I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, which comes into my inbox first thing every morning.  I enjoy starting the day with a poem and some interesting facts about writers and writing.

The October 12 entry introduced me to Lester Dent, a writer I had never heard of before.  Here’s the text that caught my eye:

Scholars prefer particular research to universal generalizations such as Campbell makes, but no one has refuted the validity of the patterns he observed.

I have always enjoyed biography, autobiography, and the personal essay, but my study of memoir as a subject is only two years old.  It started when I saw a 2007 literary contest announcement in the local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette.  The three categories were poetry, short story and memoir. That choice was easy, since my favorite genre, the personal essay, is a form of memoir.

Entering contests was not at a new phenomenon for me either.  I identified with both the mother and her writer-daughter in the memoir, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio. My own mother loved contests and showed me how to send off for free things in the backs of magazines when I was growing up in the 1950′s.  Going to the mailbox was fun because a fat envelope might be lurking there.  I entered lots of contests and won more than my share of prizes–all with my mother’s encouragement, and sometimes, with her help.  A number of my most vivid memories focus on contests; my young imagination was fired by them.

My mother herself was a housewife “prizewinner”–someone who found scant opportunity to exercise her gifts of speaking, writing, acting, and making music as she laundered on Monday, ironed on Tuesday, cleaned on Wednesday, etc.  She loved reading stories and telling stories to her five children.  She even published a few feature articles and spoke in many churches.  She praised the stories and pictures we brought home from school.  In addition, she encouraged us to enter newspaper and magazine contests.  This eagerness to compete and to create has never left me.  The legacy it left in my life is a mixed one.  I have “won” many contests–4-H, the Bobst Award, admission to graduate school, grants, scholarships, various jobs, a presidential leadership award, etc.  However, it is hard to listen to the still, small voice of the spirit with the roar of the crowd in one’s head.  And it is easy to get attached to winning.  Like Sylvia Plath, I went into depression at one juncture of my life when I failed to win a fellowship I wanted badly.

At age 60, I am able to turn away from some contests, like nominations for prestigious jobs, even if I might win them.  This seems like spiritual progress to me.  To make such decisions well, I have to pause, meditate, seek counsel, and interrogate the greatest sources of wisdom I know.  If I don’t, I can still be addicted to my own adrenaline.

In the last two years I won memoir writing prizes in the Kalamazoo Gazette contest and also two other honorable mentions, the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and the Soul-Making Literary Competition in San Francisco.  These contests got me started.

I also entered a handful of other contests and did not win!

External recognition can be one of the signposts we look for when asking how to use our precious time and exercise our gifts in the world.  But it is not enough.  I desire to follow my heart and soul to deeper levels of reflection through reading and writing memoir–even if I never win another contest in my life.

A few weeks ago, my husband Stuart and I traveled to the “west coast” of Michigan, first to Saugatuck, where we had a lovely visit on a rainy day to the Wickwood Inn, and then to Holland, where Stuart explored the downtown and I visited Max DePree, the man who has been my mentor for more than a decade.

I would never have thought of Max as a memoir writer had I not begun this blog.  Max has written three best-selling books on leadership and one on volunteer boards: 

Those books contain personal stories from his years of leading the Herman Miller furniture company, his family life, and his service on nonprofit boards.  They exude a rare combination:  confidence, authority, humility, and accountability.  Max lives his philosophy of leadership, best exemplified by the title of this book:  Leading Without Power:  Finding Hope in Serving Community.  Max has been generous with his time.  He was the first mentor in my life to ask me the kind of questions I described in my last post:  personal, ambiguous, and anxiety-producing.  I look forward to our infrequent one-on-one meetings because I will inevitably be surprised by one of his questions and ponder them long afterward.

Max has written one book that is evidently out of print now.  It is a memoir in the form of a letter to his granddaughter Zoe.  Called Dear Zoe, the book describes the Max’s love for the premature baby born to his daughter, a baby so tiny that her arm fit inside Max’s wedding ring.  Max helped Zoe cling to life by gently stroking her tiny body while talking to her.  A nurse in the hospital told him,  “She has to connect your voice to your touch.”

Max will be celebrating an important birthday in a few days.  I won’t tell you which one it is, but if you guess it by looking at this picture taken in August, you will guess too low. Max continues to connect his voice and his touch with his family and many friends.  My life has been immensely enriched by Max’s voice.  His questions echo in my mind.  His stories instruct my own.  His spirit inspires me to be a better person.

