Memoir, biography, and corporate history. William Zinser says, “Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid, such as childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance.” As Judith Barrington (Writing the Memoir) puts it, . A memoir (singular) is not the larger story of a life (from birth to death), but may be a slice of that life, a window into the life (through the author's lens), the shaping of a single piece of experience, a crystallized version of “I remember.” In the view of William Zinsser, “memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The writer of a memoir takes us back to a corner of his or her life that was unusually vivid or intense—childhood, for instance—or that was framed by unique events. By narrowing the lens, the writer achieves a focus that isn’t possible in autobiography.” Or in Barrington's words, memoir . Indeed, one of the important skills of memoir writing is the selection of the theme or themes that will bind the work together. You are saying effectively, “I am a pretty interesting person. These are the lives I’ve intersected with.” Pachter doesn't think it’s about a “corner” of a life only. At the other extreme, says Marc, is the confession—all about one’s internal journey through life. The autobiography is somewhere between the two. Tiberghien in One Year to the Writing Life. In the contemporary world, there is a need to testify, an urgency to share real- life stories and to learn from one another. It is through memoir- -writing memoir and reading memoir- -that we discovere our connectedness, our oneness with another, our common humanity. Each time you discover meaning in your life, you contribute to the greater meaning of human life. Peter Petre, in a symposium on collaboration sponsored by the Authors Guild, said, . Less is expected of the reader of a memoir, which focuses on one of the memoirist's . An early example: the Confessions of St. Here is a quotation from someone who has written a modern version of the confession, Sue William Silverman: “The lessons learned in memoir aren’t as evident in autobiography. In autobiography the author may no longer be president of the United States or a box- office attraction, yet emotionally, he or she hasn’t necessarily changed—at least on the page. With rare exceptions, autobiography isn’t about exploring the subject’s psyche. Autobiography isn’t about turning a life into art. The autobiographer justifies “mistakes.” The memoirist explores them. The autobiographer focuses on success while the memoirist tries to decipher how or why life events often go wrong. Memoir, therefore, is not a simple narcissistic examination of self—as some critics claim. By employing many of the same techniques as fiction, poetry, and belle lettres, memoir achieves universality.“Also unlike autobiography, memoir relies almost solely on memory. Memoirists may research old letters, conduct interviews with family members, examine family documents and photographs, but the reliance on one’s subjective perceptions of the past is at the heart of memoir. Whereas autobiography tells the story of “what happened” based on historical facts, memoir examines why it happened, what the story means.” ~ Sue William Silverman, in . She is also the author of Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, a memoir of incest. To write a memoir, she writes in a letter quoted in Brevity's In Defense of Memoir, . The big fiction advice is 'Show, don’t tell,' but this is not what memoirists are embroidering on their pillows and sleeping on. It’s instead 'Show and Tell.' It’s the idea that you can tell unless you can show, but you don’t just show. You have to talk about it. You have to somehow reflect upon it. You have to track or respond to it, this thing that’s happening. And in the intersection of these two things is the excitement we feel about this genre. Too much show and 'Why aren’t you writing fiction?' Too much tell and 'I’m not going to listen to you because you’re boring.' The narration is the thing that lets you do the other. Click here for an extract. Types of autobiographic writing (Center for Autobiographic Studies). Hearst Magazines and Hearst Digital Media are divisions of Hearst Communications, Inc. If you want more data on life support than you know what to do with, try reading this NASA document. For some great notes on spacecraft life support, read Rick Robinson's Rocketpunk Manifesto essay. Bangladesh location, size, and extent topography climate flora and fauna environment population migration ethnic groups languages religions transportation history government political parties local government judicial system. Preowned powerboats for sale under 30 feet Preowned high performance powerboats, cruisers, and yachts for sale by owner. Bundle up in style with our outstanding outerwear! You'll brave anything from breezes to blizzards with our variety of perfect pea coats, trendy trenches, and bedazzling blazers. You don't have to freeze to be fashionable! Credit Reuters