Last spring, I posted Getting Through  announcing the completion of a new memoir manuscript. I haven't touched that manuscript in four months. Instead, I have taken a lovely, long break filled with all the things that matter most to me: baking brownies with my grandson, road-tripping with special people, re-experiencing the joys of (ultra-light) backpacking, and coming to terms with e-assist cycling. In other words, it has been a summer to reset a life and psyche deeply affected by the fear and unrest of COVID and the Trump years. 
I'm not saying the reset is complete or the fears for our collective future are gone. I'm also not saying that during this long break I have stopped thinking about memoir or memory. To the contrary. My manuscript (and what it needs) has settled comfortably into the back of my mind as a nagging voice demanding I dig deeper and do the research needed to make the work complete. 

As autumn closes in with gray skies and longer nights, I will return to my work-in-progress, Pandemic Baby - Letters to My Grandson Before He Could Read. In the meantime, I'm preparing a memoir workshop I will be leading early next month. I hoped to reference a piece I posted in June 2017 titled Memoir & Why I Do It only to discover that the link to the complete essay no longer functions. To remedy that issue, I've reposted the essay below. 

As to the workshop, the title remains the same as that of prior workshops I've offered, but it has been expanded to a three-hour format. Thanks to our wonderful system of public libraries, it is FREE. If you're in the Pacific Northwest and have a story you're eager to get on paper, I hope you'll join us.

Writing Memoir - What? Why? How?
Mill Creek Library15429 Bothell Everett Hwy, Mill Creek, WA425-337-4822, sno-isle.orgSaturday, October 7, 20231:00 - 4:00 p.m.

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Memoir & Why I Do It

A fewweeks ago, I was driving home to Seattle from eastern Washington with mysisters. I sat in the back seat. As we drove over Snoqualmie Pass and startedthe descent into the Puget Sound lowlands, I noticed two police vehicles parkedin an open area, perhaps a weigh station parking lot, to the north of thehighway. One was an SUV, the other a sedan. Both were black. They were parkedhead-to-head with the drivers’ windows aligned. The SUV was on the highwayside, almost blocking the view of the sedan.

 

“Lookslike that’s where the cops take a break,” I said.

 

“Butthere’s no donut shop around,” said my sister, the one riding shotgun.

 

We laughedand thought nothing more of it. Fiveminutes down the road, a police SUV passed on our left. A moment later they’dpulled someone over.

 

“Where’dthat guy come from?” I wondered.

 

“Same onewe just saw,” my sister said.

 

“No way. Theparked cars were black. That one’s white.”

 

“No,” mysister said. “It’s the same white SUV.”

So whathappened? The paint color of the cop cars obviously hadn’t changed, so one ofus had to be wrong. Was it her or me? Was the white SUV the same vehicle we’dseen parked or another? Was it possible that when we joked about donuts, mysister and I were actually looking at different cars?

If I werewriting a memoir that included this scene, I’d write them as differentvehicles. The two parked cars were black. The SUV that passed us was white.That’s what I saw and that’s what I remember. I also know my sister would tellme I was wrong. And maybe she’d be right.

I couldcontact the Washington State Patrol to find out what vehicles were patrollingthe I-90 corridor that Saturday at that precise place and time. But for amemoirist the actual color of the SUV is not of primary concern unless it is anessential element of the story. Memoir is not the reporting of researched,measurable facts. It is the sharing of perception and personal memory.

 

I writememoir not only to remember people, places and events in my life, but also tomake sense of those events, as well as the decisions I made and paths I took. Ialso write memoir because memory, how the human brain remembers or doesn’tremember, intrigues me.

 

I believememoir—whether poetry, short essay or book-length work—is the most challengingform of creative nonfiction because while memoir allows us the freedom torevisit our past, it demands we dig deep with brutal honesty to make sense oflife lived, choices made, and the consequences of those choices. If a writer isable, if I am able to write that deep personal truth, pain subsides, joydeepens and life goes on, richer and fuller than ever before. This is myexperience writing memoir.

 

As a memoirist,I write my own memories, my personal version of events I struggle tounderstand. All the while I am aware that the simple act of recalling andtranscribing memory, the act of turning memory into story and hopefully intoart, alters the memory. 

Memory isa sneaky devil, a slippery thing. As soon as I come close to what I believe tobe an honest truth, shape-shifting is a risk. Especially when excavatingmemories from years past. The person remembering is not the same as the personwho lived the experience. The me today—the rememberer, if you will—is not thesame me as the young woman living in Mexico City, or the ex-pat moved back toSeattle after the disappearance of her youngest sister, or even the middle-ageddaughter caring for her aging mother. The me changes, and as it changes so toodoes the way I perceive past events. The act of remembering alters thememories.         