Happy Birthday, Max!

My husband Stuart and I went to our local theater Friday night and saw the Coen brothers’ latest film, Burn After Reading.    One reviewer called it a smart movie about stupid people.  I would call it not-quite-smart movie but definitely agree about the stupid people part.

Only a viewer obsessed with memoir would have thought of this, but my reaction to the film connects to several of the posts already offered in this space.  First of all, the whole plot revolves around a CIA agent, Osbourne Cox, who gets fired and decides to–you guessed it–write his memoirs.  As you know, memoirs are written by famous people.  Part of the fun of this movie is that Ozzie, as his wife calls him, does not recognize that the best he could hope for is a memoir.  To write his memoirs, he would first have to have been the Number One Spook.  Undeterred by the rules of the game and fortified by his Princeton connections and multiple glasses of Scotch, Ozzie  takes up a digital recorder and begins his story.

The computer where he stores his nascent attempts at life writing becomes the focal point for theater of the absurd.  A jewel case containing a CD copy of the hard drive of Ozzie’s computer made by Ozzie’s wife, given to her lawyer, and carried to the local Hard Body gym by the lawyer’s administrative assistant, is found by a janitor.  When two crazy trainers, played by Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, put the disk in their own computers, they think they have found a goldmine–secret CIA documents.  From there, the plot unfurls with one crazy mishap after another.

This movie is a romp on the darkside of human nature, so it prompts the question of how memoir writing itself potentially connects to the dark side.  Supposedly, the Coen brothers borrowed the title, minus one word, from a real author–Admiral Stansfield Turner–whose memoirs were called Burn Before Reading.

The content of Turner memoirs has little or nothing to do with the plot of the movie.  But the idea of a former agent writing his memoirs is so much a fixture of our culture that it becomes easy fodder for satire.  We have retired generals on television constantly critiquing the military decisions of current generals–or the ones they themselves were part of before they retired.  We have aspiring presidents and former presidents who make more money selling books than they ever made in office.  Similarly, we have CEO’s who almost bankrupt America with their greed and carelessness, who walk away with mucho millions of dollars as severance pay.  Some of these memoirs are profound and helpful, some are just self-serving, and some are actually destructive.

Any writer, either of memoir or of memoirs, needs to wrestle hard with the question of motive.  Why do I want to tell my story?  How honest am I prepared to be?  If we are writing for fame, glory, revenge, or just because we can, we will never write a classic memoir.  We might even do lots of damage.  Just ask Ozzie.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed from Mary Karr about the way opponents of Barack Obama like to diminish him by calling him a memoirist, just as they make fun of his career as a community organizer.

Karr, who has written several excellent memoirs herself, including

and

describes why memoir writing is a good test of a leader’s character and intelligence:  “a president, like a memoirist, must be able to hold in his mind highly incendiary paradoxes and communicate those contradictions to a broad and overheated audience. Think of Lincoln during the Civil War.”

If the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote is true–”The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”–then Barack Obama has the very kind of mind we need most in these troubled times.  His speech on race was the turning point for me in deciding I was with him to the end.  He talked about the incendiary stain on the American Dream–racism– in terms that were clear, courageous, and paradoxical. No other politician since Lincoln himself has held both sides of a such an important debate so gracefully, so lovingly.

Obama writes his own books, drafts his own speeches, and thinks his own thoughts, while respecting those of others. Yes, words do matter.  And this kind of writer and thinker comes along only once a century.

John McCain’s memoirs

were written with (by?) his speech writer and long-time staffer, Mark Salter, profiled earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.  I have not read them.  Maybe I should.  Or maybe someone out there can tell me how much evidence there is in these memoirs that McCain has the capacity to be Lincolnesque in his ability to hold together “highly incendiary paradoxes.”  What I hear when I listen to McCain speak is not paradox but artificial, incendiary, clarity, such as these final words from his acceptance speech:  “Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.”

If memoir writing is poor preparation for the presidency, as Republicans have claimed and Mary Karr denies, wouldn’t it be even more embarrassing to be a pseudo memoir writer?  John McCain’s name is huge on these covers, but he split the royalties 50-50 with the staffer who did the writing.  If someone outsources writing to others, how do we know he won’t outsource thinking and wisdom also?

