While browsing in the Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street, I encountered this recent book about Brooklyn writers. The author, Evan Hughes, landed not one but two book reviews in The New York Times, one by Dwight Garner and another by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Both are worth reading. And the book, if you live in Brooklyn or plan to make a pilgrimage here, is worth buying.

If you don’t have time to read the book, read this essay by Colson Whitehead: “I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It,” the best short piece about Brooklyn I’ve ever read. It’s real subject is writing, not place.

Inspired by learning about my new environment, I have tried to open my eyes and my heart to the very land above which I am perched as I write these words–in this high-rise condo building. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to be talking about land when you are sitting twelve stories above it!

I can imagine the land first of all before European settlement. Wooded, grassy, swampy, planted in maize. The various branches of the Canarsie Indian tribe left few signs of themselves as they were pushed by settlers east into Long Island or west into what is now New Jersey. I learned a smattering of facts about these first dwellers in the land by reading broken land: Poems of Brooklyn, edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell, and I look forward to hearing the editors of this book speak in person next Saturday at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

With only ten months to live in Brooklyn (and three of them already behind me), I feel the hot breath of time on my neck, and I realize how little one can learn about a place as complex and rich as Brooklyn in so short a span. However, I am nothing if not adventurous, and when it comes to the combination of literature, history, and place, I’m all in. (My children still roll their eyes at the thought of all the author places I dragged them to over the years. They express no regret at not being able to join me in my current visits and flights of imagination.)

Brooklyn today is a living literary reality. Not only is it filled with authors, bloggers, agents, publishers, and readers (thriving independent bookstores being one of the signs), but under this current hip scene, lie layers of literary history as deep as the bones in the Martyr’s Monument just a few blocks from here on the pinnacle of Ft. Greene Park.

In fact, if you had been a city mouse in 1937, and trotted into the park at this entrance across from Washington Park and Willoughby, you might have bumped into Richard Wright as he entered here:

Brownstones on Washington Park St. across from Ft. Greene Park

All of the buildings around the park would have stories to tell. Some of them housed writers who would become very famous. The Hughes book, Literary Brooklyn, contains several maps of multiple places where a dozen or more well-known authors lived from the time of Whitman to the mid twentieth century.

While Wright sat on a bench near the Martyr Monument (there’s a small sign indicating which bench now in the park), he could have been writing what would become Native Son in longhand while poet Marianne Moore was playing tennis in the courts just a few hundred feet away. That thought delights me.

But the granddaddy of all inspirations in Brooklyn has to be Walt Whitman. The Hughes book starts with an excellent chapter on Whitman, and the Kasdorf/Tyrell anthology begins with Whitman also.

A Ft. Greene Park ranger today pointed to the place where Walt supposedly sat as he composed Leaves of Grass–and looked across the East River to Manhattan. The ferry offered the poet a jumping off point for a great poem, the one we know as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or “Sun-down Poem.” This poem has come alive for me in a way it never could as I read it as a college student in Virginia or even a professor in Texas and Indiana, even though I loved it then also.

The hill in the park 108 feet above sea level--Whitman's hill.

What changes when one begins to know a place might be described as empathic imagination. Sometimes that imagination is all on the part of the reader — who, for example, visits the places where great works were written and where great poets bestrode the world like a colossus. There the reader senses one truth–the poet was like me. Whitman knows this and he catalogs all the ways it is true: “I too saw the reflection of the summer-sky in the water, . . .I too . . . I too . . . .”

But Whitman is the prince of empathic imagination–from the writer’s perspective. “I considered long and seriously of you before you were born.” He has seen me, little country girl Shirley Hershey come to the big city at last as a grandma. And he has seen this vast city of Jews and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, blacks, browns, whites, Buddhists, Hindus, protestors, magnates, people from all parts of the earth and all stages of life living together, striving: “The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun -set.”

Whitman’s power as a poet derives from using the reality of the present moment — the December sea gulls high in the air, for example — not as the only reality but as a connecting hub to both past and future. He can see what others see but recognizes that the sensory perceptions of the present moment are not enough — he must break through the boundaries of time: “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.”

