$249.00

Enrollment in Memoir 101:    (4) 1.5 hour-long classes meeting on June 11, 18, 25th and July 2nd at 5:30 PDT and (1) hour long Q and A session on Saturday June 22nd at 8am. 240 dollars.

$124.50 now and the balance later.

Payment Plan: Enrollment in Memoir 101:    Same class as above paid in two (2) installments. One payment now and the other later—June 1st, 1013. 240 dollars in two payments.

$99.00

Add-On Consulting: Individual feedback from Theo in a 45-minute phone consultation on a manuscript up to 6k words in length. 99 dollars.

$135.00

Consulting-Only Option:  Individual feedback from Theo in a 45-minute phone consultation on a manuscript up to 6k words in length. 135 dollars.

…

How does it work?  Shortly after you enroll, you’ll be sent a phone number and a participant access code to call in for our first class meeting.  During our meetings, I will be giving lectures on the various memoir topics listed in the course outline below and fielding questions from you on these topics.  I will also be guiding you through memoir writing exercises that you will do in class and giving you optional assignments to work on outside of class. Each week you’ll read assigned readings from our texts.

What if I miss a meeting? The day after the class meeting, you’ll receive a link to a recording of the meeting, which you can listen to at anytime.

Who’s the instructor?  Theo Pauline Nestor. You can read my bio here. Read testimonials from coaching clients here.

When do we meet? Our class meetings will be four consecutive Tuesdays: June 11th, June 18th, June 25th, and July 8th from 5:30 to 7:00pm PDT.  There will also be a one-hour Q and A session with me during which I will address individual memoir writing problems on Saturday June 22nd at 8am.

Course outline:

First meeting: Introduction to the memoir genre; understanding story structure and how to develop your memoir’s narrative arc.

Second meeting: The three narrative modes of memoir: Scene, Summary, and Musing; the essentials of scene writing; the use of time in a memoir.

Third meeting: Developing the emotional preoccupation of your memoir; creating a narrator and a narrative readers care about; developing the universal elements of your story by using elements of the hero’s journey to create a memoir that chronicles a transformation of the self.

Fourth meeting:  Finding your voice as a writer; letting your personality show up on the page; creating a narrator who serves as your story’s “central consciousness.”

How do I enroll? To enroll in the course, click on the “Buy Now” button for the course below to pay either through Pay Pal or with a credit card.  After your payment has been received, you’ll receive a course confirmation with further instructions. If you prefer to pay by check or money order, email me at theonestor@yahoo.com.

What if I want individual feedback on my work? Click on the “Buy Now” button for individual feedback and pay either through Pay Pal or with a credit card. (If you prefer to pay by check or money order, email me at theonestor@yahoo.com).  You’ll then receive instructions for sending a manuscript (up to 6k words in length) to me either now or during the course.  After I’ve read your manuscript, I will meet with you for a 45-minute phone consultation.

Here’s what Lisa had to say about memoir writing:

Theo: In your book Shimmering Images you say that you believe memoir writing is a tool for world transformation.  Can you explain how memoir creates change?                  

Lisa Dale Norton: When we write memoir we craft a story of our past from disparate pieces. One could argue that all experience is random. To make a story from this random experience we must apply structure. By applying structure we create form and meaning. As we create meaning about our past, we have the opportunity to re-envision what we believe those past events meant. In so doing we open up the possibility of living a new way in the future. (If you see the past differently, the future that rises from it will consequently have to be different, too.) When we claim new meaning around our past and offer that story as a written narrative for others to read, they are given an opportunity to rethink and rewrite their lives. This process of transforming oneself and then passing on the transformation is a radical act of change. The more people who do it, the more apt change on a large scale will take place. This is an organic, subtle and powerful way to influence the world.

Theo: Which memoirs have created a change in your life?
LDN: THE LIARS CLUB by Mary Karr; all the small pieces of memoir in TEACHING A STONE TO TALK by Annie Dillard; THIS BOY’S LIFE by Tobias Wolff. Oh heck, once I start this list it’s hard to stop. A deluge of other titles crowd in. Just about every book I read changes my life in some way, but those three books came into my life when I was ripe. They taught me about craft and voice (Karr), honesty (Wolff), and a stunning kind of luminescence (Dillard).

Theo: Memoir students are often concerned about how their writing will impact the family members and friends they’ve written about–and yet they realize they can’t tell their own stories without including them.  Have you had this experience yourself? Have you been able to resolve it?

LDN: My experience with HAWK FLIES ABOVE: JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE SANDHILLS (Picador/St. Martin’s Press) struck at the heart of this dilemma. My choice in that book was to write my truth. I knew instinctively that it would not be anyone else’s truth and so I did not burden myself with the fantasy that I could either speak for them or protect them. I assumed that no matter what I did someone among my friends and family would not be happy. There was no way to please everyone, so, I simply forged forward and told my story as honestly and gently as I could. And, just as I suspected, there were those who did not agree with or appreciate my version of reality. Such is the work of the memoirist.

If given another chance to write that book, I would not change my story. What I would change would be the degree of compassion I included in the telling of that story. I would sculpt characters with even more compassion for what I perceived to be their faults and have even more compassion for the narrator for my inability to get my heart more fully around those characters’ gifts and strengths. But I would not change my story.

The key to this dilemma lies in craft, in evoking a sea of vulnerable compassion for self and others. If I could recommend anything around this issue, I would say: Go to a place of jaw-dropping gentleness and forgiveness inside yourself as you tell your truth. That will help balance whatever your spin on the story may be with the fact that we are all frail and flawed beings.

Theo: Your memoir Hawk Flies Above was published about ten years ago.  Publishing a memoir sometimes transforms the author’s life in unexpected ways or opens doors one didn’t know exist.  Was that true for you?

LDN: Yes, and that change roared in. First, the publication of HAWK FLIES ABOVE changed my literary life; it catapulted it to a whole new level.

But there was another change I could not have anticipated, and which became part of the energy behind SHIMMERING IMAGES: A HANDY LITTLE GUIDE TO WRITING MEMOIR, and that was the slowly dawning realization that once you write a memoir you codify a version of the past. As a first-time memoirist, I did not realize this was going to happen.

This phenomenon has to do with the nature of story itself. Story has form. You can’t get around it. In memoir either you are going to write a long grocery-item-like list of events that happened in your life, or you are going to select some of those events and draft them into a narrative. And narratives need dramatic tension, some compelling aspect that pulls the reader forward. The very definition of story demands that we select certain events and leave out others, and when we do this we impose interpretation. We edit; we shape meaning. That is what story does.

But the key with memoir is that when you edit out some events and include others you are crafting a specific meaning from a random list of life experiences. What this does is create a version of your past, and that version once published gains momentum and rolls out into the world before you. And the events that are discarded in the name of art, fade. Quickly you forget them. The one version rises and becomes the truth. When this happens you have named meaning; you have named what matters; you have shaped your past, and you have set up a springboard from which your future will issue.

Theo: What advice do you have for writing students who want to write memoir but are having trouble getting started?

LDN: Apprentice yourself to story. Read like a writer. Analyze texts. Write. Consider the first 15 years practice, and accept the fact that choosing writing as your first love means giving up many other things.

Learn more about Lisa at www.lisadalenorton.com

Repost:  Voice can make me fall for a memoir.  Like love, voice is very tricky to describe but undeniable when present. Like love, voice belongs to the ineffable.

While I might not feel like I can describe voice, I can get up on my hind legs and point when I spot it in the field.   And, when I read Meadow Braun’s blog White Girl in Black Face for the first time, I pointed. Voice. It’s right there on the surface, certain as rain. Meadow generously agreed to let me repost “For Writers Who Have Considered Memoir When The Story Is Enuf” today, and after you read it, you might want to go over to her blog and read more. I love this post, “For Writers,” too for how it conveys the power of personal narrative.

Here’s Meadow……cheers, theo:

For Writers Who Have Considered Memoir When the Story is Enuf

I am writing my memoir instead of giving up. Instead of making nice. Instead of losing it. Instead of screaming. Instead of gaining weight. Instead of going postal. Instead of dying.

I am writing my memoir despite the fact that many days I can’t write. Despite the fact that, in all actuality, I spend most of my time doing everything but writing.

I am writing my memoir despite the fact that I have no concrete proof that it needs to be written. Despite the fact that there is no guarantee it will be published. Despite the fact that no one has asked me to write it except my self, and if it is not written, no one will feel its absence but me.

I am writing my memoir despite the fact that sometimes it feels like a merry-go-round of self-absorption. Despite the fact that sometimes it feels self-congratulatory. Embarrassing. Voyeuristic. Exhibitionist. Shameful. Despite the fact that it might be more fun to throw myself into oncoming traffic.

I am writing my memoir because I can’t change the past. But I can make it immortal.

I am writing my memoir because I feel compelled. Because each time I manage to put the words together in just the right way and say precisely how that day went, how that relationship unfolded, how that argument went down, a great calm washes over me. In that moment I feel peace. I feel alive. I feel sure that those words needed to be written. I am in love with those words. In love with the process that created them. In love with even the pain. I feel my feet firmly on the ground and my heart light and open. In that moment I know that I may not have a special degree or certification and I may not have published much. I may not be famous or wealthy or well connected. But I know that if those words came that more words will come and they too will demand to be written. I know that they won’t be satisfied until they are poured freely onto the page and given life. And I know that I will treat them like royal visitors, like drops of rain after a drought, like a loving touch after years of isolation.

I am writing my memoir because there is no good reason why I shouldn’t. Because I’d be cheating myself if I didn’t. Because I have every right. Because no one else can speak for me. Because no one can stop me. Because if I write it I won’t have to regret not writing it. Because writing it might be the answer (or one of them) and if I don’t write it I will never know.

I am writing my memoir because this is it. Because time is running out and I won’t get another chance.

I am writing my memoir in order to expose myself. To defeat fear. To tell my side of the story. To see things as they are. To lay claim. To shift the balance. To fill in the blanks. To make sense of things. To make things right.

I am writing my memoir to say goodbye. To say thank you. To say I’m sorry. To say it wasn’t my fault.

I am writing my memoir to find my place. To find community. To join hands.

I am writing my memoir to say that we are more alike than different. To break down barriers. To give voice to people on the margins, the sidelines, between the lines, and outside the box. To classify the unclassifiable. To define the indefinable. To mix the unmixable. To embrace the ambiguous.

I am writing my memoir to clear the airways. To clear my throat. To explain. To forgive. To heal. To be bigger than myself. To be comforted, validated, and vindicated. To be delivered.

I am writing my memoir to grant permission. To restore meaning. To justify my existence. To test my faith. To celebrate the journey. To find love. To keep living. To save myself.

Here’s how Meadow describes her work: “White Girl in Black Face (WGiBF) is the blog of Meadow Braun, a typical black, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Russian Jew from upstate New York. Through personal stories, images and humor, Meadow explores the complexities that make up her mixed race experience, encouraging readers to grapple with the complexities in their own lives. Her goal is simple: to write (and laugh) her way toward love, empowerment and wholeness. She invites you along on the journey. Meadow is also working on a memoir of the same title.”

Great submissions!  Thanks, everyone!  There were nearly 400 submissions.

Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat is thrilled to announce the winner of the

 Writer.ly Six-Word Memoir Contest.

The randomly drawn winning name and tweet is:

UPDATE:  (1:30 pm 2/26/13)  The winner has accepted the scholarship and the contest is therefore officially closed.

Didn’t win?  We’re sorry! Until Noon February 27th,  you can still receive $50.00 off the price of registration when you enter the discount code “Writerly” (Please note there is no period in the spelling of the trademark word “Writer.ly” when applying the discount code in your Check Out for  registration).

…

The winner of the Writer.ly Six-Word Memoir Contest should contact us immediately at theonestor@yahoo.com to officially accept the scholarship to Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, which includes tuition, shared lodging, all meals during retreat stay, and transportation via chartered coach between Seattle and Sleeping Lady Resort.

If the winner does not officially accept the scholarship by midnight Tuesday, February 26, 2013, another name will be randomly drawn and an announcement will be made on this page on Wednesday, February 27, 2013.

We hope to see you at Wild Mountain, a weekend of community, inspiration, and writing with keynote speaker Cheryl Strayed and 10 memoir classes from retreat faculty Theo Pauline Nestor, Suzanne Finnamore, Ariel Gore, EJ Levy and Candace Walsh. Read more about the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat program here.

“Big-hearted, keen-eyed, lyrical, precise…Cheryl Strayed reminds us in every line that if defeat and despair are part of human experience, so are kindness, patience, and transcendence.” ~ George Saunders

“Cheryl Strayed is a courageous, gritty, and deceptively elegant writer.”
~ Pam Houston

“Strayed gives the impression of tapping raw emotion while at the same time exerting tremendous authorial control. Her carefully honed sentences are as sharp as knives.” ~ Bernard Cooper

“In language that’s lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.” ~ Ursula Hegi

“No one can write like Cheryl Strayed.” ~ Ann Hood

“Strayed writes fierce truths about how we live, with compassion, humor and uncanny precision. We need her.” ~ Sandra Scofield

Theo Pauline Nestor: Tell us about Writer.ly?  What is it? How does it work?

Kelsye Nelson: Writer.ly is an online marketplace that connect writers to the services and experts needed to create their books and get them sold. For example, if a writer is looking for an editor, she places a job post on Writer.ly describing her project, what help she needs, and her budget. Editors bid on the job. The writer chooses based on price, portfolio, reviews and experience.

All kinds of writers use Writer.ly. Those self-publishing may use Writer.ly for every step from editing, to design to marketing. Traditionally published authors come to Writer.ly for extra marketing help, or to have their author websites developed. Publishers even come to Writer.ly to find copy-editors and cover designers.

Nestor: How did the idea for Writer.ly come into being? 

Abby Carter: Kelsye and I met in a Meetup.com writer’s group that Kelsye formed about five years ago called the Seattle Daylight Writers. A lot of different writers come and go and so we hear a lot of stories about their attempts at self publishing. Often writers ask other writers about where they can find an editor or a book designer and it struck us that there was no one place where a writer could go and find the experienced professionals they needed, be it an editor, a designer, a website developer or a marketer. Even though I was traditionally published, I had no idea how to begin marketing my book, something that I realized too late that the publisher had no intention of doing. Kelsye took the idea to Founder’s Institute, an incubator group that helps startups and was accepted into the program. She came to me a few weeks later and I immediately signed on and invested.

Nestor: How do you see Writer.ly fitting into changes that have occurred in publishing over the last few years? 

Nelson: This is a golden age for writers. The average American now reads seventeen books a year, compared to just six a few years back. People with readers like Kindle or Nook are reading an astonishing 24 books a year. The demand for new, quality content has never been higher. However, it’s still incredibly difficult for writers to publish a book, especially new authors. But, it doesn’t need to be. Authors can’t be expected to know and do everything. They set themselves up for failure when they try to do it all – edit their own books, design their own covers, distribute to books stores, schedule marketing and drum up press attention. With Writer.ly, writers can get the help they need to accomplish their publishing goals. They don’t need to do it all alone.

Nestor: How does Writer.ly fit into your writing lives

Carter: I am in what I hope will be the last throes of finishing my first novel. I found an editor through word of mouth before the site was launched, but intend to use Writer.ly to find a cover designer and a marketer and probably an ebook formatter since I’ve made the decision to self publish. I’m really excited that I will be in charge, and have control over every aspect of my book. Exciting days ahead!

Nelson:  I’m also finishing my first novel. I have a draft and need some help with the story structure, so I’ve placed a job on Writer.ly to find a developmental editor to help me make my book as good as it possibly can be. My plan is to send the edited manuscript to agents to try to get a traditional publishing deal. If there is no interest from publishers, I will happily self-publish.

Valerie Due

has been selected as the Cheryl Strayed/VIDA Memoir Scholar and will be attending Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat on a full-ride scholarship.

VIDA judges read through a thick stack of 95 applications and deliberated over the past week, choosing Due as the recipient and four finalists:

Alexandra Behr

Amy Beth Schneider

Elizabeth Haussler

Carrot Quinn

…

Read about Due’s work-in-progress, The Skinning Board:

In 1982, President Reagan suggested that America keep the farms but rid itself of the farmers. Two percent of Americans farmed. By 1998, less than one-half of one percent still farmed, my family among them. We had survived.

My father escaped foreclosure through austerity and resourcefulness, selling inherited land, inventing equipment, diversifying farm products, and leaning on family labor—my brother and I.