John F. Kennedy Jr.: A Life Under a Microscope, Cut Short 2016-07-16T06:35:27-04:00 July 16, 2016 6:35 AM ET. The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of. Dog beds, cat beds, and specialty pet products: we love to spoil our pets. The longer you have your pet, the more your dog, cat, or other furry friend becomes an important part of your family. You want to do everything you can. A MEMOIR puts a frame onto life by limiting what is included. In my experience the chief value of the groups is that members have a weekly deadline, an interested audience, and helpful writing prompts - - a combination that keeps them writing (which, when the group is not meeting, they are less motivated to keep doing). Autobiography, Orwell thought, . Auden’s advice about confession remains in force: Be blunt, be brief, be gone. Richard Gilbert on Lessons learned teaching creative nonfiction to non- majors. Matilda Butler's final blog on memoir beginnings that will grab the reader. Includes segments from interviews with various memoir writers. One of a series of blogs on Opening Salvos on Story Circle Network's blog Telling Her Stories: The Broad View. Wood, Weekly Standard, 2- 2. Historians have an obligation to tell us, “in some sequential—that is to say, narrative—form, what has happened in the past, what the struggles were all about, where we have come from..“to explain contextually is, implicitly at least, to excuse.”. Victoria Costello's essay on storytelling approaches to illness narratives (Nieman Story. Board 7- 1. 1- 1. Costello (the author of A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness ) writes about illness narrative as an interactive experience, and about three common plotlines: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative, and the quest narrative. Stewart (1. 0- 2. Paula Stallings Yost and Pat Mc. Nees. The basics of preserving our family memories, stories, and mementos.~Probing Question: Can we save today's documents for tomorrow? Will today's digital documents be readable in the future? Find useful info on how to make a digital file of an old photograph here: Scanning Basics 1. Wayne Fulton's useful site), which includes such pages as Scanning and Printing Resolution Calculator. Scanning old photos properly is essential in a life story that includes photos (don't you love it when there are lots of photos?). See especially Staying on Track: The Red Thread of the Narrative. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were. Michael Lenehan's fascinating conversation with Studs Terkel on when and how much it is okay to cut and paste (rearrange) material from an interview to make it seem as if that's the way the interview subject said it.(Chicago Reader, 1. Stiles on telling good stories and asking big questions (Laurie Hertzel, Nieman Storyboard 1- 2. Shields is author of one of my favorite books, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead . You have rising conflict that culminates in the book’s climax, which you resolve in the denouement. Just work on creating suspense.. Suspense exists the minute your narrator wants something.. The basis of structure is figuring out what your narrator wants, but here’s the complication: this primary desire must shift in some way, or else it gets boring for your reader.? Lucy Knight on the Importance of 'Firsts' (guest entry on Dona Munker's blog, Writing a Biography). Daniel Kahneman: (TED talk, February 2. Howieson, Cerebrum, The Dana Foundation, 1. How mental health functions react to the normal aging process, including why an aging brain may even form the basis for wisdom. Without it, we'd be prisoners of the present, unable to use the lessons of the past to change our future. But how does it actually work? A process called reconsolidation helps 3. Covers misremembering; being confidently wrong; having false memories implanted by family members, police interview tactics, or in therapeutic settings; . It is commonly believed that storing a memory is like making a video, but long- term memories are never literal replays. They’re mental constructions of facts, inferences and imagined details that people patch together after the fact.. Your choice of people to tell about past memories helps determine whether you remember them accurately—or at all. Sharing stories with listeners who pay attention and are emotionally responsive aids in recall of facts and helps storytellers find meaning in past experiences, according to research.. And do read the comments! Maybe also read Kate Erbland's Playlist review of the movie.? Instead they exist as fragments of information, stored in different parts of our mind. Over time, as the memories are retrieved, or we see news footage about the event or have conversations with others, the story can change as the mind recombines these bits of information and mistakenly stores them as memories. This process essentially creates a new version of the event that, to the storyteller, feels like the truth. With the help of experts, Foer