As I write my memoir, casting my eyes to the past, I have no desire to go back. What I am learning from the ghosts of Whitman, Wright, and Moore and all others who lived just blocks away from this present location, is to think of the centuries ahead and of the others who will come to all the places so dear to me now. And once again I think of Wordsworth: “they will love what we have loved/and we will teach them how.”

Today, I sat on a bench across from an amazing piece of public art on the Fulton Mall called “Before I Die” which I first photographed three days ago. I watched as a young father pushing a stroller, picked up a piece of chalk and finished the sentence “Before I die–I want to hold my son’s child.” Whitman knew that about him and about his son and about his son and his daughter and her daughter after him.

I know most of my readers are not Brooklynites, but I hope you have found a connection to the ideas of this post. I’ve been thinking of you before you were born . Do you think beyond the present time as you write? Do you visit writer’s places? How has a particular place inspired you?

Sometimes a memoir knocks you over even before you read all of it. Such is the case with John Lithgow’s Drama: An Actor’s Education. I’ve read about it, listened to the author, and read a chapter of it at the Diane Rehm Show website.

Lithgow, who lives in New York, has made the rounds of the talk shows and could sell the book just with his charming personality.

The reason I want to read it, however, is that I already admire two things about the man which make the life one I want to know more about:

1. His love of language and literature has deep roots and great nurture. He knows Shakespeare and the great poets in his bones.

2. He had a happy childhood.

I first encountered the man behind the actor by watching this fantastic interview on Bill Moyers Journal:

As I write my third chapter of my own childhood memoir, Mr. Lithgow has given me an idea. Stay tuned. . . 

Barbara Ann Hess, photo attached to her 1941-43 Diary

Anne Frank. Read about her here: http://www.annefrank.org/

 Thank you, readers, for letting me know you’d like to see side-by-side journal entries of the two girls pictured on the left.

Today I want to be three people: (1) an American Studies scholar who functions as a detective, reading the diaries of these girls with perspicacity, illuminating both character and culture, (2) a memoirist drafting chapter two of her manuscript and, (3) a grandma who wants to be there when her grandson wakes up from his nap.

Naturally, being Grandma wins the race, but let’s see if I can give you a taste of  the scholar, albeit an imperfect one.

Having spent the morning reviewing the overlapping sections of the two diaries, I can report that there are six days in which the two girls begin their diaries in the same way–day of the week, date, year. Anne sat in a cramped Secret Annex in Amsterdam, and Barbara Ann found a nook in her spacious, open farmhouse on the Fruitville Pike near Lancaster, PA.

One could write a dissertation on two primary sources as vivid as these. There are gender, race, religion, cultural, and class issues to dissect. One is written in a voice that will be iconic and forever young. The other voice belongs to the girl who would become my mother, an 84-year-old woman who looks back on these passionate declarations of her teenage self with a mixture of bemusement, admiration, and disbelief.

Each girl wrote 40 or more entries during the overlap period, usually once or twice a week. Anne’s were usually longer. I have selected Saturday, February 27, 1943, as the day for comparison. Imagine you are watching a movie with a split screen, one in Amsterdam, the other in Pennsylvania. And you are listening to the pure, clear voices of two young girls. First, Anne:

Dearest Kitty, [an imagined name she uses for her diary]

     Pim [Father] is expecting the invasion any day now. Churchill has had pneumonia, but is gradually getting better. Gandhi, the champion of Indian freedom, is on one of his umpteenth hunger strikes.

     Mrs. van D. [one of the eight people hiding in the annex] claims she’s fatalistic. But who’s the most afraid when the guns go off? None other than Petronella van Daan.

     Jan brought along the episcopal letter that the bishops addressed to their parishioners. It was beautiful and inspiring. “People of the Netherlands, stand up and take action. Each of us must choose our own wepons to fight for the freedom of our country, our people and our religion! Give your help and support. Act now!” That is what they’re preaching from the pulpit. Will it do any good? It’s definitely too late to help our fellow Jews.

