Memoir Writing: Remembering Emotion
Gloria Ziolkowski called yesterday to say she enjoyed reading Still Life with Violin, a memoir I published with Inge Lokos last year. Still Life with Violin is about Inge's life with her husband,Stefan, a romantic story set in post World War II Europe and a story of the courage WWII women needed to move on and to allow romance in their lives.
When I signed the inside cover of Gloria's copy, I wrote "To old friends, they're the best." A silly, not very original inscription...but, hey, we were in the post-gorging haze of our semi-annual Schezuan Shrimp lunch at the Jade Cafe in Florence Colorado, where they feel compelled to cover their 10 inch diameter entree plates and I feel compelled to eat all. Later, thinking how unwriterly of me, how lazy my imagination with that inscription, but how unembarrassed I was because I meant it and because I've known Gloria so long that I can be lazy and unimaginative with her, I realized that she is not just an old friend.
I've known Gloria for 50 years this very week. She is my oldest girl friend. I knew her before we thought about having boobs or wearing lipstick, when we still played with paperdolls and ran to grandmother's houses after school for cookies. The first Pitzel I ever saw I consumed in her grandmother DeCarlo's kitchen, where she answered in English the questions Mrs. DeCarlo put to us in Italian.
Gloria's last name hasn't been Ziolkowski for at least 40 years, but that is hard for me to absorb. I remember how accomplished I felt when I learned to spell her last name, a name long and foreign to my ears! And it began with the last letter of the alphabet! We'd just moved from a San Antonio, Texas suburb to a small coal mining town in the Wet Mountains of Colorado, populated mostly by Polish and Italian families, when I met Gloria. Everything was foreign to me there. I was accustomed to the Southern Hispanic culture of Texas, where my father's family had thrived since before the battle of the Alamo. I could eat TexMex all day and pronounce any word you put in front of me in Spanish, though I probably didn't know what it meant. But these Polish and Italian names and words! And the food!
Remembering all I learned in the tiny town of Rockvale, Colorado fifty years ago, brings me to the current popularity in writers workshops and book publishing of memoir writing. The publishing industry is embracing not just the unusual adventurous life but that of the ordinary person told in memoir. As young adults the lives of others seem exotic, much more interesting than our own. Just now I am beginning to appreciate the rich texture of my own childhood and what that brings to my writing as a middle aged adult.
I've learned that it is not how exotic the locations or dramatic the experiences of a life that makes good memoir writing, but the honesty of the images. I've learned in working with people like Inge Lokos, developing their memoirs as a collaborator or a ghost writer, that it is not just the clarity of the image of an experience, but the clarity of the emotion that accompanied the experience and the courage to put that emotion on paper, that makes the story. We need detail, as much as can honestly be attached to an experience of time and place, but in memoir writing we also need the courage to revisit emotion and embed it in the image, as well, in order to compel the reader to turn the page to learn from and value that ordinary life. For information on writers workshops featuring memoir writing check out www.BelleCora.com/Workshops.html.
Last week over lunch, I realized that while I was eating my first pitzel in the early fall of 1956, it wasn't just the sound of Italian words coming to me, the shiny scrubbed linoleum floor, the steam and smell of bubbling sauce on the stove or the exotic licorice flavor of the thin, crisp cookie that was embedded in my memory. There was the exhileration of fear in my first visit to Mrs. DeCarlo's kitchen. Gloria is a caregiver. I guess she always was. I was reminded that I went with Gloria that first time to check up on her Grandmother because her Grandfather had been buried a few days previous.
My mother's sister had died the year before. My brothers and I never visited her in the hospital during her long illness, nor were we included in the funeral. We weren't to talk about it to our mother. She might cry. That was the extent of my experience with death. Now I had been invited by this smiling, energetic new friend to visit a woman in her kitchen who's husband was dead, as though it were not only a usual thing to do after school, but a responsibility. In the dialogue of my childhood such a visit was intruding, rude, not a child's place and certainly something I wouldn't be allowed if I asked first. Boy, oh boy, with my stomach flip flopping, I was in step with Gloria down the school hill, over Oak Creek, across the tracks. I wasn't going to miss an opportunity this scary. I'm going to have to beg Gloria to let me rewrite that incription.
