March 20, 2024 Wednesday Essential Honesty, Captured Moment, Exercise the CONVERSATION

 Question: What are your concerns about honesty / privacy in legacy in writing.

1. My concern is that the tone of the writing may be too self indulgent, like about me and my reaction to a situation instead about the situation itself. 

2. That the tone may change the story itself from being an "honest" one in the sense that it conveys more about the situation than about me, how to take myself out of the story, so it is more of a gift to others in the family.

3. That the emotional tone may be off putting, ie, like "who does she think she is" type of moment.

4. On the other hand, I want to include bits of information that may be of interest to anyone. For instance the history of the Iron Mines in Northern Minnesota in 1919 and 1929 and 1939, how to make that more informative about the human condition and survival, and how people guard their hearts and can still give from their hearts to others: family, community, the society as a whole. More of a message of hope without being "preachy" or self important about my particular family.

5. That the people I write about were not people to be pitied, but people who adapted to the situation at hand, for survival, love, the other.

6. Maybe a disclaimer at the beginning of the story. to inspire educate and inform. How to prepare the audience in the introductory statements and how long should it be. Short is always good, see what comes first.

7. Is it my story to tell? How to tell it....

Quotes from other writers: Patricia Hampl in TELL ME TRUE. "Memoir is a personal history; history is a public memoir." And memoir is "a reasonable rendition of the truth." 

"Every memoir holds th truth about one person's vision of the world. Experience is based through our personal filters and expressed by our own point of view... What is it that you want the world to know? What life learning is forefront in your mind the you want to remember? A memoir is more than just a history recitation. It includes feeling and perceptions that make the story unique.

Marion Roach Smith in The Memoir Project. "memoir is about telling the truth. But which truth? Whose truth? What about the other person's version? And what, by the way, is the truth?"

Helpful prompts/persepctives

Here's how I see it

Here's how it happened to me

Here's how I felt

You do not have to claim yours is the only version. 

CAPTURED MOMENT USING ESSENTIAL HONESTY. THEN REFLECTION WRITE. WHAT IS MISSING. HOW DID YOU FEEL. THE MAIN THING IS TO BE CURIOUS. YOU MIGHT CATCH THINGS YOU DIDN'T THINK ABOUT......

CAPTURED MOMENT: with essential honesty. (this is what I recall to the best of my knowledge). helpful that you were a key player for, doesn't have to be a conflict, can have a heavy moment to it. Use that as a prompt to begin. "This is the way I saw it." Then do a reflection/break or put it aside but take a break.

"the way I remember it is"

"Here's how it was for me"

There was an afternoon light and my dad asked my brother and me to pose for some pictures, he wanted us to balance on these sling back chairs. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about, but they were kind of a wrought iron squiggle with 4 pockets and 2 of the pockets fit on the top and two on the bottom, they were green material. My dad asked us to balance on the corners of the chair. I was afraid that I might fall. I can tell from the photos my Dad took and developed that my mom had somehow curled my hair into ringlets. Shirley Temple fashion. Then he snapped the photos. I remember feeling glad when it was over. And then when I saw the pictures I realized that my brother and I only had our underwear on, and then I was embarrassed. Now when I look at the pictures, I wonder what he was thinking. What made him interested in taking the pictures. He had created a dark room in the house and he developed them there, probably a bathroom somewhere, although I only have fleeting memories if any of that. Now I wondered if there was an artistic side to my dad, where he was able to appreciate shadows and light, and now I wondered if he felt any discomfort in taking those photos of scantily clad children, or if he was just oblivious. I didn't find any other photos of his that he developed. Did he take the pictures and then realize he shouldn't have and because of that decided not to take more photos? I was only an afternoon, but because of the photos and the feelings I had at the time, I remember quite a bit about it. Also it makes me wonder with all of the photos that people take these days, if the purpose is eventually to put it all I perspective, but what kind of perspective. One where every single moment: lunch, child sitting, child eating should be recorded in a way that is just too much. Does every photos have a story, are things that are missed by photo recording even worth while? Growing up I remember slide shows of trips, where if you went to someone's house they showed you endless slides on the blank wall of the trips they took, every stop, every view, every rock they picked. And with the lights low, you couldn't help but go to sleep. Perhaps that is the numbing effect of too many photos. I kind of wonder about memories of the past, are they important at all, when they are every persons memory, or is it really the way the story is told so it becomes more of an historical fiction, with a plot, and characters who have a turning point, red herrings, protagonist and antagonist, and character flaws that contribute to the development of the story, in some type of moment of truth. So, perhaps any story then becomes just that, another story, one that may or may not be interesting depending on the way the story is told or the memory is revealed. To this story of the black and white photo, and the emotions I have attached to it, my ability to recall that moment says more about me and my overall development than the story itself. Just like that story I just wrote about my dad's pet crow, what made that an interesting story for me. Perhaps the crow itself, like the red violin will now become the memoir. 