     Guess what’s happened to us now? The owner of the building sold it without informing Mr. Kugler and Mr. Kleiman. One morning the new landlord arrived with an architect to the look the place over. Thank goodness Mr. Kleiman was in the offic. He showed the gentlemen all there was to see, with the exception of the Secret Annex. He claimed he’d left the key at home and the new owner asked no further questions. If only he doesn’t come back demanding to see the Annex. In that case, we’ll be in big trouble!

     Father emptied a card file for Margot and me and filled it with index cards that are blank on one side. ‘This is to become our reading file, in which Margot and I are supposed to note down the books we’ve read, the author and the date. I’ve learned two new words: “brothel” and “coquette.” I’ve bought a separate notebook for new words.

     There’s a new division of butter and margarine. Each person is to get their portion on their own plate. The distribution is very unfair. The van Daans, who always make breakfast for everyone, give themselves one and a half times more than they do us. My parents are much too afraid of an argument to say anything, which is a shame, because I think people like that should always be given a taste of their own medicine.

Yours,

Anne

From Barbara Ann Hess:

February 27, 1943 (Saturday)

This is my sixteenth birthday and the closing entry in my diary. This day has been a red letter day for me. I received 7 cards through the mail from Ethyl Rote, Marty Rote, Esther Landis, John and Mrs. Rote, Ella and Martin Lefever, Florence Lefever, Irene Brenneman.

Bob and Anna sent me some pictures of the wedding and also a dozen name cards plus one of their own. It was certainly very nice of them and I appreciate it a lot. John Henry and Betty came and brought me a card too.

Yesterday afternoon I rode over to Esther Groff’s and left my bike there and got the Manheim bus and went into town. It was snowing fast. Mother and I went to Adler’s and bought me a blue plaid coat suit, 3 dickeys, white, egg-shell and brown and a blue straw hat with a black veil for my birthday and Easter present. It just fits me and its beautiful!! I didn’t think we’d get it until Tuesday because it had to be shortened. But Christian and Dotty went into town this morning and went in and it was done. Was I surprised when they brought it in!

This morning Christ and Dot cornered me and pulled my ears. That was fun.

////

John Henry is in 1-A (meaning that he has to go very soon unless we can get him deferred.) If he has to go Betty will come here. It certainly is awful. Betty pregnant – and she cries and cries and cries (because of Johnny) and she’s all alone except for us. Lloyd hasn’t been classified yet.

//

It used to be not so very long ago that when you were my age you looked forward to fun, dates, popularity etc.  You made plans for your future. It certainly has changed. The youth of today have only a very clouded future ahead to look forward to. The future is definitely – BLACK! with no silver lining. And I am one of that number. I am one of the youthful American citizens. But as youth has always been and probably always shall, we are still hopeful. We still dream and think and hope. Although it is a very dark outlook at present who knows how soon the clouds may be lifted away. – (the end.)

So there you have it. One day in the life of two girls during wartime. Neither entry is totally indicative of the whole of the journals. The exclamatory ending of Barbara Ann’s February 27th entry derives, I’m guessing, from the need to say something final as she squeezes out the last of her stenographer’s notebook space.

Overall, both girls write about boys and dreams and a little about their bodies. Both write about the war. Anne naturally lives on war news. Barbara Ann has more luxury of choosing when, where, and how to think about war. Yet she does view it as a dark cloud ruining her youth and stealing the lives of the innocent. Both young writers are capable of poetic passages of description and philosophic musings not illustrated on this particular day.

What did YOU notice as you read the two entries. Since little Owen will soon be awake, I have to depend on you to be the scholars!

Anne Frank, writing, from this website: http://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-franks-history/a-diary-as-a-best-friend/at-last-seriously-taken-as-a-writer/

Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank, (1929-1945) the young Jewish girl who kept a diary while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from her thirteenth birthday (June 12, 1942) until August 4, 1944, shortly after her 15th birthday, when she and her family were betrayed, discovered, and sent to concentration camps. Anne Frank died of a typhus epidemic that spread through Bergen-Belsen.  The camp was liberated April 12, 1945. If she had lived until her 16th birthday, she might still be living today. The Anne Frank Museum, created at the Frank family’s war-time hiding  location in Amsterdam, has an award-winning website in which you can visit the annex where Anne lived and learn much more about her life and times.