Read about Still Life with Violin and a sneak peek of the first chapter on the BelleCora Press website. It can be ordered from BelleCora Press or from Amazon.com.
When I signed the inside cover of Gloria's copy, I wrote "To old friends, they're the best." A silly, not very original inscription...but, hey, we were in the post-gorging haze of our semi-annual Schezuan Shrimp lunch at the Jade Cafe in Florence Colorado, where they feel compelled to cover their 10 inch diameter entree plates and I feel compelled to eat all. Later, thinking how unwriterly of me, how lazy my imagination with that inscription, but how unembarrassed I was because I meant it and because I've known Gloria so long that I can be lazy and unimaginative with her, I realized that she is not just an old friend.
I've known Gloria for 50 years this very week. She is my oldest girl friend. I knew her before we thought about having boobs or wearing lipstick, when we still played with paperdolls and ran to grandmother's houses after school for cookies. The first Pitzel I ever saw I consumed in her grandmother DeCarlo's kitchen, where she answered in English the questions Mrs. DeCarlo put to us in Italian.
Gloria's last name hasn't been Ziolkowski for at least 40 years, but that is hard for me to absorb. I remember how accomplished I felt when I learned to spell her last name, a name long and foreign to my ears! And it began with the last letter of the alphabet! We'd just moved from a San Antonio, Texas suburb to a small coal mining town in the Wet Mountains of Colorado, populated mostly by Polish and Italian families, when I met Gloria. Everything was foreign to me there. I was accustomed to the Southern Hispanic culture of Texas, where my father's family had thrived since before the battle of the Alamo. I could eat TexMex all day and pronounce any word you put in front of me in Spanish, though I probably didn't know what it meant. But these Polish and Italian names and words! And the food!
Remembering all I learned in the tiny town of Rockvale, Colorado fifty years ago, brings me to the current popularity in writers workshops and book publishing of memoir writing. The publishing industry is embracing not just the unusual adventurous life but that of the ordinary person told in memoir. As young adults the lives of others seem exotic, much more interesting than our own. Just now I am beginning to appreciate the rich texture of my own childhood and what that brings to my writing as a middle aged adult.
I've learned that it is not how exotic the locations or dramatic the experiences of a life that makes good memoir writing, but the honesty of the images. I've learned in working with people like Inge Lokos, developing their memoirs as a collaborator or a ghost writer, that it is not just the clarity of the image of an experience, but the clarity of the emotion that accompanied the experience and the courage to put that emotion on paper, that makes the story. We need detail, as much as can honestly be attached to an experience of time and place, but in memoir writing we also need the courage to revisit emotion and embed it in the image, as well, in order to compel the reader to turn the page to learn from and value that ordinary life. For information on writers workshops featuring memoir writing check out www.BelleCora.com/Workshops.html.
Last week over lunch, I realized that while I was eating my first pitzel in the early fall of 1956, it wasn't just the sound of Italian words coming to me, the shiny scrubbed linoleum floor, the steam and smell of bubbling sauce on the stove or the exotic licorice flavor of the thin, crisp cookie that was embedded in my memory. There was the exhileration of fear in my first visit to Mrs. DeCarlo's kitchen. Gloria is a caregiver. I guess she always was. I was reminded that I went with Gloria that first time to check up on her Grandmother because her Grandfather had been buried a few days previous.
My mother's sister had died the year before. My brothers and I never visited her in the hospital during her long illness, nor were we included in the funeral. We weren't to talk about it to our mother. She might cry. That was the extent of my experience with death. Now I had been invited by this smiling, energetic new friend to visit a woman in her kitchen who's husband was dead, as though it were not only a usual thing to do after school, but a responsibility. In the dialogue of my childhood such a visit was intruding, rude, not a child's place and certainly something I wouldn't be allowed if I asked first. Boy, oh boy, with my stomach flip flopping, I was in step with Gloria down the school hill, over Oak Creek, across the tracks. I wasn't going to miss an opportunity this scary. I'm going to have to beg Gloria to let me rewrite that incription.
Read about Still Life with Violin and a sneak peek of the first chapter on the BelleCora Press website. It can be ordered from BelleCora Press or from Amazon.com.
posted by Martie | 8:34 AM
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