What a Difference a Day Makes - Some Thoughts on Memoir

This summer I am teaching another in a series of memoir workshops. My approach in this class is somewhat different from previous classes. Instead of offering a number of writing prompts and approaches for initiating the story lines, I asked the participants to determine a thread or theme for the entire 6 weeks, creating the goal of a completed piece or series, declaring the outcome of success and achievement from the start.

In reading memoir in the last few years, I keep encountering the profile of the privileged woman with a loyal and committed husband, a successful career (often as a freelance writer), even a great cat or dog, and a malaise that can only be satisfied by taking a year off in some exotic land or ritualistic endeavor. Of course, there is likely the complaint of a decrease in discretionary funding but it will all work out because these women also have book deals.

Another model for a successful memoir is often the pot-boiler tell-all that shares the sordid and painful details of a troubled life, the horrid things that an individual has endured and every skeleton uncloseted for the shock value and loads of book sales, especially if the author is famous or the child of someone famous.

Then there are the exceptions to these two examples, the well-written, touching, and authentic sharing of one's personal story. Anne Lamott is a prime example; Patti Smith, Stephanie Hubbard, Kathleen Norris all meet that mark as well.

Everyone's story is important. We are losing the stories of previous generations, the ties to our families, our heritage, history itself. Start your story. Start it simply...what was the first day of school like, your first job, your first date, how did you learn to cook, describe the bathroom of the home you grew up in. Dedicate a file folder on your computer. Purchase a spiral notebook or a blank journal. Don't worry about whether or not you are a "good writer." Write the way you would tell a friend. Just start...

Fate, Discovery, & Sunday a.m. Television

I woke to a gray, heavy July Sunday morning, thick as flour, damp to the nose, quiet. I am reading Patti Smith's tender memoir, Just Kids, and I waited to make coffee for at least an hour. Then I infused the moist air with the incense of coffee perking, the syncopation.

Next, I immersed in my weekly ritual, "CBS Sunday Morning." That program always airs something that makes me wonder, something that makes me more aware, and always an amusement, along with a thoughtful meditation on humor.

Afterwards, I stumbled on "Kool: Dancing in My Mind" on Sundance. Choreographer and director Robert Wilson documented his journey to find his collaborator from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Japanese dancer Suzushi Hanayagi, with whom he had lost touch.

His dear friend, a dancer, an artist equally gifted in both Japanese traditional dance and the most avante garde modern, was in a facility in Japan for elders with Alzheimer's. Graciously and gracefully, the 30-minute documentary illustrates the essence of their art as dancers and philosophers, and how they collaborated to make dances. The reunion and its implications were poignant. The dance expansive and impeccable.

I adore any book or video that illustrates the creative process, no matter the artistic discipline or medium. In this film, it was Robert Wilson's articulation of making a dance, making a piece that caught my ear. Dancers make a piece; poets write one. The context for me is one of active involvement somehow. Making a poem opens the potential for the work to guide us more than writing a poem seems to imply to me; it expands the promise, the vow of discovery.

At the beginning of the film, Mr. Wilson avers, "The most important thing, as an artist, is not to say what something is; because, if we know what it is we're doing, there's no reason to do it. The reason to work is to say What is it?"

Anyone can be safe in making art. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe danced that difference between each other and within themselves, I am learning. Safe is okay for some but seems somehow mundane to me, at this point. Writing a poem seems safe. Making a poem must somehow involve taking a risk, refusing complacency.

The making of a poem is about process. The writing of a poem is a concern rooted in product. Again, I am prompted to my repeated question of myself and to my students, "What's the rush?" The act of making a poem is the glorious mystery of what it will achieve, given its own journey, what it make aspire to express. In making a poem, the poem is the driver, the poet holds the map and navigates. Our fingers dance what the poem asks of us, leaving a notation of that choreography on the page.

The Symphony of Summer Rain

It is the second day of summer; at 5:30 this morning, a spectacular thunderstorm marched through Central New York, depositing more rain than the remainder of June has afforded us. I woke to open the blinds and watch the lightning and sheets of water from my bed, then fell asleep to the rhythm of the rain once the excitement died down.

Now I am moving slower than a slug, and I have resisted any sound but the raindrops. Periodically, the clouds let loose with curtains of rain falling straight down, soaking the soil and the roots of all the lilies, hostas, bee balm, and other perennials waiting to do their dance. 

I am being intentional in my slow pace as well. I read 30 pages of Patti Smith's "Just Kids" while nursing a tumbler of iced coffee. Once in awhile, just enough breeze jostled the wind chimes into performance. Now I am upstairs in my office that resembles the inside of my brain...an informed chaos.

This is the beginning of my summer. I have no book deadlines to meet this year. I hope to attend to my poems and the stack of memoirs I want to read. I need to weed and reorder the gardens front and back. And I am teaching a couple of workshops that will be most fulfilling. I hope that work centered on "Our Difficult Sunlight" presents itself soon and that all stabilizes for my bank account. 

But this morning, I am being slow and conscious of the blessing of rain.