My own mother, Barbara Ann Hess Hershey Becker, was born February 27, 1927, on a farm near Lancaster, PA. She is living today! She too kept a diary during WWII. Though she was two years older than Anne Frank, her teenage diary overlaps with Anne’s because it was begun when Mother was “14 years, 3 months, 13 days” old. It ends on her sixteenth birthday, the birthday Anne never reached.

As I read the two journals, Anne’s and Barbara Ann’s, together, several amazing coincidences jump out at me. First, both diarists begin their journals on the same day–June 12–just one year apart. Anne starts her diary in 1942 Barbara Ann in 1941.

Between June 12, 1942 (when Anne begins) and Feb. 27, 1943 (when Barbara Ann’s diary ends) there are 47 entries in Anne’s diary. Some of these entries are written on the same day!

But two significant differences stand out (in addition to the slight difference in age). One is obvious–Anne is a Jew living during the Holocaust. Mother is living safely in the arms of her Mennonite family in America, but she nevertheless experiences fear about the war.

Another is less obvious. Anne hopes to reach the rest of the world with her journal. Barbara Ann warns any potential readers that her diary is her “personal property and private journal” (see warning on the cover below).

Anne Frank, sometime in 1944, hears an underground broadcast from London saying that letters and diaries will be collected and possibly published after the war. She goes back, amends her private journal and begins new entries with the intent of contributing them to the cause described on the radio. She therefore finds in her diary more than ordinary teenage solace for angst; she is also trying on the vocation of writer. Writing keeps her spirit alive.

Today it’s time for my weekly call to my mother. Her voice will seem even more precious to me after studying these two journals.

If she gives me permission to quote from her “personal property and private journal,” would you like to read some excerpts here? Would you like to see them side-by-side with Anne’s?

My daddy offers me support before walking, 1949,

From Wordsworth I am reminded that the joy I knew as a child, before I developed this shell around me I call my “self,” still exists. None of us, except possibly Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir Speak, Memory, remembers our infancy. Whatever happens in our brains to bring us consciousness seems to erase most, if not all, memories of life in the first two-three years. Try as I may, I can dredge nothing from my early childhood until the birth of my brother when I was nearly three years old.

But fortunately I have my own teacher. His name is Owen, he’s my grandson, and he’s four months old. By holding Owen in my arms, feeling his supple openness to the world, placing my eyes next to his eyes, my ears next to his ears, my heart next to his heart, I can feel the “clouds of glory” that are still “trailing” him. I can feel the heaven that lies about him.

Writer Kathleen Norris, whose book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography was among the first to inspire me to want to write about the land that formed me, has experienced a similar connection to a child: “I recently spent some time with an infant who is four months old, and I would say that her work is learning the world. She approaches this daily task with a focus and cheer that I find inspiring. The ability to focus, to be still and listen, is a gift we may receive as infants, but have to learn all over again as adults who are easily distracted. Yet the gift of attention is one we need if we are to write works that are meaningful to others.” You can read her full essay here.

Grandson Owen before proprioception. Moving with the whole universe in the eternal Now.

Babies lack a sense of separation from the rest of the world. They don’t even “know” they have body parts. They soak up sense information but have to be taught that they have eyes, ears, nose, throat, mouth, hands, and feet. Awareness of the mouth and the sucking function comes first.

But hands and fingers? Some of the early music classes for babies name the parts while touching them. The teachers talk about proprioception–awareness of the body in space. As one sings to a baby, one’s own hand becomes more magical, as in this 20-second video.

My teacher Owen as I try to acquire a "philosophic mind."

Again from Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality Ode:

Noble laureate Doris Lessing wrote her last book, Alfred and Emily, reviewed in The New York Times here, at age 88. She’s now 91 years old.

Apparently she’s been working out the meaning of her parents’ tragic lives all her life. Her father lost a leg in the trenches during World War I. Her mother was a nurse. They tried to find wealth and a refuge from the ghosts of war in Persia and Rhodesia. But they instead became frustrated and bitter. Lessing’s last book, a combination novella and memoir, tries to give them an alternative world without war in which they might have been happier.