REFLECTION WRITE: skim over what you have written, underlining highlighting and then a bullet point or two or a couple of sentences. 

DIALOGUE

What are people saying. May feel funny about including. "said what" This is how I remember it, it went like this. Dialogue is a way of telling not showing. Looking for the core truth, staying close to the truth. Listening to things going around about her. One page with one column things that happened, what you say, and recall something you heard during the day. Practice by reading and writing out loud, our voice is kind of writing, paying attention to our own voices.

1. Make a list of conversations you might include in your pieces. 

    a. What to do with your life.

    b. Should I date a boy.

    c. Playing in a quintet.

    d. Mr. Storti and returning to the classroom.

    e. Helping my brother when he was beat up by Danny DuPaul

    f. Dad, what is a benzene ring.

    g. Explain taconite pellets

    h. How to tat.

    i. Was everyone really from Northern Wisconsin Viola?

    j. Did you all grow up in Michigan, grandpa and grandma Erickson?

    k. Are you really Finnish?

    l. Mom, why are you studying Russian. Why are you quoting Chaucer when I ask you a simple question?

    m. What is a simple question.

    n. Did you save any of your writing, Mom? What did you write about? Did you dream of becoming a writer?

    o. What about your sister? Did you miss her when she was in Germany? What happened to your Niece. Arnie talked about her but not much. So did Stan.

    p. George, how did you get your job in the grocery store.

    q. Why did you want me to sit out on the step and wait for something to happen?

Choose one. 

OR 

2. Create a conversation you would have liked to have had with someone.

Start with a line you do remember from a conversation. Not all dialogue, can be explanation in there too. How I remember it. "It went something like this"

From my mother's point of view. My sister had just left to be a stenographer in the Nuremberg Trials and I was stuck at home with my brothers and my dad. All my brothers did was taunt each other, and my niece, my older sister's daughter just followed my mom around the house and of course my brother Stan, they were actually the same age. I was getting sick of the whole thing. The fighting, the taunting, the work my mom had to do in the kitchen cooking for My Dad, my niece, Don, Roy, Stan and I wanted nothing to do with it. I thought. "What if I can make some type of income, then I wouldn't have to do all that housework and cooking and be around those ruffians, my brothers."

"I had done well in school, but at the time, girls rarely graduated from high school before heading home to help out."

"I studied stenography and dreamed of moving to the Twin Cities to work in an office."

"I went to the Newspaper and told them I could write well." 

They offered me a quarter for every story I brought in. My Dad only gave my 30 minutes from the time school was over before I got home, so this job, let me meet other people, interview them. I could remember everything they said and I scribbled it in a small notebook."

"Mrs. Sorenson's chickens are hatching eggs, she is selling them for a penny a piece if you are interested."

"Mr. Erickson just got a job washing iron filings in the mine, "it pays well." he says.

Basically I reported on my neighbors on the street where we lived. When nothing was going on, I reported on the Mines, the Tree Industry, the plants that did and didn't grow, and of course, how to make the best donuts from a recipe in my mom's kitchen."

"Every day was different and it gave up sometimes 2 hours when I didn't have to be home, in a house where my dad chewed tobacco and spit it across the room into the spittoon, when my brothers fought each other over the bowl of potatoes, where they hit behind the back shed to drink and act crazy."

"So, I dreamed of a different life."

continue writing or do a reflection.

"I got married at 19, to your dad, by then I had already completed one year at St. Mary's in Minneapolis in the nursing school. Once I was married I had to quit, because married women students were not allowed to pursue and education."

"Soon we had moved to Illinois, by then the US was in a full conflict in Europe with WWII. In Illinois, Dad worked for some I believe type of war effort, but he was not allowed to talk about it, some days he would return his skin with blisters, and coughing, but he never complained or talked about it. Where we lived there was no electricity and we had to draw our water from a well."

When your Dad finally accepted a job as an Engineer, he graduated 5 years earlier, we were living in a small apartment across from St. Joseph hospital. The only heat was from the radiator, so we ended out washing our clothes in the tub, and heating our food on the radiator. 

You were born at St. Joe's in the afternoon and I stayed there for a week, at the same time the war was over, I was figuratively and literally relived from that weight, but still not working. 

NEXT WEEK, the CAST OF CHARACTERS IN OUR LIVES.....STEPPING STONES MIGHT HELP.....