For ten years, I lived five hours away yet drove home weekends and vacations to work the farm. I hid my roots and weekends from classmates, friends, and coworkers, ashamed by the cultural disgust for farmers, the myth that they deserved a farm crisis and lived as economic parasites. My shame built a wall that kept me from committing to a farmer I loved and the father and farm that molded me.

Then came my Solomon’s choice: Accept a lucrative promotion to a distant city, or accept my farmer’s ultimatum to move home and give us—and farming—a chance. My brother left the farm; my father needed me more than ever.

This is a story about leaving roots, abandoning dreams, rejecting family. It’s also a story about American culture and identity, about what happened to family farming and farm communities, and the continuity of love despite distance, pride, and economics.

………………………………………………………………………………

Still hoping to win a chance to attend?  Enter the Writer.ly 6-Word Memoir Contest before Monday, February 25th at Midnight.

Can you write your memoir

in six words or less?

If yes, you just might win.

Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat is thrilled to announce the Writer.ly Scholarship, a full-ride scholarship including tuition, shared lodging, and dining for the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, March 15-17, 2013 at the Sleeping Lady Resort in Leavenworth, Washington.  The retreat will be a weekend of community, inspiration, and writing and will feature a keynote from Cheryl Strayed, author of #1 New York Times best seller Wild, and classes from Ariel Gore, Suzanne Finnamore, Candace Walsh, E.J. Levy, and Theo Pauline Nestor.

Proudly supported by Writer.ly,a newly launched online marketplace connecting writers with the services and experts needed to create their books and get them sold, the Writer.ly Scholarship contest launches on Thursday, February 21, 2013.  A winner will be chosen in a random drawing at midnight on February 25, 2013. Check out all the details on how to enter here.

Not registered yet and don’t want to wait til Monday?  For all new registrants: if you win Writer.ly‘s contest, Wild Mountain will refund registration fees paid. Existing registrants: if you win, you may gift the prize to a friend! Thanks for visiting looking around a bit! Follow Wild Mountain Memoir Facebook Page and see who else is going at our Facebook Event site.

If you do not have a free Twitter account, it only takes a minute to sign up. Sign up to both make your contest entry and to follow the madness:  Twitter.

 Writer.ly believes every story deserves a chance to be heard.

Check them out here.

…

Melanie Bishop

I’m really excited to be interviewing Melanie Bishop from Alligator Juniper today.  Alligator Juniper was one of the first places to publish my writing.  In 2002, I entered their annual literary contest with a short story.  I didn’t win but they published the story, and I was thrilled when I saw my contributor copies of the gorgeous issue arrived in my mailbox.  In 2003, my essay “Lessons from the School of Sink or Swim” about my stepfather was published in Alligator Juniper as the Creative Nonfiction winner, the spot held in the magazine’s 2013 issue by Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat participant Natalie Singer‘s piece “How to Be Analog.”

Natalie Singer

Bonus to retreat participants:  Alligator Juniper has generously donated a copy of their last issue for each retreat goer. So you’ll soon get a chance to see for yourself what a beautiful magazine it is.  Thank you, Alligator Juniper!

…

Founding Editor of Alligator Juniper, Bishop currently holds the position of Fiction Editor and Co-Editor of Creative Nonfiction there.

NESTOR: Tell us about the upcoming issue of Alligator Juniper.  What are you excited about?

BISHOP: Honestly, I’m excited about all of the work that’s seeing print in this year’s issue. It was a robust year for submissions in every genre and there’s a lot of range in the stories, essays, poems that made it to the top of their respective piles. As you know, Theo, one of your former students, Natalie Singer, took the prize in Creative Nonfiction this year with her essay, “How to Be Analog.” A favorite line of mine: “You learn the secrets of your parents’ marriage slowly, the truth unfolding to you like the disassembly of an intricate paper crane.” I think what I admire most about Singer’s essay is its economy.

Two of the essays we’re publishing—“Orphan” by Martha Schulman and “Frank’s Buick” by David G. Pace, examine elements of family and loss and access to the departed, but from opposite ends of an emotional spectrum. Pace’s essay is almost playful next to the gravity of Schulman’s. Pace uses a shared automobile to explore a relationship between two men who barely knew each other—a son-in-law and father-in-law. Schulman’s “Orphan” is about as raw as an essay about loss can be. On the topic of her mother’s illness and death, this essay’s more memorable lines chart a progression of degrees of disappointment and devastation.  From page 4 of her manuscript: “It is amazing the stake other people have in someone else’s willingness to believe in cures.” From page 5: “It’s hard to think things could’ve been more horrible.” From page 6: “We will not rise to the occasion and pull together like the families in the books. We already are together. It just doesn’t look like the illustrations.” From page 7: “Where is the self-help book called Grieve Here Now?”  And finally, from page 10: “Being an orphan is like being one or two lifted veils closer to the tragedy at the core of the world.” Devastating and profound.

And then for something completely different, we have an essay by Judith Barrington, “Consciousness,” which looks at the early stages of the Women’s Movement in Britain. We read, discussed and selected all the nonfiction in October of last year, and it was particularly interesting to be reading about the history of women’s rights, while at the same time facing the possibility of a presidential candidate who would reverse Roe vs. Wade. With the exception of myself, Poetry Editor Sheila Sanderson, and one member of the student staff, everyone in on that discussion had been born after 1985, a dozen years into legalized abortion. Barrington’s essay helped us to see how far we’d come, and how much we stood to lose.

I’ve gone on too long about the nonfiction. I’m every bit as excited about the fiction in the upcoming issue, but I know you have more questions for me. I’ll just say my personal favorites are the prizewinning story, “Hero” by Esther Welsh, “Sanctuary” by Sara Dupree, and “Palindromes” by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz. Beautiful, frightening, memorable stories, and we are honored to feature them in our pages.

NESTOR: What’s the history of the magazine?  When did it start?  How long have you been involved? 

BISHOP: As a graduate student at University of Arizona in Tucson, I had the opportunity to work on the staff of Sonora Review. I went from being someone who opened the mail to being on fiction staff to being Fiction Editor. I loved the work and the interesting way it enlarged our lives as writers in the program. On one day, you might be struggling to finish a story for workshop, feeling low and insecure and absent of  talent, and on the next day, wearing the hat of editor, you’d pass quick judgement on the stories of writers who sent work to the magazine, and you learned to articulate why you found something publishable or not. Riveting or not. Moving or not. Speaking about these stories among classmates was a completely different type of discussion than when we were workshopping each other’s fiction. We were freer to say what we thought, without fear of  hurting feelings. Different layers of the same game and all very informative.

When I started teaching at Prescott College in 1991, I very much missed the contact with a literary magazine, and felt it was something we needed to provide for our undergraduates in creative writing. I found myself helping students to set up internships with literary magazines, (one of them with Sonora Review) so they could get that experience. Within a couple of years, I proposed to the college that we start our own magazine, and utilize our upper-division students as staff, thereby providing them with a much-needed, in-house internship. This was approved in 1994, and we started the Literary Journal Practicum class that fall, and put out our premiere issue in 1995.

Before I could put out a call for submissions, I knew we needed a name. Alligator Juniper was the tree I’d become most enamored of since moving to the southwest, so distinctive was its bark and so easy to recognize. I found the two words together to connote something layered and complex, and to also be, when spoken, melodic to the ear. All those syllables, seemingly metered. And then a more practical concern helped me confirm this choice for our magazine’s title: I realized that when placing ads in Poets & Writers, this title would put us close to the top of any alphabetical list. That first year, we only put a call out for fiction and poetry, and we only got about 50 submissions per category. Now we typically get triple or quadruple that amount.

It’s definitely exciting to have been involved so long, from the magazine’s inception. To see you take the nonfiction prize one year with “Lessons from the School of Sink or Swim,” and then to see, years later, one of your former students—Natalie Singer—winning the same prize.

NESTOR: What’s the role of students at the magazine?

BISHOP: We have several practicum courses in the Arts & Letters Program at Prescott College—courses designed for learning by doing.  Literary Journal Practicum is one of these. To register for the course, students must have background or coursework in creative writing and literature. Typically a student would take this class in the beginning of the junior year, and often students will take it again in fall of the senior year. They tend to enjoy the work and often find they want to do more of it.

We spend the first 4 to 5 weeks going through all the creative nonfiction together—students, myself and Sheila Sanderson, co-editor. We do all the reading in the Alligator Juniper office, where we have a bunch of couches and chairs and never any shortage of files to review. Every week, we discuss between 20 and 40 files, determining if they should be rejected, accepted, or kept for further consideration. The files that are rejected get assigned to someone on staff who will write a thoughtful, specific rejection letter. In most cases, we’re able to have the person who appreciated the piece the most be the one to write the rejection letter. We are becoming known for our rejection letters—they are kind, careful, specific, and, most of all, encouraging. Each year we get dozens of sincere thank you notes for our rejection letters. These make us feel good. We’re all writers ourselves, and know how hard it is to get published, and to keep on writing when faced with rejection. We like to tell writers at least one thing we loved in their story or essay, and give them at least one concrete suggestion for revising toward improvement. It was particularly gratifying when one writer whose work we rejected wrote to us, saying that he’d taken our suggestions for revision to heart, incorporated the suggestions of staff member Chris Zaccone, submitted the new improved story to a different contest, and won first place! The writer’s name was Lones Seiber.

Once we’ve narrowed down the list of files under consideration to about a dozen finalists, we reread those, and then begin the difficult process of deciding on the small handful we will publish, and the one piece that will get the $1000 prize. When the nonfiction decisions are behind us, we divide the students into two separate staffs, based on the genre with which they have the most experience, and Sheila leads the poetry staff and I lead the fiction staff and we spend the rest of the semester selecting the best work in those genres. It usually takes us till the very last minute of the last class of the semester to come to all these difficult decisions and sometimes we stay late, ordering pizza, so that we can do the process justice. Long after the last day of the semester, we’re all still showing up in the office, writing our personal rejection letters and stuffing them into SASEs. There’s a camaraderie in this course that makes students want to take it again. We work so hard, such long hours, that sometimes we become semi-delirious. And we crack each other up.

I will say I absolutely adore working with students on the magazine. They learn so much about writing in the Literary Journal Practicum, even though it’s a class in which they do not do their own writing at all. They learn what is cliché; they learn what they like and why they like it. They begin to articulate a personal aesthetic, and they leave the class stronger writers.

NESTOR: What’s the relationship between the contest and the magazine?  Does all the content for the magazine come from the entries?

BISHOP: Sponsoring a contest every year is the way we generate more than half of our operating budget each year. Entry fees allow us to pay the prizewinners and meet the rising expenses for putting out a print journal. The college provides us with a small budget and we also apply for grants. We’ve received several grants over the years from Arizona Commission on the Arts, and an early seed grant from Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Since we are an annual, the contest every fall is the only way to submit work to our journal. The only work to appear in our pages that is not associated with the contest entries would be the occasional special sections designed and carried out by various managing editors. Two former managing editors, Jeff Fearnside and Rachel Yoder, each edited special sections. Fearnside did an international section and Yoder did one on genre blur. Currently, and another thing that excites me about this upcoming issue, Managing Editor Skye Anicca is putting together a special section of work she solicited. No spoilers! Check out the 2013 issue to see what her section explores.

 NESTOR:  How does working with Alligator Juniper fit into your life as a writer?

BISHOP:  I’ve often said that sometimes I enjoy discovering talent more than I enjoy exercising my own. And the main places I discover talent are in my classroom and through work submitted to the magazine. I love nurturing talent in my classes, and, through the magazine, being able to bring quality literature to print. It’s enormously satisfying. Writing, as we all know, is not always as reliably fun or successful. Lately, though, after 21 years of devoting myself mostly to teaching and being an editor,  I’ve felt my desires shift more toward my own work—not just generating new work, but also marketing existing books. I have a story “Trina Comes Home,” in the current issue of Potomac Review, a memoir, Some Glad Morning, coming out later this year from www.outpost19.com , and the first book in a young adult series, My So-Called Ruined Life, coming out in January of 2014 from Torrey House Press.  You can see the cover of the YA novel on my website.

A story cycle, Home for Wayward Girls, has been a finalist five times in the last three years: The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, the University of Iowa Press Short Fiction Awards, the Doris Bakwin Award, the Tartt Fiction Award, and Hidden River‘s Eludia Award. I’m hopeful that book will eventually see print. I’ve gone halftime at Prescott College and am spending January through August of each year with my husband on the Monterey Peninsula, where he is a Career and Academic Advisor at Monterey Institute of International Studies. I’m teaching a memoir class in Carmel, doing freelance work, designing a 4-day writing retreat here in May, and doing my own writing. Next up is some final revisions on the memoir, and then Book Two of the Tate McCoy series (young adult). I’m also eager to finish a book of novellas started last year, and hope to eventually write a textbook on teaching memoir in the college classroom.

Thanks so much for the chance to talk about all this, and have fun at the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat! Looks like such a great event.

NESTOR: Thanks, Melanie!

[ Melanie Bishop is hosting a retreat, Write and Play in Carmel-by-the Sea, May 19th through 23rd, 2013. More info: www.vagabondshouseinn.com ]

When How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed came out, people would sometimes say to me, “Writing this must have been very therapeutic for you.” And I would, I have to admit, cringe.

Why the cringe? I cringed because I see the book as a story that I had worked long hours to craft and shape.  I see writing as something I love, but it’s also my job. When I think of “therapeutic writing,” I picture long scrawled journal pages of unfiltered, uncensored feelings. When the word therapeutic is used in reference to my work, I feel a smidge patronized.  Why don’t you just pat me on the head while you’re at it?

However, there are a couple of problems with this objection. One: I sound like an ingrate.  These people are most often readers of my book–maybe even buyers of my book. They are mostly likely well intended and simply wanting to connect with me about the writing process.  Maybe they are wondering if writing about their experiences might be therapeutic to them, and they’re hoping I will pass off some bit of wisdom that might save them hundreds of wasted hours of time if this writing stuff isn’t therapeutic afterall.

And the other problem with this objection is that writing the book–and specifically publishing the book–actually has made me happier, but not for the reasons that people seem to assume, which I figure are a) writing is “therapeutic” and b) publishing is a glorious experience that brings you uninterrupted joy and the praise of others.

And yes, writing some of the early pages of the book actually was–cringe–therapeutic. The first scribblings of the book started on a notepad I had in my purse that I pulled out waiting in an attorney’s waiting room. Seated across from me was a very thin woman of a certain age with a box of legal papers on her lap that she held tightly with her two thin hands. She had a very spare veneer of hair left which was combed over in an attempt to cover her scalp. Was she going through chemo and divorce? I wondered.  And in this juncture of my life when I was frankly totally miserable and self-involved, I had a moment of insight that pulled me out of myself, of seeing that I was a part of something larger than my own private drama.

I took out the notebook and scribbled a short note about this woman. Making that note made me feel connected to the loss of others, making my loss seem smaller, which yes is therapeutic. And I continued pulling out that notebook for the next few months, making notes about the most hideous moments of the freefall through misery called divorce. Eventually, I took the notes to the computer, and yes, beginning to sketch out a story felt better than wallowing.  But then, the craft of writing took over, and while it is therapeutic to be involved in any endeavor that requires concentration and focus, writing a memoir is work, and it’s work that’s not as self-serving as it’s made out to be; my desire was to write a story that would capture the larger experience of divorce through my specific personal experience.  There’s a heap of revision and research that goes into that, two R words I don’t usually associate with something that is therapeutic per se.

But, as I said, writing the book and the book’s publication has made me happier, and I’ve struggled sometimes to articulate just how that’s happened. Yes, there’s a feeling of success and that’s been good.  I’ve made some wonderful friends who I never would have met if I hadn’t written the book.  But I’ve always known there was something else, something that I couldn’t quite pinpoint.

I began to crack the code, though, after watching this “The Power of Vulnerability” TED lecture in which Brene Brown explains how our happiness depends on our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable. If you haven’t already (the video has been highly shared on Facebook), I urge you to watch the 20 minute video, but in the meantime, here’s what I took away from “The Power of Vulnerability”:  Even though we might think fame, glory, and praise will be the tickets to happiness, the true source of our happiness in life lies in our connection to other people, but in order to have that connection we must be willing to reveal our authentic selves to others.  People who believe they are worthy of connection tend to be willing to take that risk and therefore keep reestablishing their connection to others and therefore tend to be happier.  However, many (most?) of us struggle with the worthiness piece (a feeling of shame can be a clue of this) and tend to avoid feeling vulnerable and duck out from opportunities to reveal our authentic selves.