learned how to transform the kinds of memories he forgot into the kind his brain remembered naturally.? But what seems like bad news for memoirists may turn out to be their new best friend. I credit the process of memory retrieval—which keeps subtly altering and updating the past in the light of the present—with this surprising and unanticipated result. Oliver Sachs's fascinating long essay in the New York Review of Books on the nature of memory- -how we remember, misremember, and construct memories - - and borrow from what we read!? New research shows that the tendency to remember episodic details versus facts is reflected in intrinsic brain patterns. These life- long 'memory traits' are the reason some people have richly detailed recollections (episodic memory) while others can recall facts but little detail (semantic memory).? They see the events of their lives as connected by the central participation of a single, continuing character.. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Paperback. The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness—Man and Insects. Chapter One. At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high- pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam. During the day I heard them tunneling through the walls of my bedroom, sounding like a radio tuned to static in the next room, and I imagined them in there turning the walls into honeycombs, with honey seeping out for me to taste. The bees came the summer of 1. I turned fourteen and my life went spinning off into a whole new orbit, and I mean whole new orbit. Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angle Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed. I know it is presumptuous to compare my small life to hers, but I have reason to believe she wouldn't mind; I will get to that. Right now it's enough to say that despite everything that happened that summer, I remain tender toward the bees.*July 1, 1. I lay in bed, waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations. My daddy - who I called T. She had a big round face and a body that sloped out from her neck like a pup tent, and she was so black that night seemed to seep from her skin. She lived alone in a little house tucked back in the woods, not far from us, and came every day to cook, clean, and be my stand- in mother. Rosaleen had never had a child herself, so for the last ten years I'd been her pet guinea pig. Bees swarm before death. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about his one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind. Honestly, I wasn't that disturbed by the idea. Every one of those bees could have descended on me like a flock of angels and stung me till I died, and it wouldn't have been the worst thing to happen. People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life. My mother died when I was four years old. It was a fact of life, but if I brought it up, people would suddenly get interested in their hangnails and cuticles, or else distant places in the sky, and seem not to hear me. Once in a while, though, some caring soul would say, . You didn't mean to do it. I would meet her saying, . She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years. The next ten thousand years she would fix my hair. She would brush it into such a tower of beauty, people all over heaven would drop their harps just to admire it. You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair. My hair was constantly going off in eleven wrong directions, and T. Ray, naturally, refused to buy me bristle rollers, so all year I'd have to roll it on Welch's grape juice cans, which had nearly turned me into an insomniac. I was always having to choose between decent hair and a good night's sleep. I decided I would take four or five centuries to tell her about the special misery of living with T. He had an orneryness year- round, but especially in the summer, when he worked his peach orchards daylight to dusk. Mostly I stayed out of his way. His only kindness was for Snout, his bird dog, who slept in his bed and got her stomach scratched anytime she rolled onto her wiry back. I've seen Snout pee on T. Ray's boot and it not get a rise out of him. I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T. He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something. I kicked back the sheets. The room sat in perfect stillness, not one bee anywhere. Every minute I looked at the clock on my dresser and wondered what was keeping them. Finally, sometime close to midnight, when my eyelids had nearly given up the strain of staying open, a purring noise started over in the corner, low and vibrating, a sound you could almost mistake for a cat. Moments later shadows moved like spatter paint along the walls, catching the light when they passed the window so I could see the outline of wings. The sound swelled in the dark till the entire room was pulsating, till the air itself became alive and matted with bees. They lapsed around my body, making me the