I am notthe same woman or the same writer today as I was in 2002 when I began The Thirty-Ninth Victim. If I were towrite that story today with the life experience, knowledge and understanding I nowpossess, I have no doubt it would be a different book from the one I wrotefifteen years ago. My perspective has changed. But that in no way invalidatesthe memories recalled or the story told back in 2002 when I began writing or in2008 when the book was published.

Here’sanother way to think about memory. There’s plenty of evidence about eyewitnessesto the same crime reporting extremely different versions of what they saw, justas my sister and I saw different colored police vehicles. Witnesses have alsochanged testimony over time. Were they wrong? Did time and distance, lifeexperience and perspective, change the way they saw the event?

Truth, likethe perception of beauty, is individual. Imagine you are in a crowded bookshopreading. Look around you. If you were to describe the event, you might includefurniture or wall color, the aroma of rich coffee, the sounds of voices andmusic. You might add an emotional layer. How are you feeling? How was your day?What is causing you fear, sadness, joy? That story of the event would be yourtruth. But what about if you were blind or deaf? Then your memory would bemarkedly different. What if you’d just had a fight with a loved one or justcelebrated a milestone? Would your telling of the reading be the same if you wereto write your memoir right now or later this evening, a week or month fromtonight, or ten years from today? Would the versions be the same if you wrotethe piece multiple times? If everyone in the room wrote a description, Iventure that they would be quite different. Sure, there’d be some consistentfacts—a middle-aged reader, a dozen people on an assortment of chairs, abarista in the back room—but the details each chose to include or omit wouldvary widely. If everyone wrote of the event ten years from today, the storieswould vary both from each other’s as well as from personal versions written onthe spot. Such is the truth of memoir.

Anotherchallenge the memoirist faces is that of shaping memory into story, ideallystory with universal appeal, story that readers can relate to, feel connectedwith, be inspired or entertained by. As WilliamZinsser explains in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir“A good memoir requires two elements—one of art, the other of craft. The firstis integrity of intention … Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are,who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. If a writer seriouslyembarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing alongmany associations with quests of their own.

The otherelement is carpentry. Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. We liketo think that an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. Itwon’t work … Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative orderon a jumble of half-remembered events. With that feat of manipulation theyarrive at a truth that is theirs alone, not quite like that of anybody else whowas present at the same events.”

Zinsseruses Henry David Thoreau to illustrate this. He reminds us that Thoreau did notsimply return to Concord and transcribe his notes. Walden took eight years and almost as many drafts to complete.

Memoir,like fiction, needs narrative structure: plot line, character development,beginning, middle and end.  Just as infiction writing, the writer must also consider genre. The Swenson BookDevelopment website (http://www.swensonbookdevelopment.com/blog/2013/the-many-subgenres-of-memoir/)lists sixteen “subgenres” of memoir including travel, humor and grief.  So a memoir must be crafted, but truth must beretained. The writer’s truth must be honored.

Why writememoir in the face of such challenge? Factual, perceptional and emotional truthare all aspects of personal truth, and all equally valid and essential to amemoirist. Yet finding and sharing personal truth and facing those who may notaccept my version, my personal truth, of shared events is not easy.

I writememoir because I’m fascinated by memory, by how the human brain processes andretains information as well as how it deals with extreme stress. I laid thegroundwork for memoir writing in my late teens when I began my first journal.But let’s not confuse memoir with journal or diary writing. Memoir writing isthe art and craft of taking a life event and creating a story in much the sameway as one writes a short story or novel, with the added challenge of creatinguniversal interest in what is essentially a personal experience.

I’vewritten two book-length memoirs and am working on a third. I’ve explored threedifferent aspects of my life, three areas to excavate pain, examine it from allsides, accept it, and then set it aside and move along in this short journey oflife. I’ve also taught college classes, given conference presentations, ledlibrary workshops on memoir writing, but still I feel like a fraud, like Idon’t really know what I’m talking about, like I’m snorkeling in murky water,blinded by the agitation around me. Such is the nature of memoir.

I wrote The Thirty-Ninth Victim to understand mysister’s murder and how our early family dynamics may have contributed to herdangerous missteps and flawed decisions.  I wrote a yet unpublished memoir I’m calling Moving Mom to try to make sense ofmotherhood, memory loss, and the consequences of writing memoir as I cared formy mother and witnessed her deepening dementia.  I’m currently working on a new story about theyears I spent as an undocumented ex-pat in the Mexico City of the early 1980s.