And here’s where the two ideas connect:  writing and publishing a memoir requires us to reveal and share the authentic self. To write a full-length memoir, you have to share plenty of stuff that you’d just as soon keep out of public view.There are many reasons to avoid this, and many writers are out there avoiding it right now.  It’s scary to write about your own experiences and share a hunk of the real you with people you’ve never met (and even worse–with people you have met), but writing and specifically publishing a memoir has brought me an increased connection to others.

Sometimes it’s strangers who write me and tell me the book has helped them and that’s pretty cool. But the truly amazing part is how King Size has connected me to people already in my circle.   Not long ago a mother of one of my daughter’s friends pulled me aside with her face lit up. “I read your book!” she said.  Part of me want to curl up. It was an awkward moment, knowing this acquaintance has this special knowledge about me that includes, amongst other vulnerable moments, a blow-by-blow account of my post-divorce romance.  “I didn’t know if I should be reading it, ” she said, clearly feeling awkward herself. “But it was so good.” But what I saw in her face in that moment wasn’t praise for the book as literature (what I once thought would make me happy) but that she felt closer to me, that she understood me better.  And, yes, it’s awkward this vulnerability stuff, this large-scale revealing of my authentic self.

And yes, it has made me happier.

Erin Belieu

Erin Belieu is the author of three poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including Infanta, One Above & One Below and Black Box. Belieu has been a winner of the National Poetry Series, The Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the coeditor of The Extraordinary Tide, an anthology published by Columbia University Press, featuring the work of contemporary American women poets. Belieu has worked extensively in literary publishing and was previously the managing and poetry editor for AGNI magazine as well as the founding editor of Hotel Amerika. She is presently the director of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University.

VIDA

Erin Belieu: In 2009, Cate Marvin sent out an email expressing some of her frustrations about what seemed a lack of serious conversation about feminist issues in our contemporary literary culture. In this email she asked if others felt the same and also asked that we send it on to anyone we thought might be interested in the issues she brought up in her message. I was so jazzed about what she’d written that I spent hours that evening forwarding it to a long list of writers I thought should see it. The next morning, Cate’s inbox was practically crashed with the many responses she got from people saying “Hell yeah! Let’s do something about this…” As I had been the instigator, she rang me up the next day and said “Well, looks like you and I need to start an organization to address this.” And that simply, VIDA was founded.

Theo Pauline Nestor: Can you tell us about The Count?  How does it work?  What impact do you believe The Count is having for women writers?

Erin Belieu: The Count was born of what I proudly think was a pretty simple and elegant idea. We knew from talking to many women writers over the years that many of us both consciously and unconsciously were in the habit of counting the table of contents of the magazines we read, looking to see what our representation was in these places. And we all knew anecdotally the representation was not good. So one of the first things we thought to do with VIDA was to do an actual count–The Count–gathering numbers that would help us to explore this disheartening phenomenon as a community.

We’ve always believed our pie charts were the beginning of a conversation, not an end in themselves, and we’re really pleased that VIDA has been able to raise peoples’ consciousness around this serious imbalance. Some people are irritated that change doesn’t come more quickly–that is, in the 4 years we’ve been doing The Count, the numbers haven’t changed as dramatically as we’d like. And I’ve felt this frustration, too, especially when you hear responses in comment boxes and in print that say ridiculous stuff like “Well, women just don’t write as well as men,” or, “Clearly, the best work is rewarded and these women are just whining.”

That is, to put it plainly, a complete load of garbage. It’s no argument at all. As if the idea of The Best was somehow this objective abstract as opposed to a completely subjective construct that we as a community create. How do we decide that a certain stylistic approach or subject matter is better than another, for instance? How does the expectation of gender play into our assumptions about a piece of writing? And why, given all the gender bias we encounter in the rest of the world, much of it quite statistically verifiable, why would the literary world be different than any other part of the world when it comes to gender discrimination? As if we’re still living in 1949 and that Verbal Icon a small group of dudes invented is still supposedly orbiting around this monolithic, unchanging planet called Art. I’m sure it makes them feel better. It just doesn’t happen to be true.

Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat is excited to announce a call for applications for the Cheryl Strayed/VIDA Scholarship.  This scholarship, funded by an anonymous donor, will provide the full registration fee for the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, March 15-17, 2013 to one female writer of literary promise and demonstrated financial need.

The scholarship recipient will be chosen by VIDA, a literary organization that “seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities.”  Since 2010, VIDA has been conducting “The Count,” which tracks the rate of publication of women writers compared to that of their male counterparts.  Learn more about The Count here.

CHERYL STRAYED (photo credit: Joni Kabana)

To apply for the scholarship, please read the criterion on the Cheryl Strayed/VIDA Scholarship page and send your application to hburdorff@vidaweb.org with “Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat Scholarship” in the subject line by midnight in one PDF document no later than midnight on February 14, 2013.  The recipient will be announced by the end of February on the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat webpage.

CHERYL STRAYED / VIDA SCHOLARSHIP PAGE LINK

In class, Claire talked about how we as writers of memoir share our own vulnerabilities and put ourselves outside of our own comfort zones so that our readers might find comfort in our experiences,  referencing Lisa Jones, author of the memoir Broken: A Love Story, who describes the role of the memoirist like this, “You’re simply a nice carpenter who has helped make a shelter for other people’s uneasiness by exposing your own.”

After class a few of us were talking about the fear we experience before we share or publish a piece that reveals something particularly personal when Claire made the point that reading memoir allows us to see our own lives in a new way, particularly the aspects of our lives that happen behind closed doors.  As we talked of how memoir allows us to bring the private sphere into the public one and why that’s important, particularly for women, I remembered how Claire had also spoken in class of how the feminist movement of the 1970s and her own mother’s experience in the 70s had inspired and possessed her before and during the writing of Poser (read Claire’s great piece about her interest in 1970s feminism in the Nation).

And then it occurred to me, that memoir is not just a literary movement; it’s a social one, and  I found myself saying, “It’s a groovy sort of revolution, memoir. Isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Claire.

And then we went for a drink. And as the great Hemingway once said, “It was good.”

Here’s the interview I did with Claire for my blog Writing Is My Drink.

Theo: What was it like to write so openly about your life and especially about your marriage?

Claire Deidre

Claire: My husband and I were lucky–during the period I was working on the book, the wife of one of his friends published a very personal memoir about their marriage. So we both read that book and used it as a kind of yardstick. My husband said he could live with that level of exposure.

Theo: What does your writing time look like?  Do you have a routine?

When I was working on this book, I wrote every day for eight hours, sort of a grind-it-out work ethic. But I got the most done by going away for a few days every month and just staying up all night writing every night. I’m a night person by nature, so when I’m away from my family I can indulge that and get a ton done. Incidentally, I recently read a study that said that night owls have higher IQs than early birds. Which was great to hear after years of hearing people (ie my husband) be smug about being early risers. Suck it, early birds!

Theo: What parts of the writing process do you love?  Loathe?

Claire: Love the feeling that I’m solving a huge puzzle. Loathe the part of writing a book that no one told me about: the fifteen pounds you gain.

Theo:  I hear you! It’s like the freshman fifteen. When did you first think of yourself as a writer?

Claire:When I was in first or second grade. I always had at least a couple Mead spiral notebooks on the go. My early work involved a lot of girls from olden days living in orphanages and wearing their hair in long braids. .

Theo: What are some of the ways you’ve built your platform as a writer?

Claire: I’ve made my living as a writer since I became a staff critic at the Seattle Weekly about fifteen years ago. Once I had my first child and quit the paper, I freelanced. So I’ve never focused on building my platform–instead I focused on getting the next freelance gig. My strategy was to stair step upward–a piece at Seattle Weekly gave me a clip to send to the Chicago Tribune, which gave me a clip to send to Newsday, which gave me a clip to send to The New York Times, where I freelanced frequently for many years.

Theo: Who are some of the authors who’ve inspired you?

With Poser I turned my attention to memoirs that are structured around something outside the memoirist. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage was very important to me. It starts out with his slightly bonkers obsession with D.H. Lawrence and ends up being a very intimate self-portrait of Dyer himself. Other examples: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, which is ostensibly about soccer but is really about his parents’ divorce. Lavinia Greenlaw’s The Importance of Music to Girls, which organizes a coming-of-age story around her favorite songs. Calvin Trillin’s About Alice, a memoir of his wife that is really a self-portrait of the writer as husband. And of course Laurie Colwin, who is my favorite writer. Her Home Cooking books are about food, but also give a rich picture of her domestic life.

Theo: Couldn’t agree more with the Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage pick.  That’s one of my all-time favorite books. The subtitle of Poser is “My Life in 23 Poses.” Why 23 poses?

The number of poses varied over the course of writing. I wrote a bunch of the poses first, like little essays, and then realized that process was preventing me from finding the larger arc of the book. Once I had written the whole book, I went back and organized the pose material. 23 just seemed right. Any more and I think it would have felt too disjointed.

Theo: Why do you return to–my favorite yoga pose–the child’s pose (I think 3 times)?

I return to child’s pose over and over as a way of organizing the flashback material in the book. I really wanted to underpin my story as a mom with the story of my own mother. Child’s pose seemed like a natural pose to use to frame that material.

Theo: Had you published personal essays before this book? (I noticed that there’s a bit of your mom’s story in the Nation piece about Erica Jong.)

I had published personal essays in two anthologies, and I had written many essays over the years for publications including Seattle Weekly, Vogue, and Real Simple. I’ve worked as a film critic and a book critic for many years, and I have always tried to incorporate elements of personal essay into my critical writing. I believe strongly that reviews really reflect one person’s opinion, not some authoritative judgment from on high. Folding personal essay material into a review reiterates that more openly subjective approach.

Theo: What’s your favorite writing tip?

Don’t save your good material, your good image, your good writing for later. Use it now.

…

ABOUT CLAIRE DEDERER

Claire Dederer’s bestselling memoir Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses came out in January 2011 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was published in the UK by Bloomsbury. Poser has been translated into 11 languages.

Claire is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Real Simple, The Nation, New York, Yoga Journal, on Slate and Salon, and in newspapers across the country. Her writing has encompassed criticism, reporting, and the personal essay.

Claire’s essays have appeared in the anthologies Money Changes Everything (edited by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill)and Heavy Rotation (edited by Peter Terzian).

Before becoming a freelance journalist, she was the chief film critic at Seattle Weekly.

With her husband Bruce Barcott, Claire has co-taught writing at the University of Washington. She currently works with private students.

A proud fourth-generation Seattle native, Claire lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound with her family.

The essayist Pico Iyer once said that, “Writing can be learned, but not taught.” Beneath this skeptical pronouncements lies, it seems, a niggling doubt about the source of art: whether the making of literature is a craft which workshops can enhance or whether art is born of that divinely inspired stuff—Talent.

Michelangelo

I’m wary of the term Talent: I think it distracts us dangerously from art itself, and making it. I won’t pretend that we live in a democracy of gifts. We don’t. Clearly we each have aptitudes (as we have habits, obsessions, tics), but it’s what we make of these aptitudes that makes a work of art. Michelangelo Buonarroti, that famously “talented” artist, did not speak of talent when he spoke to his student; his admonition to his pupil speaks to us still: “Work, Antonio, work, Antonio, work, Antonio, and don’t waste time.”

E.J. LEVY

Concern for talent kept me from writing for years. I was thirty before I tried my hand at a story; I was well past that before I went to graduate school where I made my first attempt at memoir. In those days, I believed fiercely in talent—that if one weren’t called to write by God or The New Yorker then one had no business at it.

Once I’d arrived at graduate school, I was cautious about what I wrote, afraid what my work might reveal about me—that I was talent-less. My faith in talent was so great that when I wrote “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” my first attempt at memoir, penned for a graduate seminar I was in—and received the professor’s damningly faint praise (a single line scribbled on the final page saying my essay, in its over-preening language, showed that I knew “writing was about words”)—I was so discouraged that I dropped out of the program and gave up writing. Convinced that I lacked Talent.

When I returned to graduate school three years later (a different program this time), I brought the same piece to another workshop; again the professor (a different one) dismissed it. I left the class embarrassed by my own glaring lack of gifts. But a fellow student told me what I’d been waiting years to hear—that the piece was good, done, urged me to send it out. So I did; in time it was published and selected for inclusion in Best American Essays 2005. (Unrevised—the prize-winning piece appeared exactly as it had in that first class.)

I think now that the writer who said my prose was over-preening was right; certainly the piece is flawed, but it is also trying to do what art does, to bring us into conversation with our lives, and history.

I tell this story as a cautionary tale about the danger of believing too much in Talent. I wasted too much time on that false god; I’ve watched too many aspiring writers do the same. When all along Michelangelo was right in his simple exhortation to the artist, to all of us: work, work, work, and don’t waste time.

…

Read (here) the first chapter of E.J.’s new memoir-in-progress, How to Cook an Elk, that is titled “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”

“Mastering the Art of French Cooking”
Salmagundi, Fall 2004-Winter 2005

* Winner, Best American Essays 2005
* Winner, Pushcart Prize 2007
* Reprinted in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction

“…a remarkable first-person account of a life….E.J. Levy remembers [her] mother by way of the romantic Julia Child meals she prepared while [she] was growing up.”
–Publishers Weekly, August 15, 2005

Levy was born in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and earned a Bachelor’s degree in History from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. For a decade, she worked as an editor and environmental activist, founding a lesbian and gay newspaper for northern New Mexico and later serving as Managing Editor of The Independent Film & Video Monthly, a national magazine for independent film and video makers based in Manhattan, before returning to the southwest as Outreach Director for Amigos Bravos, a river-protection organization. She earned an M.F.A. in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction from Ohio State University in 2002. She has been a Visiting Writer at Colorado College and on the M.F.A. faculty at American University in Washington, D.C., where she taught for four years before returning to the Midwest to teach at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Nelson Algren Award, a Chicago Literary Award, a Gesell Award, a Michener Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, among other prizes, and her fiction has twice been named among the year’s notable in the Best American Short Stories series published by Houghton Mifflin. She has received many grants, fellowships, and residencies, including the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship to Bread Loaf, a Loft-McKnight Award, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellowship, the Goldfarb Family Fellowship, and fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Cottages at Hedgebrook, Wurlitzer Foundation, The Millay Colony, and Sacatar Foundation, among others.

She lives with her partner in Virginia, and teaches nonfiction at Colorado State University.  To learn more, visit www.ejlevy.com

Breast-pump malfunction, sexual fumblings, the truth about my in-laws, insecure angst: All things I have written about, for familiars and perfect strangers alike to read. For every one of these humbling confessions, there will be many, many more. As many as I can write and convince people, hoards of them, to read. The more transparent and honest and laid bare I am, the better.

My best friend once asked me why I would ever want to confess the personal truths that writing memoir requires.

“Why would you do that?” she said, a hint of accusation in her voice.

I tried to give her an explanation that would sound convincing.

“If no one writes truth, our entire cultural blueprint will be a lie,” I said, not even knowing what that meant.

Later, I realized the real truth. I don’t crave spotlight (I’m actually happier out of it); I don’t care about popularity or money (much). I’m addicted to one thing and one thing only: Connection.

I’m a connection whore. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

I was an average child by most accounts, not popular but always with a few close friends. Not a stunner the way the girls with straight, long hair and blue eyes were, but pretty enough. I liked the things others girls did, Barbies and sticker collections and roller skates. But those pursuits were not what really made me happy. They were not what satisfied me in the part of my heart that was deeper down than my playroom in our basement, private but insistent.

little natalie

What I wanted, what I needed, was connection. Make eye contact. Talk to me. Let’s learn from each other. Who’s your secret crush? What does your Ken really think about Barbie? Let’s connect, baby.

My family said I was dramatic. It was true, I could burst into tears over the smallest slight, and I had to talk everything out until I felt better. I wasn’t shy to show my feelings. Why would anyone withhold, I always wondered, when it was so much better to understand each other? It might explain why I especially loved to hang around a certain brand of intelligent and doting adult, who would ask me earnest questions and tell me about how the world was.

In high school I obsessed over the girls with eyes like clear pools who looked right through me, who revealed nothing and had that evasive air about them that said, I need no one.

How could they need no one? I worried, trying to catch their attention, to trade a knowing look or a shared moment. It wasn’t that I needed to be popular like them, or beautiful or to have a boyfriend who went to one of the expensive private schools and wore navy sweaters and vacationed in Florida (though those things would’ve been nice).