perfect center of a whirlwind cloud. I could not hear myself think for all the bee hum. I dug my nails into my palms till my skin had nearly turned to herringbone. A person could get stung half to death in a roomful of bees. Still. The sight was a true spectacle. Suddenly I couldn't stand not showing it off to somebody, even if the only person around was T. And if he happened to get stung by a couple of hundred bees, well, I was sorry. I slid from the covers and dashed through the bees for the door. I woke him by touching his arm with one finger, softly at first, then harder and harder till I was jabbing into his flesh, marveling at how hard it was. T. Ray bolted from bed, wearing nothing but his underwear. I dragged him toward my room, him shouting how this better be good, how the house damn well better be on fire, and Snout barking like we were on a dove shoot. I got down under the bed and begged the very dust and coils of my bedsprings to produce a bee. You wake me up again, Lily, and I'll get out the Martha Whites, you hear me? Ray could have dreamed up. I shut my mouth instantly. Still, I couldn't let the matter go entirely- - - T. Ray thinking I was so desperate I would invent an invasion of bees to get attention. Which is how I got the bright idea of catching a jar of these bees, presenting them to T. I tried for a long time to conjure up an image of her before that, just a sliver of something, like her tucking me into bed, reading the adventures of Uncle Wiggly, or hanging my underclothes near the space heater on ice- cold mornings. Even her picking a switch off the forsythia bush and stinging my legs would have been welcome. The day she died was December 3, 1. The furnace had cooked the air so hot my mother had peeled off her sweater and stood in short sleeves, jerking at the window in her bedroom, wrestling with the stuck paint. Finally she gave up and said, . The moment she lifted me, I was wrapped in her smell. The scent got laid down in me in a permanent way and had all the precision of cinnamon. I used to go regularly into the Sylvan Mercantile and smell every perfume bottle they had, trying to identify it. Every time I showed up, the perfume lady acted surprised, saying, . White Shoulders. I'd say, . She moved in and out of the closet, dropping this and that into the suitcase, not bothering to fold them. I followed her into the closet and scooted beneath dress hems and pant legs, into darkness and wisps of dust and little dead moths, back where orchard mud and the moldy smell of peaches clung to T. I stuck my hands inside a pair of white high heels and clapped them together. The closet floor vibrated whenever someone climbed the stairs below it, which is how I knew T. Over my head I heard my mother pulling things from the hangers, the swish of clothes, wire clinking together. When his shoes clomped into the room, she sighed, the breath leaving her as if her lungs had suddenly clenched. This is the last thing I remember with perfect crispness - her breath floating down to me like a tiny parachute, collapsing without a trace among the piles of shoes. I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other. I inched backward, deeper into the closet, feeling my fingers in my mouth, the taste of shoes, of feet. Dragged out, I didn't know at first whose hands pulled me, then found myself in my mother's arms, breathing her smell. She smoothed my hair, said, . He carried me to the door and set me down in the hallway. I landed against the wall, then fell forward onto my hands and knees. Lifted my head, looking past him, I saw her running across the room. Running at him, yelling. I saw him take her by the shoulders and shake her, her head bouncing back and forth. I saw the whiteness of his lip. And then - - - though everything starts to blur now in my mind - - - she lunged away from him into the closet, away from his grabbing hands, scrambling for something high on a shelf. When I saw the gun in her hand, I ran toward her, clumsy and falling, wanting to save her, to save us all. Time folded in on itself then. What is left lies in clear yet disjointed pieces in my head. The gun shining like a toy in her hand, how he snatched it away and waved it around. Bending to pick it up. The noise that exploded around us. This is what I know about myself. And I took her away*T. Ray and I lived just outside Sylvan, South Carolina, population 3,1. Peach stands and Baptist churches, that sums it up. At the entrance to the farm we had a big wooden sign with Owens Peach Enterprise painted across it in the worst orange color you've ever seen. But the sign was nothing compared with the giant peach perched atop a sixty- foot pole beside the gate. Everyone at school referred to it as the Great Fanny, and I'm cleaning up the language. Its fleshy color, not to mention the crease down the middle, gave it the unmistakable appearance of a rear end. Rosaleen said it was T. Ray's way of mooning the entire world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |