"A lyrical invitation."

This picture is the title page of my memoir, When I was your Age.
http://lakeviewer-wheniwasyourage.blogspot.com

I chose pictures and titles  to entice you, invite you to come along with me on this beach, to share my life story with you.

It is a "lyrical invitation'.  The phrase belongs to David Orr, as he explains the art of memoir in his interview by Narrative Magazine on June 7th.

Do visit and reflect with him on this concept.

http://narrativemagazine.com

Write like you speak: Your voice

"Grandma, you talk like a teacher!"
Yes, I do! When I started writing my memoir, Jasmine, far right in this picture, my grandchild, was just a pre-teen. I shared a couple of entries with her and her reaction saved me lots of re-write.  I was not trying to sound like a teacher, but that's how I tended to talk in and out of the classroom.

I was writing these pieces for my family, and that comment of Jasmine helped me refocus.

Use your own voice, the person you are with your family. You are writing for them.
Unless, of course, you are a famous....and your publisher has assured you that your memoir will be sold by the millions of copies to all your adoring fans. What do they expect?  Your famous persona.

For most of us, that expectation is not there. We are who we are and we only have to please those people for whom these memoir pieces are written.

Write like you speak.
Write so your family can recognize you.
Write so you see your soul in the words you choose.

Writing Memoir Pieces: Look for an overall theme.

You may recognize this picture from the masthead of sixtyfivewhatnow, my main blog.  It speaks volumes to me about who I am, what I'm doing in that blog.
Pictures you choose will appeal to you for some intrinsic and extrinsic motive. Yes, they will be about where you lived, how you lived, whom you loved, who loved you.

Most importantly, they say something about your perspective, your point of view, your angle of vision in your own life.
Let me illustrate this concept through  the picture above.

The camera is looking at both the water flowing, and the big boulders in the way.
The eye is moving upward, following the movement of the water.
The boulders are part of the passage the person is making through this territory to get to the next stage.
They are not impeding movement, they are to be navigated around or over.
For me, these boulders represent what we  encountered, will  encounter, as we flow like a river to the sea!
The images and the overall metaphor are ancient, classic.

Was your life a garden of delights? A torrent of desire?

Keep an image in mind as you choose pictures and artifacts that tell the story of your life through your experiences, your vision of what you hoped it would be, and how it turned out, and how you survived.

p.s. you don't have to chronicle everything. Choose what is most meaningful to you.

Writing memoir pieces-Step Three.

Establish the Here and Now.

Someone will read your memoir pieces and will ask when and where and how these pieces came together.  You will write one piece today, the next one a month or two from now, or even decades later. What and how you write will be influenced by your mood, your health, your other conditions.  Your reader may not know that your piece about your husband was written after he became ill, after you and he separated.

Establish the here and now in a couple of words and a couple of details.

"As we watched the ocean on a warm June Sunday a few weeks ago,  your father with a blank canvas trying to capture the waves,  I thought about how far away you all were, how busy and exciting your lives were.  I remembered  how we all celebrated Father's Day when you were little, the times at Disneyland. At that time I thought how extravagant ..."

I set up the time and the place and the emotional state of my present before I relive a Father's day of your childhood. This is important for my children to know for two reasons, how they remember the day versus how I remember it, and my status when I wrote this.

I was conscious of this when I wrote my memoir, and established right away that I was an old lady and had one grandchild at the time of the writing.

Harmony.

What I like most about gardening is how it makes me feel when  touching dirt, digging holes, pulling weeds.
While my hands are working to clear a patch of land, my eyes see the finished task ahead of me, the vines that will develop from those seedlings, the fruit of those vines that will transported up to the house to become our lunch.

Gardening is all about work with hope.  It depends on our hands, our careful tending, our divining the weather and preparing the right mixture of sand and loam to nourish those tiny roots.

Gently nudging  in concert with mother nature, we try to control as many elements as possible so that we may live by the fruit of our labor, the sweat of our brows: tender shoots are hand watered, predators kept at bay. We are gentle mothers and fathers.  If we can nurture our bodies through this activity, we are truly blessed and satisfied.

Every year I have great plans, great satisfaction and abject disappointment too. Every year, some things die, some things sprout out naturally and miraculously, and some things just take off and invade all my wildest dreams.

The picture above was from last summer's winter squash patch. I harvested so many zucchini, delicata squashes and winter melons that my daughter and  neighbors were kept well stocked/
We accept the results of gardening with grace and patience. We are surprised by abundance, humbled by failure and work cooperatively with the seasons and the elements.

Step Two: Add the background story.

You were talking about the picture on the previous post. In this step, you'll be talking about what you were doing before or after that picture. Were you at home watching television, doing homework, celebrating...?

This is the time to freeze time, and tell your version of that moment. Was everyone else in that part of the world doing the same thing, the same way?  Add your family's version of a dish, your version of that celebration.

Are you writing these meanderings in long hand or typing them on a computer?
Wouldn't it be lovely for your grandchildren to see your handwriting, how your special letters were formed?

Writing memoir pieces-a manual for beginners.

If you ever wanted to write essays and sketches about your childhood, you are in luck.
I will begin today, with this post, to outline and walk you through the steps you need to take to get this project going.
Most of what we write comes from our memories anyhow. Here though, we are actually mining the seeds of those memories.

Lesson One:

1. Collect a handful of pictures with you in them.
2. Don't worry about chronology.
5. Be guided by your emotional reaction to the pictures.






Great! Now, the first step is to introduce yourself.  Which one is you? Do you remember this time?
What about the clothes in this picture, the hair?

For me, the bow is the memory  point. So, here is what I came out with my first topic:

 All through elementary school, I was known as the girl with the big bow.


(Your coverage may be as short as one paragraph, as long as a short story. Just write without stopping. When done, clip the picture to the essay and put it aside for a while.)

Look for further lessons in future posts.