I just wanted us to look at each other, me and these girls (or the boys, for that matter). I just wanted to know what it was that made us alike. There must be something, I thought. There had to be.

Sometimes this need of mine gets me into trouble. Once, during my first year of high school, I was staring at the crowd of kids streaming down the hall in between classes, hoping maybe for a crumb of connection. Out of nowhere I felt an immense and powerful force sweep me up off my feet and slam me into an open locker.

“What the fuck you think you lookin’ at?” bellowed an impossibly tall senior in gym shorts, her slick biceps bulging as she clutched the neck of my shirt in her fist.

The back of my head rang with the echo of gray metal, and although I was small I realized I didn’t really fit comfortably inside a locker.

“Nothing,” I squeaked. “I swear, nothing!”

Just then, the P.E. teacher strode past. “Monica, put her down and get your ass outta here or you’re off the team,” she barked.

The iron fist released its grip of me, and I slid down into a heap.

I learned not to stare so blatantly, not to look so needy. I learned, a little, to read people’s signs. I learned to read books, where writers who were people like me wanted to tell me their truths on the page. And I ventured to tell mine.

So, I am not over here trying to lure in your husband with the sexy gleam of my eye; It’s not my fault I’m always late (blame the good conversation, don’t blame me); Hey, do you want to hear about the time I totaled my car because I was busy giving someone the finger? Tell me a story — your biggest, baddest secret or your everyday fumbles, I don’t care as long as it’s true — and I’ll tell you mine.

Will you read about the time the moving-van loaders found a dildo in my bedroom? How I’m afraid I won’t be a good wife and mother no matter how hard I try? All about my hives and my deathly fear of ferns?

This is why I write. High school cool girls, basketball team giants, wise old grandmas, perfect strangers: I still need you.

…

Natalie Singer is the 2013 winner of Alligator Juniper‘s national writing contest in creative nonfiction. She is editor of parentmap.com and has been published in newspapers, magazines and websites. She lives with her husband and daughters in Seattle and is working on a book of essays. She can be found at www.nataliesingerwrites.com. 

I like to think of memoir as a genre in its adolescence.  Before the publication of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) and Katherine Harrison’s The Kiss (1997), the memoir barely existed as a possibility.  Following this logic, the contemporary memoir turns eighteen this year. Maybe the memoir hangs out with friends doing bong hits on the weekends and has a part-time job at Safeway.  

Other than a few notable exceptions (This Boys’ Life in 1989, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969, for example), pre-1990s writers with the desire to write narrative nonfiction wrote autobiographical novels, sometimes so autobiographical that they read much like memoir (Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, to name a few).  But yet, there weren’t memoirs; they weren’t labeled memoir, they weren’t read as memoirs and they weren’t written as memoirs.  They were written as novels, with the limitations and possibilities of novels.

The possibilities for a novel (a form that announces itself as fiction) and the possibilities for memoir (a form that announces itself as nonfiction) are not the same, and while memoirists can learn a great deal from fiction, there is much we can only learn from each other.  Fiction readers want to be transported by a made up tale that reads like real life; our readers want authentic experience forged by imagination into a compelling story.   The novel has a tradition as a popular form a few hundred years long; the paint has barely dried on the sign labeled “Memoir” in your local bookstore. 

Like adolescents, no one can tell us what to do.  If we want to steal from purse of poetry or journalism, we will.  Like adolescents, we need to question the rules we’ve been handed. As a genre, our future is still unwritten. 

Fifteen years ago, I knew I wanted to be A Writer, and I knew I would never do the writing I needed to do without being enrolled in an MFA program. In 1997 the choice boiled down essentially to fiction or poetry.  I didn’t write poetry so by elimination my choice was made, but my true interest was in narrative nonfiction. I was in love with the possibilities of first person nonfiction.

Since that time I’ve written two memoirs (three, if you count one that never found a publisher—and why not?) and have been—for the last seven years—teaching memoir writing for the University of Washington’s Professional and Continuing Education program.  Teaching memoir writing has become a central passion in my life.  I’m inspired by my students’ stories and their successes.  My students have gone onto publish their own memoirs and to find their way into magazines and websites such as Salon, the New York Times, and the Yoga Journal.

Organizing Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat has been a wonderful extension of my vision as a writer and teacher of memoir.  I’m excited for the possibilities of the retreat, for the time together to discuss the possibilities of the still-young memoir form, and for the chance to be teaching in a community that includes the smarts and talent of Cheryl Strayed, Suzanne Finnamore, Ariel Gore, Candace Walsh, EJ Levy, and all of you.

See you there!

Theo

Theo’s Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat Classes:

1. It’s Not JUST About You: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and other things memoir might say

In this class we will discuss and experiment with ways that the memoir can use the individual experience to tell a larger story that lends insight into our culture, our times, and the universal experience.  We will examine how essayists and poets often use their authority as writers to tell us about the world we live in, as Allen Ginsberg does in the opening line of “Howl” and Joan Didion does throughout The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.  We will also discuss how Joseph Campbell’s theory of the 17-step monomyth can help you to find the hero’s journey within your own story.  But as heady as all this sounds, this class will be action-oriented and hands-on.  Get ready to find the bigger story in your memoir.

 2.Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts:  The Multiple-Narrative Memoir

Is your memoir not one story but two? Are you a bit daunted by the idea of writing a memoir with multiple narratives? Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, David Shields’ The Thing About Life is One Day You’ll Be Dead, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Claire Dederer’s Poser  and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge are just a few examples of memoirs that twine together more than one storyline very effectively.  In this hands-on class we will discuss techniques for weaving together multiple narratives and the benefits and drawbacks of doing so. 

Candace Walsh

Post by Candace Walsh

For the past 20 years, I’ve made my living playing with words, and if you want to do the same, I will be happy to guide and inspire you. In my classes, I’ll be bringing to the table my experience as an essay and memoir-writer, an anthology editor, a magazine editor (with all of its gifts of pragmatism and economy), and a social media expert.

One of my favorite parts of being an anthology editor was the feeling of being a den mother, of sorts, to the wonderful groups of writers who formed two distinct communities: those of Ask Me About My Divorce and Dear John: I Love Jane. I had worked with writers one-on-one as the features editor at Mothering magazine, mentoring and coaching hundreds of writers of varying experience levels, from a first-timer submitting a personal essay to a New York Times bestselling investigative journalist. And as the managing editor of New Mexico Magazine, I continue to collaborate with writers, intuitively co-creating story concepts and refining existing stories.

But when I was given the green light to write Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity (Seal Press, 2012), I was all alone. It was just me and the page, for 80,000 words. So I understand exactly how terrifying and arduous that is—as well as how transcendent and oh-so-worth-it.

The qualities that make my book, Licking the Spoon, connect powerfully to so many different kinds of people also inform my teaching. I’m a writer, an editor, I’m way into food, I’m mother of two grade-schoolers, a daughter, a sister. I survived and thrived after my parents’ divorce, various childhood traumas, and a brush with an eating disorder. I was married to a man for seven years, and then after my first marriage dissolved, I fell in love with a woman was fortunate enough to legally marry her in New York in 2011. Raised a born-again Christian, I fell away from it after high school. I went through an atheism phase, then was agnostic, and now subscribe to a loose amalgam of Vedic spirituality, animal medicine, and listening to my gut. I love to laugh, I never say never, and my wide range of life experiences informs both my writing and my teaching. Talking with writers about writing is my (totally non-stuffy) church.

 Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat Classes:

1. Showing Up on the Page: Sex and Sexuality

When I was in seventh grade, I used to love poking around in my friend’s mom’s library. She had dozens of pulpy bestsellers stacked on her shelves, and I played the game of pulling one out and flipping around until I found a sex scene. My friend’s mom wasn’t home a lot, so I had lots of time to familiarize myself with the passages, which were torrid. I ignored the other parts of the books.

That taught me about a lot of interesting, racy boudoir practices, but it also taught me that I did not want to write those kinds of books, their steamy passages rendering the rest of the books pallid and humdrum.

To me, acknowledging sex and sexuality in story is not an act of exhibitionism—it’s about not omitting. Memoir serves up one’s life on a plate. Who we love, what turns us on—owning those glorious blooms of vitality, revealing them without shame—throws open the door to creativity. When we feel open about who we love and how we love, our writing voice is not shadowed. We also give permission for others to own their desire and its illuminating power.

So, how to both invite this powerful subject and keep it from upstaging our story? We’ll begin by charting our own individual maps of desire and attraction, from childhood on (sharing it is up to you).

We’ll look at examples, comparing and contrasting raw and and edited versions of Anais Nin’s diary entries, discussing their strengths and weaknesses.

The velvet rope between what is revealed and what is kept off the page will be examined…and each person’s is different. “Elegance is refusal,” said Coco Chanel, referring to getting dressed, but it has a corollary in memoir writing. There’s power in not sharing all, just as there’s power in revealing.

We’ll also talk about writing not so that we stay in our comfort zone for this life span, but writing for future audiences who will not be bound by the same set of social rules. Isn’t the most enduring writing that which was bold for its time?

2. Turn Your Passion into a Project

All three of my books erupted into being from my passions. With Ask Me About My Divorce, I wanted to embrace a divorce experience free of unnecessary shame and stigma, and I wanted others to do the same. With Dear John, I Love Jane, I wanted to read and tell the stories of women whose sexual orientation shifted unexpectedly and powerfully. And with Licking the Spoon, I wanted to talk about the power of food to shape our memories, identity, and life, in different ways over time.

My passionate proposals met with success, and my anthologies’ calls for submissions were met with enthusiastic replies, more than I could ever publish. And yet another circle—the readers—met and continue to meet the book with their own thrills of recognition, connection, and gratitude. It feels really good, and I want the same for you.

What’s the topic that lights you up? Is it a single-author memoir, or an anthology you want to assemble, or a web-based project? How can you tell if it has legs? How will you find your writing tribe and your reader tribe? These questions and more will be addressed, giving students clarity and a distinct course of action.

Editor’s Note:  You can read more about Candace HERE and the prologue from her memoir LICKING THE SPOON HERE.

I think of writing workshops as akin to Buddhist transmission, passing along ancient wisdom about how writers can seduce audiences into empathy and out of egoism, a wisdom that dates back millennia to Aristotle. In my first year of graduate school, I was delighted to discover that through my teachers, I could trace my literary lineage back to Gertrude Stein (through my teachers to their teachers, stretching back to Paris in the 1920s).

E.J. LEVY

I have been blessed with remarkable teachers—Lee K. Abbott, Bill Roorbach, Nicholas Delbanco, Melanie Rae Thon, among others—each of whom offers a distinctive and marvelously precise vocabulary for the writing (and reading) of nonfiction and fiction, illuminating those forms and their possibilities. It’s a great pleasure for me to pass along their wisdom, and I hope some of my own, in workshops that aim to be both generative of material and illuminating of form, so that we take away from our discussions both the seed of new work and the ability to see more clearly the possibilities of the genre.

At Wild Mountain my workshops will aim to equip you with strategies and techniques to generate new work and to improve on what you have. Becoming a writer (as you likely know) is largely a matter of becoming the writer you are (which necessarily means figuring our what kind of writer that is)—discovering your obsessions, material, methods, work habits, strengths, the like. Even the most experienced writer reaches a limit from time to time, moments when you’re tired of your material or uncertain about how to proceed with an idea or draft. So we want to develop flexibility, to cultivate a range of tools and techniques to help us move to the next level in a piece, to generate new work, to move beyond what we think may be our limits, to keep developing as writers. In our work together, we’ll strive to address both aspects of the writer’s apprenticeship: discovering ourselves as writers and expanding our toolbox for the future.

Levy’s Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat Classes:

A) Visual Memoir: Every age reinvents its literary forms, so how can we as writers update the memoir form to reflect our increasingly visual and technological culture? How can we reinvigorate our prose in ways that deepen our art and expand our formal options? In our image-inundated twenty-first century, most contemporary prose still shies away from engaging the visual aspects of literary art. This workshop will offer participants a chance to explore the intersection of the visual and textual, as we experiment with making meta-narratives by refracting personal stories through the lens of non-literary forms. Workshop will include focused exercises, brief readings, and in-class discussion of a range of inspiring works from Eula Biss to Ander Monson, Michael Martone to Diane Schoemperlen and Kitty Burns Florey.

B) Food for Thought: A juicy story. Starving for love. Eat your heart out. The English language is rich in gustatory metaphors that bespeak the enduring connection between food and feeling, the link between our culinary and emotional lives. This workshop will engage writers in an exploration of their own food memories as a source of memoir through focused exercises, brief readings, and in-class discussion of that most enduring object of our affection—food.

[Bonus for readers interested in knowing what EJ Levy is writing at the moment:  Here’s the first chapter of E.J.’s memoir-in-progress, How to Cook an Elk. This first chapter, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” was included in the 2005 Best American  Essays (ed: Susan Orlean).]

(photo by Augusten Burroughs)

In 1998, my agent, Kim Witherspoon, plucked my manuscript from the slush pile and eventually sold it to Knopf and Twentieth Century Fox; I was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Author of 1999. My second book, a roman à clef about my high-risk pregnancy, The Zygote Chronicles, was published by Grove/Atlantic and was a Washington Post Book of The Year in 2003. My third book, Split: A Memoir of Divorce began as a 5,000 word feature in O magazine entitled, “After He Left.” It was subsequently written into a memoir and published by Penguin Worldwide in both the US and England. Split was chosen as a Library Journal Book of The Year in 2008, and was a Guardian Bestseller and a WH Smith Bestseller in the UK.  It was excerpted in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, as well as in The London Times.

A journalist of the human condition, I have been interviewed on NPR several times; published and profiled in New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Salon, Mademoiselle, Glamor, Marie Clare, Modern Bride, and Redbook; I am a frequent contributor to O Magazine.

My next book, Add To Cart: A Memoir of Loss, Lust, and Finding My Second Husband Online at 50, is in its final stage of completion and agony. I live in Durham, North Carolina with my husband, three children, two dogs, and a cat the size of a pony. For more information, please visit my website at www.suzannefinnamore.com. I look forward to seeing you in March.

Finnamore’s Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat Classes

Structure: Without It You’re Lost

Wherein I explain that memoir writing is not wandering through the forest of your memory without a compass or map…how not all of us are genius prose poets who can free associate our way to a cohesive text or compelling story. I will offer sturdy advice on how structure, like the chassis of a car, can and will transport both writer and reader to a place of wonder and enlightenment. How without structure you will flail and falter and drift into the night.

Using my first book, Otherwise Engaged and my third book, Split: A Memoir of Divorce, as prime examples, I will demonstrate how structure took me from the blank page (and in the case of my memoir, a place of chaos and emotional desolation) to a tight manuscript, an author’s advance from Knopf and Penguin Worldwide, and eventually to recognition and Oprah’s Book Club. I will also expound on my own recipe for creating not just structure but a cinematic feeling that will create tension and hook the reader in from page one (How To Write A Scene: THE NECKLACE THEORY.) An Extensive and brutally honest Question and Answer period will make up the last third of this class.

Getting Out Of Your Own Way/ Overcoming Fear and Rejection and Turning Your Very Worst Moments Into Money

In this class I deconstruct the radical decision to turn your worst moments into money in the form of a memoir that many many people really really don’t want you to write. Using personal anecdotes and writing existences, I will lay myself bare and describe how and why I wrote my divorce memoir, what I kept in and left out (and why) and the process of having it legally vetted by my publisher. I will take students through all the submission and editorial steps of sending a memoir to press. I intend to galvanize students to own their experiences and give them hard won advice on how to do it without ending up in shackles, either real or imagined.

I will also discuss rejection and how as writers we must embrace rejection as our very best friend and as a child of our heart and art. I will bring my thick folio of rejection letters and my article on rejection that ran in O Magazine. I will describe my process – which is not at all unusual – wherein my memoir was rejected (repeatedly) and was first in fact written as a novel (out of fear) before emerging as a memoir and having multiple bids by major publishers. How rejection and revisions happened with all three of my books — and most importantly, how to somehow deal with it and go on to press. I will encourage and explain students how to traverse these flaming hoops and press on regardless. (Another) Extensive and brutally honest Question and Answer period will make up the last third of this class.

Besides writing, Mike has been a long-time environmental activist working for The Wilderness Society, the Idaho Conservation League, American Lands and Hell’s Canyon Preservation Council. He currently lives in Boise.  In the Seattle area?  Mike will be reading at the University Bookstore at 7pm on Thursday, January 10th.

Theo: Tell us a little bit about On the Dark Side of the Moon.

Mike: It is a memoir about having a debilitating stroke in the wilderness of Craters of the Moon in southeast Idaho and recovering from it.  At the time of my stroke, I was the Idaho representative of American Lands, a nonprofit environmental organization, and took a group of friends and fellow conservationists to see Craters in preparation for a trip by the Secretary of Interior Babbitt.  Babbitt worked for President Clinton and planned to designate an enormous National Monument in Idaho.  Craters of the Moon is a vast flow of lava that erupted about 5000 years ago and it includes islands of grasslands within the flow—some of them, like Laidlaw Park at 50,000 acres are very big.  While we were hiking in this rugged lava flow at Craters, I had a stroke and was unseen for three hours as my colleagues were ahead of me in a rainy mist.  I simply collapsed and had no idea what hit me.  I was paralyzed and couldn’t stand up, much less walk, I couldn’t speak or think well.   My colleagues searched for me on the trailless country and found me just before sunset.  Katie Fite ran and drove about 50 miles in desolate country to get a group of volunteer rescuers and in another 2 or 3 hours I was light-flighted to Pocatello.  It was all very dramatic and I stayed there for about 2 weeks.  During that time I learned what it was to have a stroke.  It is unthinkable.

I learned to walk, run, speak, write, and think again over the next 3 years.  The slowest parts of recovery were my speech and memory, which continue to improve over the 12 years since the stroke.  As I walked in Craters of the Moon over the years to regain myself, I realized that the land had suffered from a lava flow, overgrazing, and all sorts of other human caused degradation and that it too was recovering.  It was slowly changing and becoming a new self.  In that Craters of the Moon and I were much the same.  Craters of the Moon was designated as a 750,000 acre National Monument and Preserve and is now recovering.  In my case luck, determination, and years of fighting to regain my dignity, put me on the path of recovery.   The book tells that story.

Theo:  What were some of the challenges you faced in writing this book and how did you overcome them?

Mike: Well, learning to walk and run came back pretty quickly, after I got over the surprise of it.  Running is the task of hard practice, and that’s what I did to regain both walking and running; it was nothing new.  Learning my name and all of the details of my former life came a bit slower.  I remember trying to open a lock that had a combination: that was humbling and I now have only locks that are opened with a key.  There are shortcuts to just about everything.  Relearning to speak came within a year and writing has taken me a bit longer.  As you can see 12 years have provided me with that.  Well mostly…

I have been a runner since 1972 and I wanted to prove to myself that I could run again. I didn’t think I could ever run again.  So I exercised regularly to strengthen my right leg and to run with a good rhythm.  In 2005 I ran a marathon at a tolerable speed.   I approached getting my writing skills in much the same way.  I practiced and trained.  I talked with people whom I respected and listened to their sometimes withering advice.  I went to writers’ conferences in Idaho and California at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and slowly I refined the skills that I once felt I owned.  I sent portions of my manuscript out to a variety of magazines and got a few published.  Then I compiled all of the pieces into a book.  The problem I had was that I couldn’t concentrate for more than a paragraph and that made giving the larger manuscript any sense of continuity a real problem.

So what did I do?  Of course I sent it out to publishers.  And they all sent it back with some very kind but disparaging comments. Or no comments at all.  I realized that the manuscript required much more work. But one place, University of Nevada Press, asked me to work on the manuscript because they thought it had some promise.  I went through three revisions that UN suggested over about three years and they finally said, “Nope.”  However, the manuscript was now in pretty good shape and with one more developmental edit, which was paid for by an Idaho Arts Commission grant, the manuscript was ready to be sent out to other publishers or agents.

I elected to send it to publishers because I figured that an agent was about as hard to find as a publisher and I was disgusted with all of the hassle and riggamarole that I had gone through.  I was finished and the book was behind me.  Period.  At that time, I sent the manuscript to Caxton Press and got the most encouraging letter from a man who had considered and rejected the manuscript several years before.  He would publish the manuscript.

I also got a note from an agent at great agency that she would like to read the full manuscript.  Ok, so I lied, I sent out a few letters to agents…  But did I need her?   Nope.  And I received another note from a publisher that she would like to read my full manuscript.  I sent her as nice a note as I could, you know, a polite “sorry but….” letter.  She responded: “Congratulations.”  That’s a sweet, sweet word!

Theo: What’s one thing you’ve learned about writing and publishing a book?

Mike: An environmental leader once said to me many years ago, ” Winning requires endless pressure, endlessly applied.”  That about sums it up.  Or something that Winston Churchill said: “Never give up.  Never!  Never!  Never!”  But don’t bang up your head about that advice; there may be shortcuts that work for you.  I haven’t found them.

Theo: Who are some of your favorite writers?  What books have had the greatest influence on you?

Mike: Anton Checkov’s The Cherry Orchard, Dennis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Katherine Anne Porter’s collected stories, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Emily Dickensen’s poetry, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” David Shield’s Nonfiction book Reality Hunger which is wacko-great!,  Julio Cortzar’s Hopscotch, Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge, Robert McCrum’s My Year Off, and Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight.  Each of these works have specific things that I look for.  For example, Katherine Ann Porter is, for my taste, the best writer of short stories and can make zinging points most vividly.  Check out her story “Theft” or “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”  I want to copy her style.  In Jill Bolte Taylor’s book she tells a gripping story regardless of her crummy writing.  I don’t want to copy her at all but I am looking at why her book was so popular—it is her story, her remarkable recovery, and her spirituality.  Each writer has something unique to teach. Craig Childs is my current favorite.  He writes nonfiction about deserts and the West primarily, that absolutely sings!  His new book is Apocalyptic Planet.  Haven’t figured him out yet.

Theo: Do you have a writing routine?  How does writing fit into the rest of your life?

Mike: I was writing at dawn for a couple hours for about 10 years, but I’m off that schedule now until my book runs its course.  Generally, I think without direction for the rest of each day, do tasks,  work, or go for a run. My mind is a funny thing: the more I ignore what I want to think about, the more will bubble-up and become useful as writing.  But trying to sell my book has put me off of that “schedule” as well.  Anyway, I like to read in the evening until I fall asleep.  Writing doesn’t fit into my life; my life fits into my writing schedule, which seems a bit pathetic.  I tend not to bitch about being in a writing slump, even if I am in one; I go for a run, look at the beauty and cruelness of nature, and let my apprehensions run their course.

Theo: What advice do you have for emerging writers?

Mike:Write!

Figure out a certain time to write and try to live with it.

Don’t get on the internet and silence your phone until 9am if you’re writing at 5:30.  Dawdle from 5:30 until your coffee is ready.  If it’s never ready, well, try again tomorrow.

Edit before sending out writing.  Let your writing ripen.  And uh, follow my advice, not my actions…

Like Earnest Hemmingway has said:  “It’s easy.  Just sit before your typewriter and bleed.”  If you don’t just love your bloody computer, find a sinecure and be happy with it.

Theo: See you at Wild Mountain, Mike!

[In Seattle? Check out retreat goer Mike Medberry's reading at the University of Washington's UW Bookstore in the UDistrict this Thursday, January 10th, 2013,  7:00 pm.   On the Dark Side of the Moon: A Journey to Recovery (CAXTON)]

Prologue of Licking the Spoon (Seal Press, 2012)

I have made risotto in many seasons and climes, but it’s a dish best made in the icy nadir of a New York February. Standing over a hot stove, coaxing broth into swelling Arborio rice grains solely with elbow grease, the burner’s flame, and a wooden spoon, is cozy when it’s cold outside but masochistic in July.

But it was February 1998, and the man I might marry was climbing up the four flights of narrow, spiraling, tenement-smelling stairs to my postage stamp–size kitchen, where I stood, beaming, dewy, and bare legged, in my black Manolo Blahnik knockoff stiletto mules, midcalf A-line charcoal wool skirt, and sleeveless shell.

On the menu: seafood-mushroom risotto and a dessert of crêpes with chocolate sauce.

Like the favorite dress you give away because it’s too small (right before ten pounds fall off ), I no longer have the mushroom cook- book, and I feel the regret-frizzled ache of its loss. I gave it to Goodwill because I hadn’t cooked from it in years. But at the time, it was a reliable friend, one of the first cookbooks my mother gave me. When I was a vegetarian, mushrooms often stood in for meat, given their chewiness and rich, smoky taste.

After work, I hurried to a Chinatown seafood market to buy littleneck clams, shrimp, and rings of stretchy calamari. I plucked oyster, hen-of-the-woods, and chanterelle mushrooms from the mounds of perfect produce at SoHo’s Dean & DeLuca. Shallots and leeks and saffron and stock were on hand at home. But I bought a bottle of tart white wine to add when caramelizing the aromatics.

All of these errands took longer than I had anticipated, and I was forced to call Will and postpone the time of his arrival.

“I don’t mind arriving before it’s ready,” he said. “I love to hang out, talk, have a glass of wine, and watch people cook.”

“That sounds lovely and I wish I could say yes,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be able to concentrate.”

I needed a certain amount of Zen, solo space to cook unfamiliar dishes. When peppered with comments and questions, I grew distracted and snippy. The food suffered, and so did the interlocutor. It was way too early in the relationship to reveal my flaws.

I wanted to reveal my cooking instead. This night had a back- wardness to it; my usual pattern was to invite a suitor up after a few chaste restaurant dates, cook a toothsome dinner, and then allow one thing to lead to another. Cooking for me was many things, but in these moments it was a form of foreplay. And it could be quite telling.

“I love chopped salads,” Ralph exclaimed. That, along with his too-small feet and the low-fat Entenmann’s cookies in his closet- size kitchenette, did not count in his favor.

“This doesn’t have any protein,” Daniel groused, when I placed stir-fried vegetables over rice in front of him. I burst into shocked, embarrassed tears, as if he had just criticized me personally. That would follow.

Jack told me ahead of time that he couldn’t bring himself to eat “red things or round things.”

Po didn’t really like eggs—in fact, it seemed like his goal was to subsist on a diet of beer, wine, and hard liquor.

But Will and I had already gone to bed—precipitously, after running into each other in the same wine bar twice in the space of a week. I was sure, when I woke up the next morning, that I had spoiled something promising by having sex so soon. But instead, he pulled me close to him and smiled. “Good morning, beautiful.”

I found myself asking Will to dinner to heighten the chances that I’d see him again. He could cancel, of course, but a plan was better than the bird-on-a-wire suspension of waiting for the phone to ring. Anyone could fake her way through a congenial morning before dropping off the face of the earth. I’d done it myself.

I didn’t want Will to drop off the face of the earth. He was different—an ambitious intellectual overflowing with ideas, philosophical theories, opera librettos, wine varietals, and classical composers. He was tall and thin, but moved with economy and precision. His skin was pale with golden undertones, like milk from the grass-fed cows that grazed where his father was raised in the Jura region of France . . . and his hair was the dark ash brown of a graphite pencil.

And although he spoke with the ironclad confidence of a practiced university lecturer, something in his demeanor exuded a vulnerability that caused me to pleasurably collapse inside. When he put on his paper-thin V-neck cotton undershirt the morning after our first night together, the pale inverted triangle below his sternum was so fragile and bare that I swooped in and kissed it.

And here I was, two nights later, freshly showered and made up, adding the seventh portion of broth to the thrifted, thick-bottomed Dutch oven. The rice grains were plump and glossy; the pot soon to be covered, the heat of the delicious glop poised to delicately steam the seafood, and in return, the shellfish would release its liquor.

The crêpe batter was chilled in a bowl in the refrigerator, and the chocolate was prepped to melt in my makeshift double boiler.

Bleat! went the buzzer. I pressed the small plastic button that released the big, heavy wooden door four floors below. Will bounded up the stairs, wine in one hand and flowers in the other. I opened the door and he crossed into my fragrant kitchen, smelling of wintry city air and promise.

…

by retreat faculty Candace Walsh

It’s February 2007. The place: Santa Fe, New Mexico. You could fit my entire New York apartment into my current kitchen, which is nestled in a sleek adobe house at the top of one of the Sangre de Cristo foothills. I have counter space to burn, and my current knockoff isn’t a pair of wannabe Manolos; it’s an oversize stainless steel stove with six burners that looks like a Viking from a distance. It was one of the reasons we fell for the house, along with the mega–living room, gorgeous views, long, meandering driveway, clusters of piñon trees, and privacy.

My two children, ages three and five, have their father, Will’s, milky skin. Honorée has my features and Will’s slim body. Toddler Nathaniel’s face is Will’s, but he’s barrel-chested and doughty, like my brothers.

Tonight, I’m making a multicourse dinner for six. We will start with appetizers and aperitifs.

Lillet on ice, graced with a single round slice of orange, and kir royales. I’ve got a single long, fresh baguette to accompany the cheese plate: pungent, creamy, melting Époisses de Bourgogne, arid manchego, a knob of chèvre, and a wedge of cambozola. It sits on the kitchen island beside a tray of endive leaves filled with rosettes of smoked whitefish mousse and sprinkled with grassy chive snippets.

The mushroom-chestnut soup is warm on the stove and will be served in red Emile Henry footed lion’s-head bowls. I had to order the dusky chestnuts online, and threw in a tall, narrow jar of boozy cherries with a label as beautiful as an art deco poster.

The main course: lamb chops Champvallon, with soupe à l’oignon gratinée. According to Cooking with Daniel Boulud, the lamb recipe was created by a mistress of King Louis XIV who hoped to gain his favor. If he was taken by lamb chops braised with onions, potatoes, and thyme, she was successful.

The onion soup gratin was a 1907 French recipe reprinted by The New York Times in 1974, when I was two, and then re-rescued from obscurity by New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser in February 2007. It’s the kind of recipe that makes people moo with pleasure.

It involves layering toasted, buttered baguette slices with Emmental cheese, tomato purée, and caramelized onions in a five-and-a-half-quart Dutch oven. I used the red Le Creuset that Will ordered for my birthday from Broadway Panhandler our first December in Santa Fe.

The entire construction is bathed in heated salt water, simmered on the stovetop, and baked for an hour in the oven. Hesser writes (one of my favorite sentences in the English language):

“The soup is ready when the surface looks like a crusty, golden cake and the inside is unctuous and so well blended that it is impossible to discern either cheese or onion.”

Dessert was made the day before and chills in the fridge: a bittersweet chocolate tart with a walnut crust. The boozy cherries will be spooned atop each dense, satin-textured wedge.

The children will be fed pizza before the guests arrive, since they never like my complicated dishes.

But this time, despite my married status and the children we’ve sired and nurtured, the house we bought together, three trips to France, thousands of dinners and breakfast omelets, couplings and records played, trips back and forth to the car to unload grocery bags, nights between the same sheets . . . the last person I am cooking for is Will.

In fact, he won’t even be here tonight. He’s at a work-related dinner. When I found out about the conflict, I was secretly relieved. I was infatuated enough to brazen through a dinner with both my husband and the person I had a crush on, but it would be even better to not have him present.

One moment in the last five months, I lost my moral footing. Will and I had spent enough time in France, enjoying the food and wine and swooning over the scenery. But we’d never for one moment thought that the tacit acceptance of infidelity was worthy of emulation. We thought it was wrong.

But look at me now. I’ve arranged to have my daughter’s friend sleep over so that she and my daughter and son will be busy play- ing all night, and not underfoot. I’m happy that my husband can’t be here. I’m cooking a side dish in the pot he gave me as a gift. Who am I?

I’ve schemed and plotted to get C. into my house—inviting four other people to camouflage the architecture of my designs.

There was a bridge, and I crossed it. A line in the sand that I stepped over. Or did I just go to sleep one night and wake to find myself on the other side? Either way, I’m intoxicated to be here.

Licking the Spoon (Seal Press, 2012)

At the upcoming Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, I’ll be teaching a course in Overcoming Rejection: Press On Regardless. In this class I offer tools on how to face and even benefit from rejection. I’ll talk about how my book, Split: A Memoir of Divorce began as a novel, which was rejected 22 times before being rewritten as memoir and going to press*, how this happened with all three of my books and most importantly, how to press on regardless.

I am a writer, but that’s not what I aspired to be. I wanted to be a dancer. I took classes for 12 years, often crawling to the bathroom on all fours in the morning because I could not stand up, due to grueling hours at the studio and muscles that were stretched beyond their limit.

After surviving the audition for an elite dance class at the University of California at Berkeley, I felt I was on my way to realizing my dream. But one semester later I was called into the dance director’s office and told I didn’t have what it takes. For one thing, I could not do a pirouette. For another, I had breasts and, according to tradition, those just get in a dancer’s way. Marinating in defeat and shame, I watched The Turning Point compulsively and felt ill.