Patti Miller’s The Memoir Book is an excellent guide to the genre under discussion in this blog and is also the image I chose to illustrate the 100 Memoir Challenge over at www.Shelfari.com. Using more than 20 years of experience working as a teacher and coach, Patti Miller gives us a condensed version of her memoir course curriculum, with exercises after each chapter. I hope to use some of these exercises when I teach my own class on reflective writing soon.

Have you ever wondered how to distinguish a memoir from memoirs or from autobiography? Here are paraphrases of the some of the useful distinctions Patti Miller makes. I’ve added several other definitions of my own (creative nonfiction, life writing) for further clarification, and I would love correction and thoughts others might add:

Memoir: A book or essay about the author’s life shaped by some frame: time (childhood only, for example), place, topic, or theme. The author may be published already as a fiction writer or poet or may be writing his or her first book as memoir. This “first book” memoir phenomenon is recent. Writers who have compelling, unusual, stories or whose most compelling subject springs from their own lives are finding receptive audiences.

The term “creative nonfiction,” under which “memoir” now fits in creative writing programs, is a neologism in genre classification. It seems to have arisen at a time when many wonderful writers were using novelistic techniques to create stories that found wide readership: Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Bill Bryson, David Sedaris, Mary Karr, and Haven Kimmel differ in their subjects, their voices, and their narrative structures, but they all have built successful writing careers primarily on memoir. I think it safe to say there are no precedents for such careers before the twentieth century.

Also, many who will never publish their stories are nevertheless writing them for the sake of posterity. This field is sometimes called Life Writing or Life Stories. Patti Miller’s website describes services that range from courses to coaching to critiquing. Even funeral homes are beginning to use the same concept, networking themselves under the title of Life Stories. They use boilerplate stock on the historical era and then personalize by inserting individual photos and reminiscences into a collage to be used at visitation and/or funeral.

Memoirs: The reminiscences of a public person in relation to public achievements. Generals and presidents write memoirs. Sometimes poets do also. I just read Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs. This distinction sometimes breaks down, however. The recent voluminous reflections of Barbara Walters were titled Audition:   A Memoir, Not Audition: Memoirs from a Life in Television (or some such). I wonder if the publisher considered and then rejected the word “memoirs” partly because of the current popularity of “memoir”? Or did Barbara Walters herself, the self-effacing, constantly auditioning persona, reject a word most often reserved for presidents, generals and Nobel prize-winning poets”? If so, one wonders if any women have written memoirs? Good fodder for future posts, perhaps.

Autobiography: Moves from birth to fame (usually written by a famous person) and focuses on the details the author finds most revealing about how he or she developed whatever it was that resulted in fame. The book reads like a biography written by the author who is also the subject.

Personal essay: I like Patti Miller’s description: “If [the personal essay] is the academic essay’s disreputable, eccentric cousin, then it is the memoir’s intellectually playful sibling and the child of confession.” Using the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne’s word “essai” from “essayer” meaning to try or to attempt, Miller emphasizes the search of the narrator subject of self in relation to the world. “The personal essayist has something to say but is not quite sure what,” says Miller.

Patti also sees travel writing as a form of memoir. I had not thought of the connection before, but I certainly see it. The requirements of truth, clarity, and evocative detail is the same, as is the use of the first-person narrator.

I live in a new neighborhood carved out of the Michigan woods. My husband and I fell in love with the winding road that led through pines into hardwoods, a road that now connects about twenty new houses to the highway. As the first residents of this new community, we had the opportunity to reach out to all the new homeowners, and all of them proved to be as interested in establishing a strong community as we are. Thanks to enthusiastic responses to various suggestions, we now have an annual summer barbeque and monthly rotating backyard picnics. We also have a book club, Girl’s Night Out, euchre games and many other types of informal socializing.

The book club meets at 7 p.m. once each month.  The hosting rotates among the six members–Sandy, Kim, Mary, Hope, Karen, and me.  We usually begin with drinks, sit at a dining room table, eat hors d’oeuvres and desserts and tell where we did or did not connect with the book, whether we trust the author’s voice, and what we think we learned from reading the book.

In the past year our group discussed Night by Elie Wiesel, Little Heathens, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, One Drop by Bliss Broyard, Boom by Tom Brokaw, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. Last night the book club met at my house, and the book under discussion was

.

