Memoir Writing

A memoir is a collection of episodes, the grandmother or grandfather stories that, in preliterate cultures, carried the living information about a people from one generation to the next. The Zuni people of Arizona called the European settlers who were coming into their land “the Orphan People” because these new people did not know how to tell the stories of their own families. They felt this lack left a great emptiness in the new comers. I think that the writing of memoirs is a way to fill that emptiness that we sometimes call alienation.

For some time now I have been noticing when I read an article or see a TV documentary about some time period that I have lived through—and believe me, the number of time periods I have lived through is mounting up--the thing I have been noticing is that, most of the time when I hear about the way it was 'back in the day'…that isn’t the way it was for me when that happened.

Spurred by a growing discomfort with other peoples’ version of "our" history I am encouraging this Memoir-Writing Project in the form of a self guided class. It is my effort to help people remember how it actually was for them “back in the day.” Our world is being saturated with notions of fear and disenfranchisement. The consequences of those notions for social advancement are incalculable. For this reason, I encourage you to begin to write down accounts of the experiences of your lives, both large and small, and your response to world events as you witnessed them.

Another, more personal, motivation for such a project is the haunting quality of the events I did not think to ask my parents about, say the way their fortunes were wiped out in the depression of the thirties—or how they managed to cook without a microwave. I think of families that had a resident story teller as being very lucky. We didn’t have one in our family. So, my first thought is that each of us should try to furnish children, and grandchildren, with stories that offer added perspective to our societies story. Stories are the only way to store information for the coming generations.

As I began encouraging people to write their memoirs, I noticed that often when people write their stories they called back to mind things that they had forgotten. As a result of revisiting those experiences they enjoy becoming reattached to the person that they had been. In some way it seemed empowering to them. It began to seem to me that there might be something in the process of telling one’s own story that not only improved memory but also rescripted an individual’s sense of self determination. So, I began thinking that telling one’s own story had more power to it than just the power to entertain one and aid in becoming aquatinted with oneself and with luck with one’s the off spring.

A while back I came across an announcement of a lecture at the Library of Congress by Robert Ornstein who was to speak at the Library of Congress on Afghan "Teaching-Stories" and the Brain. Ornstein, a leading psychologist, says the "teaching-story," a form of literature little-known in the West but prevalent in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East can help develop thinking skills and perceptions. He claims that some story telling techniques are more effective than others in setting up recall systems in the brain.

When I read this article I lamented to myself that in this time when all adults are often obliged to spend long hours out of the home, children have no story tellers to entertain them—except, perhaps the story tellers that live in the little black box that we call the T.V. The stories these people tell are merely brackets for holding peoples interest just long enough to get from one commercial to the next. What these stories specialize in is sound bytes. Which seem to be designed to destroy the memory channels in the brain. In essence, it seems to me, the T.V. has a sort of mind training built into it that is based on the pacman theory—it eats up all the little connections in the mind.

I am offering you a sort of curriculum that you can use this as a tool to encourage your exploration of the archeology of your memory, if you so chose. Because writing is so lonely, and because it is so easy to say, “Well, I don’t have anything to write about,” we have designed a series of memory joggers.

The way I have designed these lessons is to share with you various techniques I have come across that have worked for me. In these exercises, I have explained the techniques and how they worked for me, and then offered an example of how I have applied them to my life. My hope is that these exercises will resonate with some experience in your life, and open some window for you into your own half forgotten experiences. We have found that more often than not the members of our memoir group’s people do not actually write about the subject we suggested, they, rather, write about the thing that the writing exercise reminded them that occurred in their own lives. This is to me the exciting part of this project—observing the way minds dance together, given half a chance.

Some people find they are more likely to keep up their memoir writing if they find a four or five people to talk with about the work they are doing. Some people prefer to work on their own.