I was demoted to the general phys ed dance class. After a few weeks, I had to admit it was more fun than the highly structured and competitive environment of the elite class. I also declared a new major: English literature. Although this was my second choice, it became abundantly clear after I joined the workforce that it was the right one for me. The job opportunities were a lot better, as were my long-term prospects for pleasure. Reading and writing are not only vastly more rewarding than shin splints but you can do them when you’re 90, whereas you very rarely see women that age performing Giselle.

It was in a college poetry-writing class that I met my first big love, Reed. He admired my poems and looked, not incidentally, like a young Marlon Brando. We dated until the end of the school year, when he informed me that he still loved his ex-girlfriend. I was so devastated that I missed my own graduation because I could not bear the thought of seeing them together.

Reed became a minister, and a good one from what I hear. We are still friends. But because he dumped me, I developed into an autonomous woman who surely never would have emerged had I married straight out of college. Also there is this: Would I have made a good minister’s wife? Probably not. Minister’s wives don’t wear black boots, they don’t drink, and they rarely, if ever, say “s***fire.” At the time, though, Reed was everything I thought I wanted in a man, and I cried every day for months.

Eventually I learned that I can survive heartbreak, and I wrote more poems. This led to being published in Ms.magazine, the brainchild of my idol Gloria Steinem. All told, I earned $150. I decided to try my hand at commercial copywriting, which pays somewhat more amply.

I remember preparing a massive presentation five years into my first advertising copywriter’s job (at a small agency located in a desultory suburb whose name had to do with walnuts). It was a presentation for a gaggle of car dealers who were meeting at a fancy resort in Maui. I had worked hard to add the finishing creative touches, and just as I completed the task, my boss called me into his spacious office. He informed me that although most of my colleagues were bound for Hawaii, I would not be attending the meeting. I was to stay behind, like Cinderella.

That day I revised my résumé and faxed it to the creative director of a large agency in San Francisco. The timing was ideal; the agency had just landed a huge account. I was interviewed by a woman who ignored my hideous portfolio of car ads and just like the honest way I described my job and my frustration with it. She met me on a Saturday and called with an offer the next Monday—and within an hour, I gave my two-week notice. “Don’t get mad, get even” is not my motto. My motto is, “Do feel angry and don’t just get even—go to a much higher place where they can’t see you from their lawn chairs, which are probably missing slats.”

My first novel was represented by a very encouraging literary agent in the state of Washington. After being rejected by no fewer than 19 publishing houses, I shelved the book. As a teacher of Anne Lamott’s once told her, “Every writer has a novel that isn’t published. This will be yours.” I felt bruised but not broken. I retained a wild optimism based on youth and the affable nature of many of the rejection letters. Several editors stated that I obviously had talent. But they gently added, I had forgotten to include one small detail: a plot. I made a mental note: Remember to have a plot.One rejection was harrowing, though. In spidery handwriting, a somewhat famous editor said I was “intoxicated with my own style.” It was like a dagger to my spleen. Yet within hours I realized he was right. I was intoxicated with my own style. I never forgot that. Had he been kinder and more tactful, I would not have gotten the point. That’s how I learned that sometimes the cruelest cuts hold the greatest information. You remember the rejections in ways that you don’t remember the successes. They reach you in a primal spot. Rejection can be like mulch: dirty, smelly, and essential to growth.

I eventually wrote another novel, which I eagerly submitted to my agent. After three flesh-eating silent months, I received a thick envelope with my manuscript and a terse letter. My agent explained that not only did she feel there was not market for the book, she apologized for taking so long to reject it, saying that the agency was very busy with projects that were in the works. In other words, not only was I inadequate but others were catapulting into fruition with the regularity of bunny rabbits.

After a four-month depression, I decided my Washington agent was wrong. Sometimes setbacks make you feel that perhaps you have made your goal too small—you need to aim not lower but higher. What the hell, in other words.

Marshaling my courage, I sent ten query letters to agents in New York. Within days I had my replies. Not one but two agents wanted to represent me. The woman I chose became my fairy godmother. She sold the book immediately, as well as the film rights. I resisted the impulse to contact my ex-agent to inform her of the good news. I decided she should have the thrill of discovery.

Don’t get me wrong. I detest rejection. And I do take it personally, even though, according to self-help mavens, I am not supposed to. Yet I am too stubborn to admit defeat for long.

I think that, especially in matters of work, you should expect rejection on a regular basis. To try to avoid it is a major mistake, as you will massage your unique style into the consistency of gruel in the vain effort to try to please everyone all the time. In general, the populace will be divided into four groups: (1) people who understand and appreciate what you are trying to do, (2) people who understand and don’t appreciate it, (3) people who don’t understand and appreciate it anyway, and (4) people who don’t understand and hate your guts. It is not important that everyone fall into the first category; it is only important that you participate in life.

It is also key to listen and watch for the message the rejection has hidden in its folds. At 40 I now believe rejection is God’s way of kicking you to higher ground. That said, I would add that although this has always held a gift for me, I still sometimes grow tired of God’s boot print on my ass.

When a county deputy served me a petition for divorce, I placed it in a desk drawer, unable to endure its typed finality. One day soon afterward, I took it out and taped it to the refrigerator door. I needed to see it, to absorb the harsh reality that my marriage was over. The next day, I found a hawk feather on my front porch. A few days later, I found another hawk feather in almost the exact same spot. It was no accident. I believed I was being alerted to the possibility that, from a distance, this vast rejection was a blessing in disguise, I placed the two feathers above the petition and felt a little less sad.

Divorce is not something desired; I think it is often a terrible mistake with far-reaching consequences. Yes I know the law of balance works, and probably I will reap manifold gifts from my brief marriage. When I look at my son’s face, I see I already have.

As long as I am alive, I will be rejected. We all will. I try to loosen up, to become more of an observer, as though I am watching a film whose plot twists and turns only enhance the eventual resolution. It’s just plain interesting to go through big changes, to feel improved as a result of pratfalls, turnarounds, and upheavals. Rejection? Bring it on, I want to say. Bring it on.

…

Suzanne Finnamore is the internationally bestselling author of Otherwise Engaged (Vintage), The Zygote Chronicles (Grove/Atlantic) and Split: A Memoir of Divorce (Penguin Worldwide), an Oprah Book Club pick and a Library Journal Book of the Year. She is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Author and a Washington Post Book of the Year award winner. She lives in Durham, NC with her family.

Want to finish and publish your memoir this year?  Here are four resolutions to knock your writing up a level to create a memoir of enduring value that readers want to read and publishers will want to buy.

1.      This year I will make myself vulnerable on the page.

What’s the one quality that keeps me reading a memoir?  The narrator’s willingness to make himself vulnerable.   Most often in memoir the narrator’s vulnerability originates from sharing stuff most of us want to hide—our fears, our mistakes, our smallness, our regrets.   Yet, big confession doesn’t always translate to instant vulnerability. We don’t really need more tales of simple carnality and depravity.  It isn’t necessary to have broken nine of the Ten Commandments to earn the reader’s attention.  I think most readers of memoir are compelled by the nuances of intimacy over the lap dance; we’d rather read a slow rendering of envy or avarice than yet another bald confession of adultery. We’re looking for insight, for subtlety, but mostly we desire the writer’s complicity in the problem.  Before writing, ask yourself, “What was my part?” and then dare yourself to show that part.

2.     This year I will share wisdom in my writing.

In Writing the Memoir, memoirist Judith Barrington describes “musing” as the memoirist’s skill of making an insightful observation about a specific situation or a more general human condition.  In fiction writing classes, writers are admonished to “show not tell,” but in memoir, it’s perfectly okay—and in my opinion, advisable—to show and tell.  And musing is the tell.  Musing is the place in the story where you get to share your wisdom about grief or alienation or the price of success.  For most of us, doling out wisdom can feel scary and unnatural. Writing about the nature of betrayal or love, we can be met with a rush of “Who am I to say?” But it is this type of wisdom—and the underlying boldness that generates this expression of wisdom—that readers of memoir hunger for.  We want the author to own her authority (yes, the roots of the words are the same).  We long for it.  Dare to offer not just your story but the wisdom you’ve gained from it.

Here are a couple of examples of musing that demonstrate the type of conviction I believe readers of memoir crave:

From Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: “I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries. The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”

From Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: “[Grace] is unearned love—the love that goes before–that  greets us on the way.  It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

3.     This year I will not shun drama.

In real life, none of us want to be known as a drama queen, but in memoir, you need to embrace the drama of your own story and not be shy about playing it up here and there, especially in the opening and closing lines of chapters.  While we might feel self-indulgent underscoring the drama of our own narratives, I think that it actually takes courage and humility to own the dramatic in your story. Why courage?  Because being dramatic means fighting the conditioning that tells many of us to stay small, to not make a big deal of things, to not make ourselves “the center of the universe.”  But in our memoirs, we are the center of the universe.  As writers of memoir, being the center of the universe is our job.

I find tremendous courage in the way Cheryl Strayed uses dramatic repetition and foreshadowing at the end of sections and chapters in Wild. I think it is brave to write the words “I would suffer,” as she does in the book’s Prologue. In fact, all of this drama-filled final paragraphs of the Prologue seems wildly courageous and fierce to me:

It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said hone and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.

            It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

 4.     This year I will seek to illuminate the universal aspects of my story.

I’ve written elsewhere about how important it is not to believe that our own stories are inherently interesting just because the events are sensational.  My favorite quote about this comes from V.S. Pritchett: “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for the living.”

As Claire Dederer, author of Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses, has said, “In memoir, the transformation of the self is the story.” It’s not enough to tell an exciting story; you need to tease out the story of transformation within your narrative.  And the story of transformation is, in essence, the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell wrote about in The Hero with A Thousand Faces, the cross cultural, universal story of a hero who is called to leave the ordinary world to journey into a special one. The hero—in a memoir, that’s you—heeds the call and makes his way through the special world over obstacles and through tests until, at last, he returns to the ordinary world.  But he is no longer the same person who left pages ago for the special world; he is transformed.

And this universal story of transformation—even if it is transformation so externally imperceptible that no one but you might know it exists—this is the story of the most powerful memoirs.  Read Strayed’s Wild with one eye to the hero’s journey and you’ll see what I mean. A woman is called into a special world; when she returns to the ordinary world, she is transformed. It’s the story of transformation your readers long for.  Find it within yourself and give it to them.

Theo Pauline Nestor: How did you get started writing?

Tim Elhajj

 Tim Elhajj: I loved to read when I was a boy but had a hard time imagining myself as someone would could pull a story together, much less a book. I went to college later than most and ended up in a fiction class taught by Alice Sebold. More than anything else, Alice gave me the sense that writing was a lifestyle. Not so much a profession (though it can certainly be one) as a way of looking at the world. In that class I first started to see myself as a writer. I began thinking about the various narratives that were most important to me and looking at the world as a writer.

TPN: How did it feel when your essay was published in the Modern Love column?  Did that impact how you saw yourself as a writer?

TE: Exciting! “As a Father I Was Hardly a Perfect Fit” was my first published work. It’s a story about my relationship with my oldest son and I savored calling him on the phone the Sunday it came out and hearing him describe his own feelings reading it. The impact it had on me was huge. If you read the story, you’ll see I don’t mention at all that I’m a recovering heroin addict. After it was published, I realized that if I were going to explore my relationship with my son in my writing, I would have to be willing to reveal more about my life–especially my years in early recovery. I eventually turned away from the childhood memoir I was working on and started work on what would become my first book, Dopefiend: A Father’s Journey from Addiction to Redemption. 

TPN: Tell us a bit about Dopefiend.

TE: Dopefiend is a recovery memoir, but it’s really about the lengths a father will go to find a satisfying relationship with his son. Sometimes you have to follow the most unlikely path to find the thing you want most.

This is the little marketing blurb I’m using to sell the book, but it’s really true. Parenting and fatherhood are the two big narratives that interest me most. It’s a theme I return to again and again in my stories. I’ve actually failed spectacularly as a parent and father and recognizing this has given me a foundation on which I can build satisfying relationships with all my kids. Dopefiend is the story of building that foundation.

TPN: What authors/books have influenced you?

TE: Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver are at the top of the list. I like to think I learn a little something from every book I finish. Currently I’m reading Neil Gaiman and Sherman Alexie.

TPN: Readers, want to see more from Tim?  Check out the blog he edits with his wife, Holly, Junklit.

Theo Pauline Nestor: How did you get started writing memoir? 

Wendy Staley Colbert

Wendy Staley Colbert: When I was a teenager, I remember telling my parents I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t feel I had enough life experience yet.  I took the practical route.  I majored in journalism, wrote for my college newspaper and magazine, and found I enjoyed writing personal profiles best.  (I interviewed a sculptor, a male stripper, and a halfway house owner, among others.)

I graduated and went to work for a corporation.  Then 9/11 and some difficult personal events occurred, spurring me back to pursuing my passion.  I completed a couple of certificate programs at the University of Washington, first in Literary Fiction, then Memoir.  (I tried fictionalizing my stories, but didn’t find that as satisfying.)

TPN: You’ve had a number of publications in the last year.  Do you have a strategy for developing essays and getting them into print (or online)? How has it felt to have these personal stories come out into the world?

 WSC: I try to keep my essays short (around 2,000 words) and the scope tight.  I track where each essay is in the revision process – whether both of my writers’ groups have reviewed it.  I spend hours researching potential publications, and have created a spreadsheet where I track each of my essays along with the publications I’m targeting, including audience size, whether simultaneous submissions are accepted, pay rate, turnaround time, date submitted, date accepted/rejected, etc.

I think about timeliness and newsworthiness when submitting.  (For example, I submit breast cancer pieces in September, just prior to Breast Cancer Awareness month, when online publications are most likely to be hungry for that type of content).

It feels great to see my stories published.  I enjoy making sense of life events by turning them into a form of art (imperfect as it may be).

 TPN: What are you working on now?

 WSC: I’m actively submitting an essay I just completed about a difficult situation – giving birth to a stillborn baby. I’ve drafted a few other essays that I’m in the process of revising.  And I’ve got a couple of ideas for book-length memoirs.  I’m beginning to work on a book proposal.

TPN: What are some of your favorite memoirs?  Favorite writers?

WSC: I love The Year of Magical Thinking, The Memory Palace, The Boy in the Moon, Just Kids, and What Disturbs Our Blood.  Some of my favorite writers are Joan Didion, Ian Brown, James Fitzgerald, Phillip Lopate.  I’m discovering new favorites all the time, through magazines like Ploughshares, Creative Nonfiction, and Narrative.

Most of my memoir students through the University of Washington’s Professional and Continuing Education department come to writing after having already established themselves in other fields. Katy Horan, who will be attending Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, exemplifies this trend.  As a college student, Katy dreamed of writing, but turned her attention to medicine. Today, she fits writing classes and writing time into her already busy life as a pulmonary and critical care physician.  Here’s a little bit about how Katy got her new career as a writer started.  Also, a bonus, below the interview you’ll find Katy’s essay, “A Time to Be Born and a Time to Die,” which was published on ModernLoveRejects.com, a wonderful site for the hundreds of essays out there  written for the Times‘ Modern Love column but didn’t quite make the cut. (Modern Love Rejects’ humorous tagline: “All the Love That’s Not Fit to Print”)

Cheers,

Theo

Theo Pauline Nestor: How did you get started writing memoir?

KATY HORAN

Katy Horan: I went to Duke to be an English major with the dreams of writing novels.  I hated reading the canon and was terrified of the required Milton class and soon dropped out of the English program.  But, I loved my writing class which was called Writing 102 twenty years ago, but would probably be called Narrative Nonfiction.  I wrote about important topics like my sister trying to force me to pluck my eyebrows and the beauty of calloused heels.  My now narrator is totally cracking up at how my then narrator would be so disappointed in me now–sellout with plucked eyebrows and soft pedicures.

I didn’t write much other than morose journal entries and dull medical journal articles for almost 20 years and then while writing an article on nontuberculous mycobacteria, I couldn’t think of a word.  It was almost physically painful to not be able to think of the word (which I can’t recall now, but now it doesn’t hurt).  I thought, there it goes, that’s my brain atrophying.  I mentioned this to one of my patients who gave me an assignment from your class, then encouraged me to take your class.

TPN: Was this Modern Love Rejects piece your first publication?  How did it feel?

KH: My first publication was 17 word poem that was published in a West coast literary journal and I was paid $2.  I still have the check.  It wasn’t worth the gas money to cash it.  Even in 1989, two dollars couldn’t rent you a new release at the video store.

Modern Love Rejects’ acceptance of piece and seeing the piece online was a little surreal.  When I took your class, I told myself, “I’m just doing this because writing had gotten so hard.  Not to publish or anything.”  After I saw it online, all my delusions of grandeur took over and I thought,  “maybe I should write a whole book.”

TPN: What are you working on now?

KH: I writing a piece about getting lost while trail running in the Hill Country in Texas earlier this year.  It’s a little confused about what it wants to be: part of it wants to be about the importance of meditative space, part of it wants to be about how we turn on ourselves and the ones we love when we are stressed.

TPN: What are some of your favorite memoirs?  Favorite writers?

KH: Mary Karr The Liar’s Club:  I haven’t read it for years, but I smile whenever I pass its red cover.  Her narrator was the bravest, baddest, and she was from Texas, which is mainly where I grew up.  It had an amazing sense of place and people, very specific for East Texas.  I never read another book by her–I wanted to keep her frozen in that age, before the drugs, before the sobriety.

Different kind of memoir, but I really loved Patti Smith’s Just Kids.  Elegeic, an amazing tale of friendship

Dry and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.
All over but the Shoutin‘ Rick Bragg
I’m Down: Mishna Wolff

In the nonmemoir world, I love John McPhee, and anyone who can write narrative nonfiction about dry science topics well (Laurie Garrett, Gina Kolata before she became obsessed with exercise).  I’m currently seething with jealousy over Sudharta Murkhajee’s Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer because he is a great writer and wrote it while working as an oncologist-I’ve go no business complaining about not having enough time.

Thanks for the questions!

A Time to Be Born and a Time to Die

by Katy Horan

Infertile is an arid word. It is so dry, that my mouth becomes parched and I choke on the phrase, “I am infertile.” I prefer childless. It sounds breezier, like a summer sleeveless dress, rather than a straightjacket. In the true vernacular of infertility, I should say my husband, Dan, and I are infertile, but every month that passes without pregnancy is like a gigantic foam finger, jabbing at me, “You, you, you.” Shame on you, I tell myself, this is your punishment for over-indulging in coffee, work and wine.

After greater than one year of childlessness, I lobbied Dan to pursue fertility treatments. Dan was more than happy to keep trying “the natural way.” He grimaced at the idea of stimulating my body to produce double-digit eggs, sucking the eggs out of my body, injecting his sperm into my eggs in a laboratory, and then shoving the resultant embryos back inside me. He’d cringe and shake his head, and say, “It’s just not natural.”

“It’s not natural to wait until you’re almost forty to have kids,” I would bark back. As a physician, I understood our barriers to pregnancy and believed we would find our baby salvation in reproductive technology. Of course, I have great faith in medical technology; I work in the critical care unit where we prescribe drips and ventilators to save our dying patients. The French call our specialty “réanimation.” We are puppeteers; our tubes and intravenous lines are the threads that bring life to our crumpled, dying patients. I believe in medical technology, most of the time.

In a whirlwind of negotiation that left Dan’s head spinning, we agreed to pursue a single cycle of in vitro fertilization. With the glory of medical technology reigning, it should have gone perfectly. But, it didn’t.

I hung up the phone after receiving the phone call that we weren’t pregnant. I had taken the news well, I thought, better than my nurse, Melinda, who had responded to my meek, “It’s okay,” with her growling, “It’s not okay. Not at all.”

I folded over like rag doll. “Why, God?” I whispered to the carpet, “Why won’t you let me get pregnant?” In that moment, I had a new target for my blaming, foam finger.

I’m not certain who was more surprised by the question: Me or God. God for His part had every right to wonder who the hell I was, berating Him. In the best of times, I am a lapsed Catholic. At worst, I am a half-hearted agnostic calling out from every foxhole. Yet, I hadn’t asked God for His help with our childlessness, though I knew others who had.

A patient of mine, six weeks post-partum with an asthma flare, confided in me about her divine intervention. She had an air of purity, her bangs laid straight across her forehead like the hood of a nun’s wimple. She was Asian and had a habit of looking directly into my eyes, then quickly at her gentle hands, folded in her lap. These staccato moments of intense connection were unnerving, as if all my agony of childlessness was exposed, and suddenly I was the broken and she was the healer.

“What’s his name?” I asked, to hide the kernel of babylust that always threatened to pop whenever I met a new mother my age.

“Samuel.” Her soft brown eyes met mine, and we both smiled broadly.

My heart jumped for this little boy with such a big name. “I love it! Why Samuel?”

She laughed, a light sound, like butterfly wings. “We went on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje because we wanted a third child, but I could not seem to have one.” The laugh evaporated from her lips as she refolded her hands and stared at her wedding band.

I struggled to imagine her, hiking through the Bosnian thicket to a bleached white statue of Mary.

“I prayed at the foot of the Blessed Mother Mary for hours,” she recalled, her head bowed as if in prayer, “Until an angel came to me, and told me that I would be blessed with a child and that I should name him Samuel.”

Angels do not figure often into my daily work. Reams of paperwork, buzzing pagers, and the delivery of bad news occur every day of the week, but angels are rare. A chill ran down my neck and I believed her because I knew that she believed. Medically, she probably hallucinated from dehydration and the venous pooling from kneeling on the concrete carpet, but in her piety, a vision came to her, and nine months later, so did baby Samuel.

A month later, I found a lumpy envelope on my office desk. On the envelope was a blessing of the Mother Mary of Medjugorje, and in the center was a heart with my name. The beads of what only could only be a rosary tumbled like pachinko balls within the sealed envelope. My patient had left me a talisman for my childless journey. She must have smelled the musky scent of childlessness pouring out of me, seen a flash of the abyss of self-loathing within me and recognized it as her own.

Without my own baby Samuel to incubate after our failed cycle of in vitro fertilization, I limped through my next rotation in the ICU. One evening, I was called to the bedside of a man dying of cancer. After asking his wife and family what he valued and enjoyed, his wife told me that the most important thing to him was to see his current, failing chemotherapy kill the cancer. I explained that we could bring him to the intensive care unit, put him in a medical coma, and attach him to a breathing machine, but we couldn’t change that he was dying.

“So, we can do all these interventions, but to what end?” I let the question hang between us for a moment. The only sound in the room was the patient’s raspy breathing. He sucked each breath as if he was surfacing from deep under water. His brother-in-law cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything.

The patient’s hunger for air made me uncomfortable and I looked back at his wife. “We cannot fix the cause of his dying–his cancer,” I explained, “But we can give medicines, like morphine, to help ease his breathing.”

“Morphine is euthanasia,” she snapped at me. “I’ve put down dogs before.”

I was already angry with her before she accused me of attempting to euthanize her husband. I was angry that she thought it was appropriate to maintain her dying husband on a mechanical ventilator for one month, praying that his failing $10,000/day chemotherapy would begin to work. I was angry that the oncologist who had created this false optimism was safely ensconced at home with his two, pony-tailed daughters while I was alone and childless in the hospital. I was angry that my husband and I had failed to get pregnant again, and wondered if all this time I spent with the dying was leeching into me, poisoning any chance at living.

A smog of distress from this anger encircled me for weeks and I let its haze feed the mournful hunger left behind from our failed in vitro fertilization. Why would people so certain in their beliefs about their God be so afraid of dying? How can we become so fixated on our greed for life that we’ll take brutal steps to satiate it? When I searched my sacred medical texts for the answer, I was surprised to find biblical verses wrapped in the statistics of dying. There is a time to be born and a time to die. Ecclesiastes 3:2

Those twelve words summed up the twin battles within me. At work, I see people who are so desperate to hold onto life, so convinced that there is an antidote to their poison, that they are in constant search for next therapy that will make them whole. They embrace technology and our presumed wizardry as we wash their blood with dialysis and give air to their lungs with our bellows. I now recognize that the smog of distress encircled me, not because I didn’t understand my patient’s wife’s zealousness, but because I recognized it in my own monomaniacal drive to have a baby.

At home, I am doggedly chasing the end of my childbearing years down the technological rabbit hole, and dragging my husband with me, blind to his fears or how this journey is changing us.

I think of my talisman, the enveloped rosary, blessed in Medjugorje, stuffed in my bedside drawer. My husband has a vague idea of its existence; I’m not certain whom he would prefer to disinvite from our private babymaking lives: fertility enhancing technology or an unseen God. Unlike Dan, I have no problem kneeling at the altar of reproductive technology to feed my insatiable hunger for a child. But, even in my exuberant baby greed, I am not ready to unseal the envelope, drape the rosary across my fingers, and murmur my Hail Marys.

I don’t understand my reluctance to ask God for help when I find it so easy to blame him for our failures. I don’t understand why I’d rather embrace technology than God, when at work, I beg my patients to do the opposite.

Despite our available technology and prayers, we all have to die, and some of us will never give birth. I am coming into acceptance that we may or may not have children. Dan and I have set limits on what more we will do in our attempts to have children, and, since setting limits on our babymaking, the world of opportunity appears much wider. Several weeks ago, I held the baby of a college student whom I mentor and I realized that I could bond and love a baby who was not of my flesh. And, when the babylust bubbles up inside me, I temper it by singing The Byrds, “Turn, Turn, Turn” with its lyrics borrowed from Ecclesiates. “A time to be born, a time to die…I swear it’s not too late.”

from host & writing coach, Theo

To win two (2) hours of free one-on-one writing coaching with Theo Pauline Nestor, email us and let us know which new registrants are your referrals between now and the retreat sell out. Referrals will be tallied and the winner announced MARCH 10TH, 2013. The individual bringing the highest number of registered referrals will receive two (2) hours of one-on-one writing coaching in any aspect of their writing they desire to be coached. All you need to do is let us know who your registrant referrals are.

HINT:  Let Facebook do the work:  Facebook users can easily invite any, or all, of their Facebook friends from the upper right hand corner of the retreat’s Facebook “Event Page.”  Note: To use the Facebook resource of sending out easy invitations, one must must first “join” the the retreat’s Facebook Event page at this link: https://www.facebook.com/events/464453093607607/permalink/479144852138431/?ref=notif&notif_t=like  After “Joining” the Facebook Event page, please look in the upper right hand corner for option to “Invite Friends.”

I wrote this post for my blog Writing Is My Drink when I was reading Cheryl Strayed’s WILD in April.  I wanted to share it with you here because I think it speaks of how other writers’ work and process can impact our own work and the importance of going out into the world to hear other writers talk about their work.

Cheers,

Theo

Phew, I Just Flew in from the 80s

It was a sort of perfect storm of circumstances that led to my time travel back to the 1980s.  It’s hard to tease one event out as the key, but let’s say it started with a surprise email from an ex-boyfriend who lives in a zillion miles away saying he’d be in Seattle in a few weeks and did I want to have coffee.  Now, there are exes you keep in touch with for whatever reason–you’re coparenting (done that), you’re still into them (done that one too), and there are those you don’t keep in touch with for whatever reason–you despise them (haven’t quite done that), you don’t like who you were with them (uh), or maybe you just fall out of touch.  With this guy, let’s call him Writer Boyfriend, it was the latter.

But now we were going to have coffee and so the long buried file of the late 80s–when I was a grad student living in San Francisco wanting to be a writer but instead forcing myself to be an academic and just dating a writer as a substitute for doing what I  really wanted.  And when this email arrived, I was reading–or not so much reading but  swallowed up by–Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (unbelievably good), which is set in the narrator’s twenties.  In Wild, Strayed does such an insanely good job of conjuring up the mindset of a certain type of dislocation that can dominate one’s up and comer years that my own 20′s started coming back to me in a visceral way.  I felt my younger self tugging at me, saying, “Come back, I have something to tell you.” When Strayed was here reading in Seattle three weeks ago, she said that she’d kept a journal during her 20s and had kept a very detailed journal during the Pacific Crest Trail hike the book recounts.  Why hadn’t I kept journals during my 20s?  I wondered as she spoke. Or did I? (I couldn’t even remember) The truth is even if I had journals from that time, I wasn’t sure I’d want to open them due to the cringe factor.  But there was something in WILD, something in Strayed’s willingness to own all the parts of her younger self, that was beginning to erode my longstanding cringe.  Maybe the young me was tired of being banished by the cringe.

And then, it started: the opening up of old boxes of photos.  And there was cringe. The fat period. The trying too hard. The constant image and hair changes. The restlessness. And, some of the worst earrings imaginable. But pushing past the cringe, I adopted the stance of the private detective as I flipped through countless pictures and old letters (letters!), looking for evidence that there was something of me in this girl with dyed black hair and leather jackets.  And just what was it that she had to say to me?

And then I found them.  Journals!  There were journals, but unlike what I imagine Strayed’s PCT journal to be, these journals interested me not so much for what they  revealed but because of what they didn’t.  It seemed I had kept journals thinking that when I died, these journals would be discovered by both my mother and Jean-Paul Sarte, so it was not only important to avoid descriptions of the torrid and steamy, it was also important to write about all this as if it were an existential treatise.  The bulk of them read like freshman philosophy essays written at 2am. Even in my own journals, I was trying to please, rarely letting my guard down enough to write about my ordinary worries in ordinary language, which would have been infinitely more interesting.  But back then, I was always sure I wasn’t enough, that my ordinary struggles indicated all the ways I was flawed and dislocated from the whole rather than simply human.

Theo, New Mexico 1986

But then, among all this existential mumbo jumbo, there were flashes of clarity. And a few times, I stopped in my living room strewn with photos, concert tickets, and matchbooks and gasped at the audacity of the girl.  In 1988, making something like 10k a year as a waitress and tutor, I wrote my goals.  I will make my living off my writing and teaching writing, I wrote boldly in loopy cursive.  For how insecure I was at the time, I might have as well have written, “I will be President of the United States.” I want to send a message back to her with her black hair and red lipstick: hey girl, we get there. But it’s a one way street. She can talk to me, but I can’t speak to her. And what she says to me now is this: Keep going.

INTERVIEW IS HERE

Theo Pauline Nestor , author and host of the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat, talks with Sonya Chung, author of the novel Long for This World and founding editor of Bloom, a newly launched literary site devoted to featuring authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.

Sonya Chung is the author of the novel Long for This World (Scribner 2010). Her stories, reviews, & essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tin House, Sonora Review, FiveChapters, BOMB Magazine, and the anthology The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, among others. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Bronx Council on the Arts Writers’ Fellowship & Residency, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She is a staff writer at The Millions and Associate Editor of The Common. Sonya also currently teaches fiction writing at Columbia University.

Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat is open to writers of all experience levels. Some attendees will be “emerging writers” at the beginnings of their exploration of how to bring their lives to the page.  Others will bring much experience with writing and publishing to the retreat.

I wanted to highlight Wild Mountain Retreat participant Jen Singer today because I think she models a lifelong-learner approach to her development as a writer.  An author of five books, including the Stop Second-Guessing Yourself guides to parenting, Jen is the editor-in-chief of two web sites: MommaSaid.net and ParentingWithCancer.com. She writes about parenting, health and more for such publications as Parenting, Newsweek, the New York Times, Redbook, PBS Next Avenue, Living with Cancer and more. She is writing a new ebook series, “If Momma Ain’t Happy.”

For years Jen has been using her personal stories in her books, articles, and blog posts, and now she’s interested in the craft of writing a full-length memoir that goes beyond her own story of “the bad thing that happened to me” to highlight the universal experience in her personal one.

You can learn more about Jen and her interest in memoir in the interview below.

Cheers,

Theo

Theo Pauline Nestor:   Tell us a little about the memoir you started a couple years ago.

Jen Singer: I wrote a memoir called, If Cancer is a Gift, Where Can I Return it? to sort through my experience of nearly leaving my children motherless from Stage III non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2007. I sorted through it alright, but that’s about it. In fact, the title could be, “This is the Bad Thing that Happened to Me.”

My friend Joni Rodgers, bestselling memoirist and ghostwriter, read through it – or parts of it – and showed me that it lacked scenes. I had written it like an 80,000-word essay or, dare I say, blog post, when it needed to be something else entirely, something with a story arc, not just a chronologically accounting of chemo and fear.

Part of the problem was that I wrote it too soon after the traumatic event. I wasn’t even two years in remission, and I wasn’t sure yet what it all meant. Worse, my Aunt Nancy was dying of a rare cancer, and it was heart-wrenching to write about and deal with cancer at once.

During treatments, I had had a pain in my chest where the six-inch tumor was, and, right when I was writing the memoir, it returned. I then spent a year of scans, tests and pain doctors getting nowhere, until finally, I decided something had to change or I’d always get sick.