I wonder if all of us do this to some extent. We seek the missing leg, we want to restore the wounded hearts. We want to find the missing piece and fill in the hole. If we can do it for our parents, maybe we can do it for ourselves.

Even when we are 88 years old.

Perhaps you can tell that I am about to take my draft materials and photos and sit in the park, ruminating about the lives of my parents. To what extent, and in how many ways, are our lives shaped by our parents, do you think?

Brian Paff, Director of Communications, Laurelville

Brian Paff, a very creative young leader-in-the-making at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, interviewed me for his podcast series at the Laurelville website.

Brian wrote a press release about the series of three speeches I gave at Laurelville April 30-May 1. The theme was dancing with change, and Brian took a picture of Stuart and me demonstrating the function of the “frame” in learning to dance.

Here is the direct link to listen to the 15-minute Podcast Q and A. Hope you will find something I said useful–or at least interesting. Subscribers to this blog, I hope you will enjoy this new way to add “voice” to a blog and give me some feedback. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do simply by adding your email address on the right side of this screen.

Everyone: What have YOU learned about dancing with change? What did you learn as a child that has held you in good stead as an adult? As I hold grandson Owen in my arms, and dance to his happy songs, one of my prayers for him is that he learns to dance with change. Have you learned anything about change and/or leadership from the children in your life?

Gramps and Granny Nanny, and Owen

In a few days, Stuart and I will move a second time in less than seven months! Our journey has taken us from the Midwest to the South to the Northeast. By the end of this week, we will be living in a Brooklyn highrise. And by August 1, we will be sharing a new job–daytime caregivers for four-month-old Owen William. We plan to stay for ten months.

We will be describing our adventures in a new blog called Granny Nanny Diaries. More about that when we start blogging from Brooklyn, but you can find the two first posts in the link above.

In the meantime, 100memoirs will continue to roll out regularly, just like we will– when the alarm goes off for our new job of taking care of Owen. We feel excited, and a little nervous, to be making yet another dramatic change.

But when we were courting (don’t you love that old-fashioned word?), we chose the Conestoga Wagon as an image for our marriage. We wanted to be pioneers, together. So hitch up the horses, Stuart, here we go again!

Are you a “granny nanny” or “grampy nanny”? Do you know others who are? What wisdom can you share with us? We invite your prayers for our safety (and Owen’s safety), for lots of energy and a spirit of curious joy, and for the daily strength to pay attention to the most important things.

Hershey family, circa 1966. L-R: Doris, Sue, me, Henry, Linda, Daddy, Mother.

Since television was not allowed in my Mennonite home when I was growing up, magazines, newspapers, and radio were an important link to the outside world.

The magazines I read from cover to cover included The Saturday Evening Post, Boy’s Life, and Life. But these were special treats not always available. Usually, they followed some magazine drive that were standard fundraisers at school.

We always had Farm Journal, Hoard’s Dairyman, The Gospel Herald and Christian Living, which I read only when desperate.

However, we had one tried-and-true, omni-present consumer magazine friend. Can you guess which one?

Of course, it was The Reader’s Digest. I gobbled up a new copy as soon as I found it in the mailbox, and the old copies found their way to the single bathroom our family of seven shared.

“Humor in Uniform” and “Real Life Drama” were some of my favorite sections, taking me into places far outside my small, Mennonite world. I sometimes did the “Word Power” puzzles and loved to find witty quotations I could try out with my friends. In some ways, the magazine predicted the future of mass media. It valued the pithy, poignant, sound bite before that word was coined and before USA Today and Twitter carried those values to their logical conclusions.

So, when I found this essay about memoir from the online version of Reader’s Digest, I was led to a little reverie about the past, not only of my own early reading habits but of the cultural role played by this magazine. If a little Mennonite girl found a window to the world here, imagine how many other Americans did also? The stories reflected the conservative values of the founders, Lila Bell and Dewitt Wallace, but they refrained from political endorsement and had none of the shrill ideological language of today’s media.