With thefirst memoir, I struggled with collective memory and family myth as well aswith the effects of emotion on how we choose to remember or to avoid memoriesof events we’d rather have never experienced. Just as perception affects memory, emotion and memory are also stronglylinked.

I’m from afamily of nine siblings. Just as witnesses to a crime report widely divergentversions of the same event, so too my siblings and I hold different memories ofour early years. World events and family circumstances changed. Kids grew intoteens. Parenting styles transformed through the years.

Thenthere’s memory loss due to the emotional blocking of memories too painful toendure or the altering of memories to create a more manageable personalreality. As I watched my mother slowly lose memory after my father’s death in 2002until her own death eleven years later in 2013, I couldn’t help but questionwhat brought on such a dramatic decline. The simple physiologicalexplanation—mini infract syndrome—felt inadequate. I believe my mother could nolonger handle the emotional overload of loss. Losing her youngest daughter tomurder had been traumatic enough, but now she’d lost the love of her life, herreason for living, her life partner of fifty-five years. With Dad gone, andonly a few years later his dog, Mom had no one to take care of, to keep alive.So she let go. But the remarkable thing was that in memory loss she became insome ways the happy carefree woman she must have once been, the woman I onlycaught a glimpse of at a point in her life when she no longer remembered myname, when she confused me with a favorite sister who always made her laugh. Acomparison I was happy to embrace.

Now as Iwork on The Ex-Mexican Wives Club,I’m reminded of a complaint I’ve heard echoed repeatedly throughout a lifetimeof teaching English as a Second Language. “Teacher, I cannot rememberanything,” my students tell me. The burden of learning a new language in aforeign culture layered over the trauma of immigration and day-to-day survivaljumbles the mind. I experienced the same frustration when I was learningSpanish, a feeling of such confusion that all memory, even the simplest To Dolist, slipped from grasp. Was this because the memory was stored in Spanish andI was trying to remember or visualize it in English?

In “Workingmemory: looking back and looking forward” published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (1 October 2003) http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v4/n10/execsumm/nrn1201.htmlAlan Baddeley wrote, “The concept of working memory proposes that a dedicatedsystem maintains and stores information in the short term, and that this systemunderlies human thought processes. Current views of working memory involve acentral executive and two storage systems: the phonological loop and thevisuospatial sketchpad.”

I imaginetwo storage systems, two file drawers or computer files, one full of sound, theother images, both in neat alphabetical order. When you learn a secondlanguage, do these drawers or files become a muddled mess? My minimal researchshows equally minimal research has been conducted to address that question.

My currentmemoir project focuses on a six-year period I experienced over thirty years ago,in a culture utterly different from that of my youth, at a time when I spokefluent Spanish. Is it linguistic and cultural differences that challenge myability to remember people and events? Perhaps trying to retrieve memories inEnglish creates a barrier to events experienced and remembered in Spanish.Perhaps returning to Mexico and relearning Spanish would allow greater accessto memory.

Or is itthat one moment, the moment I opened the letter from my mother telling me myyoungest sister had gone missing? Did that moment short-circuit my memory?That’s my husband’s theory. At first I laughed him off. But shock treatment wasonce used to block memory or deter behavior. Life experiences can do the same.That’s what PTSD does, block some memories and intensify others.

So I keepwriting. I have a treasure trove of letters, journals and photographs I am mining.I have contact with some, but not all, of the friends I once shared Mexicowith. I have the ease of modern day research at my fingertips. And I havetimed-writing practice. I set a timer, alone or in a group, plant my feet onthe ground and go deep in hopes of being surprised by the memories that emergeon the page.

With allthe challenges and pitfalls a memoirist faces, why publish? Why do I share mywork—either as blog posts, magazine pieces or as books? This is a questionevery memoirist must address, a difficult question, especially if the memoirexplores painful events involving others who may not want the story to be toldor who do not agree with your version of events. Given that few of us live in avacuum, it’s likely that our work will include characters in addition to thenarrator. How do we justify writing about others and why publish?

I walk a razor’s edge. I am from a very large first family that is not at all fond ofhaving a writer amongst them, particularly a memoirist. I understand theirposition, but that does not change who I am or what I do. When I write memoir, Iinclude others where their lives intersect with my own and are essential to thestory I’m writing. I do not tell their stories or pretend to know where theirtruths lie. I tell my own.

Ipublish because finding voice necessitates the bearing of witness to thatvoice. I began writing to understand, and I published my first memoir because Iunderstood that if I did not publish I was allowing others to censor my voice.Personal growth and strength came in learning from readers that my storytouched many lives in a variety of positive ways. I found voice, and I foundmyself, by seeking publication for that first memoir. I will continue to writeand publish memoir despite the challenges, and I hope you will do the same.