I started two unique therapies: myofascial release, which is like a specialized massage, and Focusing, which helped me figure out the emotional issues that were manifesting as physical pain. I realized that I’d long had a hypervigilant hamster wheel of sorts running in my chest, so it’s no wonder I wound up with a tumor the size of a hamster wheel in my left lung. Since then, I’ve done the hard and unpopular work of making the changes that the cancer should have brought about, including a divorce.

Maybe someday I’ll pick up the memoir again. At least I have a record of the bad thing that happened to me, because I wouldn’t remember such details now that I’m five years in remission.

Nestor:  What qualities do you admire in a memoir?  Examples? 

Singer: I love memoirs that have a universal appeal and an unwavering truth. For instance, I’ve never been a homeless child, but “The Glass Castle” appealed to me, because I’m a mother. As I read the book, I worried about author Jeannette Walls, even though I knew she grew up fine. Plus, her writing is exquisite.

I think memoirs should be honest without being sensational, and humorous where possible. Joni Rodgers wrote with great humor in “Bald in the Land of Big Hair,” which I read long before I had cancer. Her humor made a tough subject go down more smoothly.

Nestor: What do you hope to get out of attending Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat?

Singer: I hope to soak in the brilliance of the speakers and walk away with clear steps on how to write a really good memoir. I’m also looking forward to meeting other writers and authors at a venue that’s not all business cards and “working the room,” but also a place to share thoughts and ideas with other creative types who, like me, have no clue what to wear there.

 Nestor: How does memoir writing fit in with the bigger picture of your career?

Singer: I am editing a memoir for a first-time author (with plenty of scenes!) and I’d like to write more of them, especially my own. To me, writing is about validating people’s emotions and making them feel less alone, and memoir is among the best genres in which to do that.

Hi Readers,

Suzanne Finnamore later added that her memoir Split was legally vetted by the same lawyer that legally vetted Heartburn. Small world, isn’t it.  ~sn

Link to the interview poste November 30th, 2012 is here at the Huffington Post or click image below to link to interview:

Heartburn, Nora Ephron’s roman à clef based on her own divorce, kicked off the what we know as the divorce memoir genre. Although Heartburn was technically published as a novel, every reader going through a divorce of their own knew that this heartbreakingly funny book held far more fact than fiction. But after Nora spoke her piece in 1983, it was crickets. Nobody wrote about their divorce for years. You’d have to be crazy, right?

In fact, when I was writing my memoir about my divorce, I asked Ms. Ephron, “What advice do you have for someone writing a memoir about their divorce?” She looked at me evenly and said, “Don’t do it.”

And yet I did. And in the last few years, many other writers have written memoirs about divorce as well. I’m convinced we need these stories because, as Cheryl Strayed has said, they ask us to “bear the unbearable.”

I found more answers to the question of why do we need these stories in a recent interview with two of the teachers for the upcoming Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat: Suzanne Finnamore, author of Split: A Memoir of Divorce and Candace Walsh, author of Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On and Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity.

Nestor: Did you look for books about divorce when you were going through your own? If so, were there books that helped you?

Walsh: For a few years before my marriage ended, I avoided any articles on divorce that I saw in magazines. It made me feel ill, like knowing they had the results of a cancer test within them. I read the O Magazine excerpt of Eat, Pray, Love with that ill feeling, but after the divorce was in motion, reading the entire book was so healing. I read it in giant gulps.

Finnamore: I looked in vain for a book that would apply to my situation, a woman who had an infant and had been lied to and gaslit and then dumped for another woman who was also, in very short order, pregnant. Everything was ultra-politically correct and dry and self-help-y, briskly casting me as the non-initiator, instructing me to do guided meditation and forgive everyone at once, which made me want to swan dive off the roof. Or else there were novels wherein the husband came back on his knees and the scorned wife turned him away (!)… and also novels featuring a slender and kind Portuguese gardener who fell in love with the spurned wife. Neither applied. So I began to write my own, not out of a plucky sense of courage, but out of sheer desperation.

There were two books that helped enormously: Heartburn by the great Nora Ephron — this novel should be rushed to the door of every woman who is also a mother of small children who has been hit with a divorce petition. It should be a community service. Also Remember Me by Fay Weldon, who is equally brilliant.

Nestor: How did writing about your divorce change your view of your divorce?

Finnamore: It didn’t. I still see divorce as a heartbreaking event that maims children, at least the way it is often performed by selfish partners. But writing about it gave me a sense of freedom and control, whereas being hit with a divorce petition is a unilateral move which can come out of nowhere; there is no proper preparation. Writing is a legal form of vindication, but nothing will make divorce a pleasure cruise. Writing made me realize that, yes, I had chosen to marry and have a child with someone who was secretly unfaithful and who fathered another child out of wedlock and moved away, but I had recourse. I could fashion my experience into a lifeboat for other women who were abandoned.

Walsh: Writing about my own divorce lightened me. I felt like it freed up my brain to stop maintaining the memory of it. It was out there on paper; I could store new memories and stop hauling that stuff around.

Nestor: Why has the divorce memoir become its own mini-genre? How do divorce stories help us?

Walsh: We humans really want to know what others go through when they’ve gone through what we’re about to go through. There are a lot of opportunities for release in reading others’ stories. You feel like you’re not alone, and you also note that these people have survived and thrived, and you can too.

Finnamore: We have become, for better or worse, a memoir culture — a body of people who share everything either on social media or in books or on television. Therefore, everything that happens to a significant part of the population becomes a mini-genre. Divorce stories are no different than stories about anything else; they help us by proving that we are not alone. If they make us laugh and give us practical advice, all the better. “Heartburn” had recipes. Fay Weldon’s novels consistently provide wit and courage for women who have been left behind, allowing her readers to go from victim to heroine in 300 pages or less. I tried to be extremely honest as well as prescriptive in Split: A Memoir of Divorce, boiling it down into “Ten Simple Yet Elegant Keys To Divorce”, the first of which was, “change the locks.”

Nestor: What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing about your divorce?

Finnamore: Realizing that I owned my experience. Not paying attention to the voices that say I would be strung up for telling the truth. But my manuscript came after the James Frey fiasco, and so it was legally vetted, page by page.That was terribly freeing, that thoroughness and having legal counsel. You can’t just wander out there and say whatever you like. There must be structure and restraint. You must also be willing to leave out a great deal of what happens. Which you will regret, at times, since it seems you are blamed for telling it all when you haven’t told it all. But it’s still the right thing to do, as it would be absolutely too squalid and banal.

Walsh: I think people tend to recoil away from divorce stories unless they’re “in it.” Why would you want to go there unless you are already there? But people who read the stories who were not going through a divorce found that there was so much for them in terms of being aware of the process of figuring out what you want, how you’d recreate your life if you had the opportunity, and how to infuse a life that is in a nice status quo position with the silver linings of upheaval.

I’ve been enjoying reading the works-in-progress from our teachers over the last week and was inspired to share a chapter from my upcoming memoir, The High Dive: A Writer’s Story of Finding Her Voice and a Guide to Finding Your Own (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

I don’t have a pub date yet, but I’m guessing it’s sometime in 2013. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek.

The High Dive is my sophomore book, and like many writers I floundered around like mad after my first book came out.  My plans for churning another book out right away quickly turned to dust.  I couldn’t get a foothold on a workable idea.  I wrote 70 pages or so of two different books, both of which I deserted either because of my own disinterest or my publisher’s. In what appeared to be a completely fallow period, I started a blog called Writing Is My Drink, on which I shared writing advice (because if it’s not going well for me, I’m in a PERFECT position to give advice, right?), interviewed writers, and shared stories about “coming into my own voice.”

I’d been sharing these same stories of my long coming of age as a writer for years in my memoir class through the University of Washington’s continuing education program, and I have to credit my students for helping me to see their value. One desperate day in October, 2010 (right after a proposal for another memoir had been shot down), I  realized that these “little” stories were the IT I’d be looking for.  They’d been there, just like Dorothy’s power to go home, all along.

Looking forward to meeting you at Wild Mountain!

Theo

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Filed under: Faculty ]]> http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/sneak-peek-into-theo-pauline-nestors-upcoming-memoir-the-sky-is-blue/feed/ 1 THEO1AAfeatureaa wildmountainmemoir http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/an-interview-with-ariel-gore-and-a-sneak-peek-of-her-upcoming-memoir-lung-cancer-noir/ http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/an-interview-with-ariel-gore-and-a-sneak-peek-of-her-upcoming-memoir-lung-cancer-noir/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:22:37 +0000 wildmountainmemoir http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/?p=1242 ]]> “Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.”

—Ariel Gore, Lung Cancer Noir

I have a very visceral memory of the weekend I discovered Ariel Gore‘s writing. It was my fortieth birthday and I was flying from Seattle to San Francisco.  During the flight, I was devouring her book The Mother Trip, and I remember as the plane began to descend (San Francisco! My birthday!), I felt this twinge of disappointment.  I didn’t want the flight to end.  I wanted to keep reading.  And, that’s how I felt once again today, reading the sneak peek of Lung Cancer Noir.  I don’t want to land. Bring on Chapter Two! We don’t have Chapter Two, but we do have this fabulous interview below with Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat teacher Ariel Gore, and we have the promise to see her in March.  Maybe she’ll read us some of Chapter Two at the Faculty Reading? Here’s to hoping.

Cheers,

Theo

Theo Pauline Nestor:  Tell us a little about Lung Cancer Noir.  What do you find most challenging and most compelling about this project?

ARIEL GORE

Ariel Gore: I moved my family to New Mexico a few years ago to try and take care of my mom who’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. We understood she had anywhere from a couple of months to a year to live, so I didn’t worry about the fact that she’s always been fairly emotionally and physically violent and, you know, impossible. She lived for two and a half years after the diagnosis and trying to be her caretaker — it was like Terms of Endearment meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. When she died I knew I had to write the story. But I’ve never written a memoir about such a recent event. That’s the challenge, I think, the chronological proximity of it all. But I think the emotional proximity is making it a better book.

Gore: I’ve always been a writer and first started publishing as an intern at Sonoma County Women’s Voices in California–it’s one of the oldest woman’s newspapers in the country and it was the perfect place to get started as a creative journalist. I started Hip Mama a few years later, when I was 23, and edited and published that zine until just a few years ago. It’s run by a collective now. But honestly books have become my primary writing medium at this point. Memoirs, creative nonfiction. I did a novel a few years ago. I edit anthologies. I have my own press, too. Lit Star Press published Portland Queer, which won the LAMBDA Literary Award. And I recently published a new anthology The People’s Apocalypse. They’re distributed by Microcosm, which I love. I come from the independent publishing world and that doesn’t change just because I publish some of my books with bigger presses.

ARIEL GORE

Gore: When we start working in memoir, it’s exhilarating. Here we are, maybe for the first time, imposing a narrative line on all the disparate image-memories that have made our lives. But then there comes the wow-this-is-awesome-let-me-read-it-over moment and we read it over and of course it is crap and we think, “How could this be interesting to anyone but me?” And we sort of crouch in the corner and bang our head against the wall about what a stupid idiot we are and how not only does this book suck but we thoroughly suck, too. Well, maybe that’s just me. But if you do it, too, you can go ahead and skip that second part. Keep working. As you work the writing gets better and as you work your story becomes more and more the private/universal story–about what it means to be human–and that’s a story that matters. It’s a story that breaks both writer and reader out of our isolation.

Immediately below is a recent video about developments at the arts center.  Just below it is a video with narration by Harriet Bullitt about her vision and the history of these venues.  Enjoy!

Icicle Creek Center for the Arts update:

A personal perspective in video narration by venue owner Harriet Bullitt, surrounding the origins of these venue neighbors:

Anyone who’s ever felt a twinge of rage when assaulted with one of those “20 under 40″ lists can appreciate the sentiment behind Bloom, a new site highlighting the work of writers over 40.  The majority of my memoir students at the University of Washington are over forty, and I’ve come to think of writing as something we grow into. Unlike the 50-meter dash, youth is not a requirement of writing. In fact, we may not be ready to meet what I consider the “emotional requirements” of the job of writer until our fortieth birthday is a ways behind us.  Or at least, that was my experience and the topic of my essay, “The Price of Admission,” posted today up on Bloom. Check it out.

Theo

The beginning of history of the Leavenworth,Washington area could begin with a segue like this:

“Leavenworth’s history does not begin with the alpine tradition of the town today, but with the proud heritage of the Yakama, Chinook and Wenatchi tribes. The Native American tribes lived by hunting the land for deer and elk, as well as fishing Icicle Creek for salmon. Surrounded by some of the most beautiful and bountiful lands in North America, the three tribes co-existed from Lake Wenatchee to the Icicle and beyond.”

In fact, the above is the beginning of history when history is written by local, contemporary business interests.

After a mention, in a token nod gesture like the above, the typical area history unfolds like this…

“…The area was eventually settled by pioneers in search of gold, furs and fertile farmland. Stakes were claimed, land was parceled out, and the Leavenworth area was soon bustling with settlers…”

…and as for the area locals, who, in fact, were born, lived and died in the area for generation upon generation, were cleared from the area over a period of about 25-30 years. Like their removal, which is not mentioned, these locals are not mentioned again.

However, history might also consider, for example, ongoing First Nation activities at the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery which once claimed to be the largest hatchery in the world. Adult salmon returning to the hatchery are still important to tribal fisheries activity. The focus of the fishery is the large pool below the spillway. The character of the river here provides access to construct traditional scaffolds and fishing platforms. It is touted as one of the few remaining vestiges in Washington State offering productive fishing opportunity utilizing traditional methods.

The Wenatchis (or “P’squosa”) were not given local reservation land by the federal government but instead cleared out. It’s reported many modern day Wenatchis are found living on the Colville Indian Reservation, with 11 other aboriginal tribes, with smaller numbers living on the Yakama Reservation.

The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, or simply Yakama Nation (formerly Yakima), is a Native American group with nearly 10,000 enrolled members, living in Washington state. Today, the nation is governed by the Yakama Tribal Council, which consists of representatives of 14 tribes and bands.

It is reported that many surviving Chinooks live in the towns of Bay Center, Chinook, and Ilwaco in southwest Washington. Many books have been written about the Chinook, including, Boston Jane: an Adventure.

Wikipedia offers further reading lists and many external links about these local area people as a starting place for any interested in a longer, deeper, alternative history of people in the Leavenworth area:

• The Yakama Nation
• The Wenatchi
• Chinook people

Filed under: content ]]> http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/yakama-chinook-and-wenatchi-tribes-of-leavenworth-wa/feed/ 0 feature pic option 2 wildmountainmemoir Wenatchi child. fishing platforms http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/wild-mountain-sneak-peek-of-suzanne-finnamores-upcoming-memoir-add-to-cart/ http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/wild-mountain-sneak-peek-of-suzanne-finnamores-upcoming-memoir-add-to-cart/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:06:13 +0000 wildmountainmemoir http://wildmountainmemoir.wordpress.com/?p=1154 ]]>

Suzanne Finnamore:
photo by
Augusten Burroughs

I read and loved her book The Zygote Chronicles, but as I wrote in this post, Suzanne Finnamore really came to my attention when I found out that her divorce memoir, Split, was due out the same week as my divorce memoir, How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed.  As much as I knew this was bad news for me (she already had two successful books behind her; I was a short timer coming out with my first book), my publicist tried to convince me that this was, in fact, a good thing, that reviewers would talk about us together as a trend. Okay, that happened once. (And frankly, the “trend” didn’t come til a year or so after our books were out. I’ll write more about that here soon).

But as I’ve written elsewhere,  I got to know Suzanne and her work better as a result of this strange twist of timing and fate, and I love her feisty, bad ass voice. Suzanne is one of those  writers who can turn anger into yummy dark humor on the page. She says the stuff that most only dare to think, and that’s just one of the reasons I’m thrilled she’s going to be one of the Wild Mountain Memoir Retreat teachers.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Suzanne for Match.com’s Happenmag about finding love online after divorce.  And, in another twist in the Theo and Suzanne story, it was answering the questions for that interview that inspired Suzanne to write her upcoming memoir Add to Cart: A Memoir of Loss , Lust, & Finding My 2nd Husband Online at Fifty.  Here’s a link to the sneak peak of ADD TO CART–Chapter One. It’s a bit of a tease.  After you read it, you’ll want more.  But maybe we can get her to read us a little more at the faculty reading at Wild Mountain.  Let’s hope so.