The magazine was, and is, filled with memoir–real people’s stories with names of the authors attached. I used to pore over the page that described how anybody could become an “author” in one of the many special sections devoted to real life humor and drama. Again, the popularity of these mini-memoirs may have forecast today’s reality television and enlarged memoir section in libraries and bookstores.

The article below, from a recent issue of Reader’s Digest online, does a great job of describing some critical memoir issues, especially psychological ones, and includes quotes from Jeannette Walls and other famous memoirists. So I guess you can say that even today Reader’s Digest is enlarging my world.

You won’t be able to read the article in the bathroom, however, unless you print it out or view this post on a smart phone. Ah, the benefits of print media.

How to Write Your Memoir

By Joe Kita January 2009

CLIPART.COM

Jeannette Walls had a hardscrabble youth. Nomadic, poor, often hungry, she grew up in the desert Southwest and the mountains of West Virginia. She eventually escaped her poverty and moved to New York City, where she became a successful gossip columnist. Her parents moved there too. Only, they soon found themselves homeless. One night on her way to a party, dressed in designer clothes, she saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. She lowered her head and asked the cabbie to take her home. My, how people would gossip if that were known.

“I was terrified,” says Walls. “I had this great life, a husband who loved me, a great job, a house with flush toilets, yet I felt like a fraud. I had a compulsion to write about this embarrassing stuff even though I knew I was risking everything.”

Walls made false starts on her memoir four times over 20 years, on each occasion growing so frustrated and fearful that she threw out the entire manuscript. Finally, when she was 44, The Glass Castle was published. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for almost three years, has sold more than two million copies, has been translated into 23 languages, and will soon be a movie.

“One of the lessons I’ve learned from writing this memoir is how much we all have in common,” says Walls. “So many of us think that certain things only happened to us and somehow they make us less of a person. I’m constantly urging people, especially older folks, to write about their lives. It gives you new perspective. It was hugely eye-opening for me and very cathartic. Even if the book hadn’t sold a single copy, it would still have been worth it.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Do you have any Reader’s Digest memories from childhood?  Please share!

Dora Dueck, author of This Hidden Thing

This week one of my own favorite bloggers, prize-winning Canadian novelist Dora Dueck, interviewed me on her blog about an issue central to my reason for starting this blog: to learn to write by reading better writers than myself. You will want to click the link above and explore her thoughtful blogs, but in the meantime, here is what I told her earlier this week:

From Borrowing Bones blog.

Shirley H. Showalter

A talented and determined young writer I know (Angeline Schellenberg) commented on my previous post and in the process raised with some good questions on the relationship between reading and writing. While thinking about this, it occurred to me that I must ask Shirley Hershey Showalter, whose blog 100 Memoirs  I read regularly, for her thoughts on the subject. Shirley — “a farmer’s daughter turned college professor, then college president, later foundation executive” — is writing a memoir about growing up Mennonite in America (1948 to 1966) and she’s going about the learning/reading side of it very deliberately.

Today, between a visit with a friend and picking her green beans, Shirley graciously sent me her answers to three questions.

1. You set out to read 100 memoirs, with the intention to write one yourself. What are you looking for?

2. How does the experience of reading affect your own project?

I am just now starting on what I call the long arc, or a full childhood memoir of 40,000-60,000 words, having published five short memoir essays of 2,000-5,000 words that received modest praise. ( I am easily encouraged.  )

3. Do you find, as A.S. noted, that reading other examples of what you’re doing can be reactionary rather than generative, and that it makes it harder to hear one’s own voice? What advice do you have to make the experience generative, to keep your own voice?

Harold Bloom has written about the anxiety of authorship here summarized, and Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar responded. I personally prefer Willa Cather’s imagistic explanation better than all these post-Freudian theories. A woman writer stands in the stream of literary history, but lets it fall away to reveal the purer self that sings naturally in her own body, in her own voice.

Thank you Shirley! You’ve given us some wonderful wisdom here (and some provocative links), for writers, yes, but for practitioners of anything really, from preaching to parenting, all who must absorb the influence of others while honing their unique approach. I’m very much looking forward to the song you’ll sing in your memoir!

Thanks, Dora. And now readers, here’s your turn. Can you give one example from simply reading another book that has made a difference in either your writing or your life??