Memoir making

In keeping with the note-taking, course-building bug:

Kephart’s memoir exercises

pulled from Handling the Truth, our “textbook” for UUCS Memoir Writing 2017 with Marilyn Carpenter

Definitions, preliminaries, cautions

• Frame: teaching class
• List, negative
• “, positive, examples
• Reading, devotion
• Workshop, travel
• 750 words to express expectations
• Cautioning, consequences

Raw Material

• Journal, then
• What value? Teach? Honest? Staying? Voice?
• Tense, at stake
• Rewriting in different person
• Photograph, fore- and background
• Rilke, learning to love (5 min)
• Go outside, write weather
• Landscape out window, then from memory - why this?
• Piazzolla, SD de Silos (10 min)
• “Eggshell” - color of life?
• Interview, listen, record dialogue, speech ways
• Food cooking, recipes - Proust, Mom
• Smell of home, place
• Pocket things - why irreplaceable? And a lost thing, absence, search
• Writing always almost (106 the question, 108 an answer?)
• Memory, detail, rewrite
• Research
• First memories
• Vulnerability course description

Get Moving

• Hempl, memory and imagination essay - what is your memoir about?
• beginning, prologue, blank page

Fake Not

• Empathy, beauty, “most unlonely teacher,” categories, (blogging, bragging) reading lists

Favorite passage:

From p 106

Now, I say, write about something that has been lost. Something you didn’t think you could live without. Write about absence. Write about search. Write about reconciling yourself to the idea of something eternally missing. What is the language of loss? How does one resurrect the thing that can no longer be held, touched, seen, corresponded with? Are words replacements? Can they be made to be? How is the approximating work of a writer deeply frustrating and deeply satisfying? Why does writing always feel like almost or nearly, and why do we keep trying anyway? What impels us?

And on p 108, after some “diversion by way of example”

Empty your pockets. Know what you value. Write it down so that I can see it, want it, nearly touch it, too. So that I will yearn with you, or so that I can mourn with you, because loss is now, or loss is coming, and loss is our shared human condition. You have never seen my Venetian masks, and I have never cooked your grandmother’s red sauce. But if we both write most truly, we will enable each other’s compassion.

Memoir commands us to engender compassion.

Journal for an imaginary seminar:

This is high romanticism blent with modernism, what Kephart chooses to call memoir. It is poetry and ars poetica. It is a contemporary example of the impulse pushing up in 20th C fiction in Joyce’s and Proust’s novels, odysseys and petites madeleines, and in Tolkien’s tragic fantasy. It reminds me of what Maritain says at the opening of his Creative Intuition about the bound, buried significance of things, and the converging yet so different insights of the existentialists, from Kierkegaard's Knights of faith and of infinite resignation, to Heidegger getting down to ground, for something rather than nothing, for death the essential condition on life. It reminds me of a story I wrote about Herman Walks Home, how he passes the place where little lost things are. I think of magic realism, and the neighborhood. Of Rilke's Malte on their being gone, and with them the language with which to describe them. And so the only critique I have of the book, really, is that she only talks about other contemporary authors for the most part, only seems interested in reading them, whereas I want to hear about all these, and Montaigne; but perhaps I would have to read more memoirs myself first to know what I'm missing. These exercises, too, I haven't actually done them all, but I will keep working my way through them now that I've given the book a quick read.

One other note for now, Gaiman’s rule 3:

Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.