel fortunate to have clear memories of what Memorial Day signifies. When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, this was a day where everyone I knew actually did commemorate the fallen American soldiers, who had died for our country as far back as the Civil War. Flowers were placed on the graves and memorials of these brave men and women to honor the fact that they made the ultimate sacrifice. A huge amount of patriotism was displayed as flags waved in most every yard and place of business, our national anthem – The Star Spangled Banner – boomed from horn and drum across our great land, and the smoke from charred hot dogs (gotta love ‘em) blanketed picnic grounds the country over.

Thousands and thousands of bright red, paper poppies were sold all over the United States in support of World War II Veterans. These crinkly poppies went for a 5¢ piece, and were worn with pride by all Americans. To us kids, they were like badges of honor. Perhaps this is another reason why the California poppy is so special to me, even though it is not the same poppy as the Poppy Day poppy.

                     I love spring time in California, when poppies suddenly appear in their glorious orange splendor, standing tall and bright on spidery stems, but strong and hardy nonetheless. These common poppies can be seen everywhere, from ditches to the best-kept yards, and each and every time I catch a glimpse at them, they remind me of the uncommon valor of our soldiers, the fragility of life, and the indebtedness I have for them for keeping America the land free and the home of the brave.

The Star Spangled Banner ?link to complete lyrics

By Francis Scott Key 1814
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

… Back to the blurred line between fiction and nonfiction. I enjoyed the comments I received from searchers for truth after posting the first part of this short series. The following are a few extracted comments that hit home: 

• I received a Goggle alert announcing my death
• The reality check has bounced
• I think humanity has for the most part lost the ability to confront the truth and instead seek escapism in any form
• Without truth, we’re crossing swaying bridges with no railings
• Buyer beware has grown into listener beware
• Tawdry “reality” that surrounds us today becomes the worst sort of lie

(This is a three-part series; for context, read part one, click here.)

First of all, I love literary fiction and read it voraciously – more than I read literary nonfiction, actually. I’m wondering if fiction is perhaps one of the most honest forms of writing after all. Fiction writers don’t pretend to tell the truth, but I believe their writing is based on seeking and portraying the truth about human nature. Fiction, by definition, is not based on fact, but on fabrication and the work of a darn good imagination. We only buy into fictional stories if and when the writer gives us believable characters with whom we can connect on an emotional level.

Nonfiction, with memoir being most dear to my heart, is supposed to be based in fact. Now, who said memory is made up of nothing but facts?  I teach that it’s okay to use your imagination while writing memoir. And I say that the way in which you see the truth about people and events will be very different from how your sister, for example, will look at those same people and events.  The whole matter becomes blurred to some degree by each person’s feelings, emotional posture, passion-set, and personal claim on each moment in time.

Both memoir and fiction, when skillfully written, “…[have] the ability to evoke the entire spectrum of human emotions to distract our minds, to give us hope in times of despair, to make us laugh, or to let us experience empathy without attachment.” (Quote from word iQ, regarding their definition of fiction. I chose to add memoir, because it, too, aptly fits the description.)

I remember reading a novel written by a woman I know socially. It was a lively story, entertaining, rife with emotion. While reading it, I began to believe she was the protagonist and this was the story of a portion of her life before I knew her, since many events fit what I knew about her colorful life. When next we talked, I mentioned something about what a brilliant little guy her son was, and I was curious as to what he was up to now, since I thought he surely would have turned out to be an astronaut or someone equally remarkable. Through a wry smile, she informed me that she didn’t have a son, in fact, no children at all, as planned. Turns out she was pleased that she’d written so convincingly about a son in her story that many readers believed he was hers – I wasn’t the only one caught in the snare of a talented writer. She had no intention to deceive, she’s a novelist. It was I who was reading fiction as nonfiction and loving every word of it!

I’ll move to a short post about the wiggly nature memoir next time. In the meantime, write a true tale about your dad for Father’s Day (June 20^th). What could be better than to let him know you took the time to capture his character and spirit in a bio-vignette that only you can write?

This time, while walking the memoir labyrinth, deliberately open your mind to the colors that appear when using your senses. Spend time thinking about how color affects each of your five senses, one at a time. And then expand your thoughts into combining, for example, taste with smell or sight with touch, which will give you the opportunity to add appealing sensory layers to your writing in imaginative ways. This exercise will show you that what you need to do to make a short, true tale come alive is well within your grasp. It’s yours for the taking, if you’ll simply write down what you have visualized.

Mom, Dad, Uncle Joe, Grandmother Sophia – they are or were colorful people, true? When you think of them, you think of them in color, so now write about them in color. To make your story come alive, use your senses in the context of the color of their character and their actions.

Colors trip sensory responses in all of us, and sensory responses are tied to every hue imaginable. It’s your job to invite the colors in.

• What colors come to mind with when you see you mother’s angry face or when you dissolve into her warm smile?

• What colors come to mind when you feel your father gently pat on your cheek or when you cry out as his belt hits your bottom?

• What colors come to mind when you smell your wife’s perfume or when you get a whiff of the sneakers she just took off?

• What colors come to mind when you taste that horrible stew your grandmother made or when you gobbled up her famous strawberry shortcake?

• What colors come to mind when you hear your husband talk about the sexy, new girl at the office or when you listen to him whistle while he works on the screen door you’d asked him to fix?

Now that you’ve had some fun using your senses to add color to your personal thoughts, apply what you’ve learned when you write your bio-vignette. The people whom you’re writing about – do them justice by capturing their character in living color. Add details that describe them, the scenes, and the events vividly through colorful characterizations that put oomph and vitality into the flat facts.

In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison has her characters ponder color this way:

Her past had been like her present — intolerable — and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. “Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, it you don’t.” And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue.

Do write your bio-vignette using colorful, sensory details – become a Technicolor TellTale Soul – but spend thoughtful time on the memoir labyrinth first.

I know you’re budding out, pert and peppy in all your glory, Spring. I feel you beckon me with your flirtatious ways, flowing sap and saucy spirit, so that I can’t resist your charms, but that only means trouble is looming on the horizon.

Our love affair is fraught with predictable problems, and I should know better than to trust you after all these years. With you, Spring, I get bees that sting, sunburn, in spite of the block, and broken fingernails from poking around in your fertile bed. But that’s not the half of it. You make me hot – my temperature rises with hope held high for planting. Were it not for you, I wouldn’t envision brilliant flowers and juicy tomatoes that taste like tomatoes making their grand entrance all around after teasing them with gentle love and holy water.

But I know my dreams will be dashed by loving you. You make me love you, and then you invite your ill-mannered friends to our garden party and leave me broken hearted, empty. After each fruitful day with you, I awaken to see that overnight, every new leaf and bud has been silently nipped. Your treacherous friends have left smelly tracks and dangerous ticks in their wake, while your face opens into a wide blue smile and you wink at me as only you can.

Sorry, Spring, I’m not falling for this again. Now I wonder where I left my hoe.

Spring has written her Mother Memoir. Have you? Mother’s Day is just a couple days away, you still have time to give your mother the best gift – a short, true story capturing her spirit. Become a TellTale Soul by writing your bio-vignette.

When you use descriptive imagery in writing memoir you add powerful appeal to your true story. The images I’m referring to are the mental pictures you have stored away in your memory banks of a person, place, or thing, whether they are remembered vividly or in a shadowy vision.

Creatively describing the images of characters and events in a story is the means by which a writer can put into words unique and lasting impressions that readers will connect with. When you’re describing images, say in a story about your grandfather, stop and really think about how you are communicating your reflections of him at a certain time, in particular places, and during specific events. Moreover, when you take the time to go through an exercise in descriptive imagery, you’re allowing yourself to revel in depth about savored incidents.

When you’re writing a memoir about your grandfather, ask yourself if you have made him, as well as your time with him, come alive through your depiction of the images you’ve perhaps carried with you since childhood. Have you conveyed to readers, through even a few words or a phrase, the emotional hold a certain memory of him had on you? Or is he coming across flat as a photograph, in a way that doesn’t give his likeness or unforgettable moments the energy they deserve?

Descriptive, creative imagery invites readers into a deeper dimension by showing them what you mean through words; words evoking mental images that allow people to connect on an emotional plane with your characters and the story in general. For example, you could say, “I liked to go fishing with grandpa early in the morning.” Or you could say, “I had been shivering on the back porch for what seemed like forever, when suddenly my heart skipped a beat as I heard grandpa open the creaky wooden door at the crack of dawn, two fishing poles geared up in one weathered hand.” Both of these sentences have the same meaning, but the second one pulls readers into a visual of you and your grandfather at that precise moment you want remembered.

Action is created by your choice of words. You may want to play around with different ways to portray specific images, feel the emotional responses your descriptive images can evoke, and then decide what you will say to achieve the results you are looking for.

There is a side to adding imagery to be wary of, however. You don’t want to overdo it by overwhelming readers with descriptions that take away from your story line. Take this cliché to heart, “…Can’t see the forest for the trees.” Your memoir is the forest, the big picture, so don’t be too effusive and don’t get hung up on describing each tree. You can achieve a balance by including good, emotionally informative images in appropriate places, but not so many that your story itself is lost in the descriptions of too many images or mired in images that are extravagant or overstated.

Have fun playing around with writing descriptive images in your bio-vignette, your short, true memoir. Become a TellTale Soul.

Could just be that chaotic memories are poetry in motion leading us to write memoir. I’m posting a blog from Mara Buck, an exceptional writer of poetry and novels, among other artistic works. A sensitive person, with a great head on her shoulders, Mara and comes up with ingenious thoughts on most subjects. Today she has something to say about “from chaos comes the poetry of memoir.” Seems she’s got a scientific streak as well… 

     Which of us has memories as ordered as files in a desk drawer, neat and tidy, accessible or ignored, hidden or exposed only by our own decisive hand?  Not I and (I suspect) not you either.  The greater number of us live instead in a constantly evolving state of discovery and disorder, the past intruding upon the present, forever subject to ambush, chaos really.  Yet chaos can be a good thing, and when perceived and accepted for the potential gift it is, can render the most surprising of outcomes. 

     In chaos theory as applied to physics, small initial differences can yield widely divergent outcomes of unpredictable nature.  Such is life inside a family, each member with a slightly different viewpoint, seldom agreeing on cause or effect.  Chaos is created.  Such is individual memory, tinged unreliably with emotion, influenced by the memories and opinions of others.  The product is once again chaos.  We each see only a part of the whole at any given time, and these factions shift and split within our overloaded psyches and through the years, blemished by emotion and doubt, chaos results where clarity is needed.  Like fragments on the hard drive of a computer, remnants of abuse and distrust and pain clutter our brains in nano-bytes, useless within themselves, impeding progress until the defrag system clears the unwanted stash.

     Writing memoir can become a system of harnessing that chaos, of restoring order.

     It takes courage to surrender to chaos, to step back and grit our teeth and become a voyeur until, until…  Until that moment when the sun breaks through the clouds and highlights the answer that was there all along, hidden within the whirlwind of chaotic memories.  Writing through that chaos is a brave thing, an individualistic thing, such a difficult thing that when we attempt it we must first acknowledge the risk, that all our efforts may not produce the result we had imagined.  Yet it is a learning experience, as is life, and once we accept and examine the bumps in the ride, we can better enjoy the trip, and we are the richer for it.

     To illustrate the point in a rather physical manner, my desk is a partners’ model from 1910, a massive thing with four banks of drawers and a twenty-square-foot top which accommodates two complete computers, a printer, phones, answering machine, and all the bells and whistles befitting the twenty-first century.  However, cowering amid the computer wires and assorted piles of effluvia, there is the treasure of a small antique bisque creamer, formerly beloved by my mother, and every now and then I stroke the softness of the porcelain and it feels not unlike the touch of her skin.  A piece of beauty found amid the chaos.  A physical memoir. 

     I wrote a poem entitled Chaos, ending with the line “for out of chaos comes poetry.”  We must trust that the poetry of memoir will come someday from our own chaos, no matter how toxic, no matter how painful, because that’s what poetry ultimately is.  Poetry is truth.

http://www.redroom.com/member/MaraBuck

http://www.redroom.com/blog/marabuck/chaos

http://www.youtube.com/user/marabuck       Check Mara’s YouTube spot – intriguing, to say the least.

We’re getting close enough to Mother’s Day for me to encourage you to write a “Mother Memoir,” so that you can give your mom a unique gift.  I’d like to share a snippet from a poem by Suzanne Lipsett, which never ceases to echo through my soul from its nesting place in my heart. I’m hoping it will get you thinking about your mother and in the mood to Tap Memory and Write Memoir.

 The following are five stanzas from a 33 stanza poem to her mother that inspired me through the depth of her sensitivity and the lessons of understanding so deftly penned straight from Suzanne Lipsett’s heart. Her words resonate with the often conflicting thoughts and memories we hold when many of us think of our mothers, and, for me, they punctured my inner-most being to the place where I know Mom resides.

 Here are five stanzas from “To Elynore.”  The verse in larger font is my heartstring.

 Now, I tell you, there’s something to say here.

It’s not that I’m happy you died.

It’s not that I’m glad

That you left me and Dad.

It’s not that I loved the whole ride.

But I learned something from this dark lesson

That showed me why people are strong:

That way down below

Is where love seems to go

And to think that it fades there is wrong.

It’s the oldest soft floor of the forest,

The roots of the searchingest tree.

It’s the ivory bones;

It’s the riverbed’s stones.

It’s the gift of your being in me.

And the final result of that loving,

That presence of you that I sought,

Is the work that I love

Nearly all things above,

The books that I’ve rendered from thought.

So I find, after all, I must thank you.

You have been there on that deepest shelf.

You’ve been one I could use,

You’ve been my only muse . . .

And I thought I had done it myself!

Write your “Mother Memoir,” now and become a TellTale Soul. Give her the gift that only you can give.

Memoir as a gift…

When you write true tales, while walking the memoir labyrinth, it is appropriate to think of the stories as gifts. And here is why I believe that to be true.

“Give the Gift of Story” is the title of my guide book, so it goes hand-in-hand with the type of writing I encourage you to do, which is writing a short and true “Mother Memoir.” (If you’re new to my blog, I want to let you know that I use the term “mother” rather loosely when asking people to write a short, true tale – a bio-vignette that captures character and spirit. The person you choose to write about can be any woman who holds a significant place in your life. For that matter, writing about any person, male or female, fits the bill.)

 —- Yes, back to my point: Some of you may turn away from thinking about your memoir as a gift, because the person you pick as your main character and the experience you intend to use as the basis for your story is unpleasant (or worse). Obviously, in this situation, and from your point of view, you certainly don’t think of this memoir as a gift. However, from my point of view, it is truly a gift. If you don’t deem it appropriate as a gift to give her, then accept it as a gift you’ll give to yourself by writing it.

Remember the potent healing aspects of writing we talked about awhile back? For many of you, stories about “mothers” bring up dreadful memories. But when you write through painful experiences, you work through layers and layers of crud, and you eventually come to some understanding about what happened due to the fact that you have opened your mind to those things buried deep inside and placed the painful events out in the open through the process of writing memoir.

You might decide not to let anyone else ever read what you’ve written. And that’s okay. The story can be for your eyes only. When you make this process fully intentional, like walking the memoir labyrinth by simply putting one foot in front of the other, and take personal control over the emotions linked to the events, you have given yourself a very special gift. It could just be the best gift you’ll ever receive.

On the other hand, when you write a heartwarming, even poignant, memoir, it’s a natural to want to give it as a gift to the person you have chosen to portray with clarity in a short memoir. You believe your gesture will be well received, and you can imagine her delight in reading this particular story – a memoir where you’ve taken the time to look at her as an individual. What’s more, your gift of memoir will preserve treasured memories of her spirit for years to come.

Either way, writing memoir is a powerful gift. Please join all TellTale Souls in giving gifts of story.

If you’re want an easy-to-follow guide to Give the Gift of Story for yourself or to help someone else learn to write memoir, click  The Story Woman BOOKS  on this website or go to Book Passage.

I posted a Speed-Dating event sponsored by Women’s National Book Association a couple weeks ago, so thought I should let you know how it went last Saturday. FYI: I’m the president of WNBA-SF and was the chair for this event, so now I’m bragging, but I can’t help it. I’m feeling an elated exhaustion.

I think it’s important, too, to celebrate our successes, just like I ask you to celebrate your success after writing your “Mother Memoir.” Mother’s Day is coming up soon, so think about writing just a short, true bio-vignette. More about that later. Read below to catch the drift of a great event for writers of all shapes and sizes.

Need I say more?

Wow! One of my favorite member-benefit affairs made a huge splash last Saturday with dozens of people Speed-Dating on San Francisco Bay. The large number of members who took part in our Meet-the-Agents event had the time of their lives, as did a slew of other Bay Area literati. Everyone enjoyed an enthusiastic, productive time as the anxious writers presented their work to the agents, and the agents in turn gave back valuable tips and insights to the writers/would-be-authors in their inimitable way.

 Several agents said they were impressed with the quality of work presented to them and asked many of our classy writers to send them their proposals – you just know these writers have to be thrilled! And I am delighted for them. The glowing participant evaluations will be posted on our site soon along with pictures of the group from various angles of intent. 

Mark your calendars for Saturday, March 26th, 2011!

LINKS:     The agents I can identify on the right hand side of the picture above are:

Brooke Warner (Seal Press/Perseus Books)

Amberly Finarelli (Andrea Hurst Agency)

Alan Rinzler (Josse-Bass/Wiley & Sons)

Georgia Hughes (New World Library).

For the complete list of the 14 agents who participated in the MTA event, visit Women’s National Book Association – San Francisco.

Do you ever feel like you are just a character in your own life? Going through the motions of day-to-day living, but forever going back to certain memories from long ago that just won’t let you be? You’re not alone.

Frequent, reoccurring memories present themselves to all of us from time to time. Do they pester you for a reason? Plague you nonstop? Pluck at your heartstrings? Do you whisk them away like a pest because they make your heart beat faster, bring a smile up from deep inside that you won’t take the time to savor, or do you fear remembering times you’d rather forget? Maybe you actually think you’re too busy to honor, respect, or try to understand the importance of your past by revisiting your memories. Do it with a purpose. History does repeat itself, if only in memory.

Take the time now to discover what these persistent memories are there to tell you – they are vying for your attention. They are brimming with intention. Ask yourself, if not now, then when will I do justice to my memories? Begin your journey by looking a memory or two full in the face. Then pick just one compelling memory and write a bio-vignette.

What will fall into place when you write memoir? Only you can answer that question, and the best way to do it is by looking at each recurring memory carefully and setting pen to paper. There is much to discover by paying attention to what you find deep inside. You will find that your new role will free you live a life more fully yours.

It is an exciting experience to take steps along the memoir labyrinth where you will immerse yourself in the imagery that awaits, and with intuition as your guide you will have a better understanding of who you are.

BECOME A TELLTALE SOUL – WRITE A SHORT, TRUE MEMOIR TO SET YOURSELF FREE.