Writing Memoirs

By Deborah Wright Yoho

When I was growing up, Walter Cronkite's warm, reassuring voice on his nightly newscast greeted our family every night. He was the Most Trusted Man in America. In retrospect his ironclad credibility seems surprising, because Walter reported relentlessly on the agony of Vietnam, the first war to beam straight into America's living-rooms during a period when the nation's sense-making of warfare was confused and divided.  His broadcasts punctuated our evening meal five days a week, every week from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies, except in the summer and on weekends, when Roger Mudd substituted so Walter could go sailing.

Cronkite's job as the CBS news anchor required him to announce the evening American death toll in Southeast Asia. “Today’s casualties numbered thirty-two Americans dead, seventy-one wounded and three missing in action," said Walter as we sat over our dinner, only the numbers changing with each broadcast. Of course we believed him.  No one ever questioned the truth of anything Walter Cronkite reported.

I've been thinking about this anew since Brian Williams, the evening anchor at NBC, was recently placed on unpaid leave for six months because he exaggerated about coming under fire when he flew in a Chinook helicopter a number of years ago in Iraq. Inquiring people want to know:  is Brian Williams a liar? News anchors are no longer credible just because they speak to us in our living rooms.

I write what I hope is non-fiction, putting to paper my memories of my own life. A haughty enterprise. Why should anyone believe a word I say? As I work to write an accurate account of events that happened thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, I find my memory is a very fickle tutor. Some recollections, significant and insignificant, come easily to mind, but my brain needs prodding to recall other things. So I pour over photographs, compare my memories to those of others who were there with me, and listen again to the music of the era. Ah, the music! For me, the Sixties and Seventies will always be about the music! Nothing evokes memories like music.

But I still can't be sure if every word reflects exactly what happened, especially the precise sequence of my personal story. Suppose, for an instant, that I possessed an eidetic,  lasting and reliable recall. Would my writing improve?  Become more credible, more interesting, more compelling? I think not.

A writer's offering of a personal account is fascinating to me not because it purports to be true, but because memoirs reveal how people, events, and locations conjoin to influence an individual's perspective on what is worth remembering, worth capturing in written language, worth presenting to the world in a published work. Reading a memoir, and especially writing one, creates opportunities to sift through my life to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

A Spark of Inspiration

By Deborah Wright Yoho

People we know spark a writer's passion. My mother has been a puzzle to me since earliest childhood. Her name was Rose.

Mom never downsized, having resisted all my cajoling to please, please deal with her three bedroom house crammed to the rafters with stuff. She was a hoarder, perhaps not interesting enough to be featured on TV, but bad enough. Since she died eight months ago, I have been dealing with her leavings. Mom, why did you do this to me?

I started with her kitchen. In the refrigerator, packed wall to wall, top to bottom, lived twelve packets of sliced cheese, all of it outdated, the oldest moldy package two years old. In a cabinet, I found nine cans of expensive Melitta coffee, six bottles of olive oil, and five jars of gourmet orange marmalade. Mom, you couldn't afford to stock up on such things!

I don't think she did. I realize only now her memory was compromised long before her last hospitalization. How many times had I helped her put away bags of groceries? How often had I struggled to find room in that fridge? Yet it had never occurred to me she had been buying duplicates of favorite items she had already stashed away.

My mother was a collector. Angels and elephants, tablecloths, costume jewelry, five different sets of Christmas dishes, knick knacks from our travels. But plastic bags, bread ties, dried up ballpoint pens, hundreds of clothes pins? She had been using an electric dryer since 1967.

In her basement, Mom saved all our Samsonite suitcases. A family of Air Force vagabonds with three kids, we had a lot of suitcases; none of them had wheels. She also kept all the curtains she ever hung in more than a dozen different homes. I won't discuss her clothes, except to mention 82 pairs of shoes.

My mother's last ten years weren't so easy. You could tell by her stuff. She saved four diabetes glucometers and three blood pressure cuffs.

I am by now expert at solid waste disposal and recycling. Half a dozen charities recognize my car when I drive up. I know which brand of trash bags is the strongest and how to organize a garage sale (I made $600). I survived sore muscles, sleepless nights, and long-distance arguments with my brothers. I now suffer from myopia, having focused for weeks on handling, cleaning, sorting, folding, packing, lifting, loading, and unloading.

I left her underwear drawer for last, unable to touch her fragile, lovely lingerie. Underneath her sizeable collection of lacy slips, I found my reward, a photo album I had never seen before. Clinging to the faded pages, my parents, circa 1946 - before the kids, before they were married, before the moves, before all the stuff.