Baptist minister Don Piper is the “I” of the story, but he freely admits that he needed his co-author, Cecil Murphey, to shape the tale.

Don Piper boils down his story this way:  “I died on January 18, 1989. . . . Immediately after I died, I went straight to heaven.  While I was in heaven, a Baptist preacher came on the accident scene.  Even though he knew I was dead, he rushed to my lifeless body and prayed for me.  Despite the scoffing of the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) , he refused to stop praying.  At least ninety minutes after the EMTs pronounced me dead, God answered that man’s prayers.  I returned to earth.”

None of the members of the book club are Baptists, so I was curious about how such an overtly religious book would be received.  The first responses were positive.  The book got high marks for readability, pacing, and dramatic narrative.  No one questioned the validity of the story.

Overall, however, the assessment of the book came down to the assessment of the voice, the character of Don Piper, the man who tells the story.  Here the group became much more critical.  The book seemed to be written the confirm the truth of theological claims rather than to share the transformation of a life.  Piper goes out of his way to distance himself, for example, from other narratives of death survival  He doesn’t go into the light, he wants us to know, he goes straight to Christian heaven.

When his description follows familiar biblical narratives (yes, he walked on streets of gold and saw the pearly gates), it may be comforting to fellow believers, but it is not compelling reading.   However, when he tries to describe the ineffable without the aid of the Bible, he is much more convincing.   I loved his description of heavenly music:  “I can only describe it as a holy swoosh of wings. But I’d have to magnify that thousands of times to explain the effect of the sound in heaven.  It was the most beautiful and pleasant sound I’ve ever heard, and it didn’t stop.

It was like a song that goes on forever.  I felt awestruck, wanting only to listen.  I didn’t just hear music.  It seemed as if I were a part of the music–and it played in and through my body.  I stood still, and yet I felt embraced by the sounds. . . .My heart filled with the deepest joy I’ve ever experienced.”

We book clubbers wanted to see not only the glories of heaven, but also tenderness, joy, and larger vision as a result of a visit to heaven.  Piper’s pain in his crushed body understandably took precedence over what might have been more of an immediate transformation.  His recovery, especially his ability to walk, is the second miracle in the story, again brought about by the prayers and support of loved ones. One person we wanted to know a lot more about was his wife Eva.  She is a very flat character, and, surely, she must have a story of her own!  Piper continued as a minister and is using this story for evangelical purposes.  The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies!

In the end, we gave this book 2 stars out of 4 and had a wonderful conversation about our own spiritual experiences, heaven, hell, miracles and religious backgrounds.  The book may not have been a great one, but we had a great time talking about it.

Coincidently, most of the members of the book club stayed on to watch Barack Obama accept the nomination of the Democratic party for president.

It occurs to me that evaluating memoir and judging political candidates is a similar kind of process.  How much have you suffered and what have you done with that suffering, is one of the questions we ask the protagonists of any story, including potential president protagonists. The women of the Stratford Woods book club, listening to Barack Obama, were not just listening to one man tell his incredible story.  No, we were listening to the song of  transformed pain of all who have suffered, which is all of us.  And we were inspired to become better people here on earth.   We were part of the music, and, for us, it was a foretaste–90 minutes worth–of heaven.

My daughter Kate and I had a wonderful conversation on Monday about the difference between fantasies, feelings, and actions.  I resolved to get back into the practice of meditation as a result of that conversation.  I am fortunate to work in a place that provides opportunity for meditation at work, so I have begun using the Meditation Room on a daily basis.  Like other disciplines, meditation should be done for its own sake.  However, we now know it also has positive health benefits.  My guess is that it can have positive benefits for work, also. In silence, the heart opens.  I believe an open heart and a shimmering mind are keys that help the writer unlock the doors of memory.

I just finished reading a New York Times review of Doris Lessing’s new novel/memoir (strange combo). The review focused on the author’s struggle for emotional control of memory. Lessing apparently hated her mother and saw both parents as tragic figures. In this book she tries, without total success, apparently, to understand and forgive both parents.

I don’t feel particularly inclined to read this memoir (one purpose of reviews is to help us know how to allocate precious time), but I was greatly inspired by one fact. Doris Lessing published this book at the age of 88! I have 28 years to go before I reach that lofty height, so I shall just view my first 60 years as a protracted writing adolescence.