Why I Write

By Deborah Wright Yoho

At an age too young, striving to please my parents, teachers and peers, I lost myself. My writing is about finding my way back, to reclaim what I've always known to be true. Truths about the shifting world, about relationships, about the power of time and memory. Most especially, about the power of my own voice.

To my surprise, this process has been peaceful rather than disturbing, serendipitous rather than deliberative, full of ebb and flow rather than effort. I write for myself but also for another, searching and reaching in the hope of finding a mind capable and willing, even desiring to understand me.

For me, there is no greater luxury than being understood, because true commonality is rarer than a blade of grass in the desert. Yet I remember the feeling. I remember seven-year-old Scott, giggling with me under his jacket on the school bus, cocooned in a private conspiracy. As a teacher, I live for the moment when my eyes lock with my learner's in a flash of insight as together we discover a new idea. As a young woman, I remember my own unconditional trust flashing back to my heart from the eyes of my first love.

It is not approval I seek. I write pursuing a sense of rest, of slowing down my thoughts, so that one mind can understand another's by capturing authentically on paper mental images, emotions, and yearnings. Converting mental energy to black and white squiggles on a page becomes a tangible and permanent record of my connection to others, like a musical composition or a visual work of art.

Putting Memories Into a Memoir

By Deborah Wright Yoho

When I last read a selection at our writers' workshop, someone remarked, "How can you remember all these details?" I understood the question both as a compliment and as a sincere query, since I am writing a true story that took place more than 35 years ago. Besides, I turn sixty this year. This graying old mare ain't what she used to be, especially her memory!

Much of the pleasure I stumble upon as I struggle with the hard work of writing a memoir is the delight of savoring old times, old friends, old places. So I thought I would share how, indeed, I work to retrieve detailed memories to include in my writing. It isn't rocket science, and what works for me may be useful to any writer.

My secret: I work with photographs. You could be astounded at how much you will notice in a photograph you haven't looked at for some time. A picture of myself at seventeen playing a guitar while sitting on my mom's sofa brought back all sorts of things: my mom's interest in watercolor (the photo showed a picture on the wall behind me); how I felt about my body at the time (I wasn't really playing the guitar, but hiding my stomach); the heat and humidity of Charleston, where my parents lived while I was in college; and how I hated the Greyhound bus rides I endured to visit them. The next thing I knew I was remembering, in detail, a conversation I had with a soldier on the bus about the Vietnam War.

I talk before I begin to draft a piece of writing, to anyone handy, even to myself if necessary. Details come to mind as someone else asks me questions, or when I am literally thinking out loud as my own mind wanders and wonders. I find that actually hearing words helps me compose in black and white what my mind "sees" in pictures while I'm talking.

I must be an auditory learner, because music, an evocative medium in its own right, has been another powerful catalyst when calling details to mind. I'm writing about the 1960s, so I immerse myself in the popular music of that time, not just while writing, but all day long.

When I first became serious about my writing, I was highly selective about what details I included, thinking only "relevant" items advancing the storyline would be of interest to the reader. But our group set me straight! Readers want detail, if your writing makes them curious enough to want to know more.

What Happened in Vegas...

By Deborah Wright Yoho

The last time I visited Vegas, the year was 1967 and I was fifteen years old. My family was passing through on our way to our new home in the Philippines. For an hour we ogled the bright lights of the Strip through the car windows, and I wondered why women wore high heels with their short-shorts as they teetered along on the sidewalks. We marveled at Frank Sinatra’s name on the marquee at the Sands, and then my parents scuttled us off to our beds at a small motel two blocks away from the hubbub.

Las Vegas today looks more like Disney on steroids than a playground for the Rat Pack. If it is possible to camouflage unbridled gambling and drinking to appear wholesome, the spin doctors of Vegas have done it. McDonald’s fits right in between the Paris and MGM casinos. You have to look closely to find a wedding chapel or an establishment advertising topless exotic dancers.

Ralph and I were quick to explain to everyone in South Carolina that we were visiting Las Vegas to attend my high school reunion, not to gamble. I had to hurry to clarify that I didn’t go to school there but overseas instead, and that Vegas was a destination venue rather than a pilgrimage to stoke the home fires.

I wasn’t that keen on looking up old boyfriends anyway, but wanted instead to promote my book, a memoir about high school days in the Philippines. So I hired a graphic artist to design a poster and a flyer to tote along on the plane.

The results were mixed. People seemed impressed that I was writing a book and were happy to reminisce with me, but I found we didn’t have the same memories! Why was I so surprised? I hadn’t realized that the Air Force base we lived on was large enough to provide such a rich diversity of experience. As I talked with people who remembered me and with many who didn’t, I frantically took notes.

On the red-eye flight back to South Carolina, I pondered whether to incorporate any of the stories I had heard into my tome. Abruptly I realized I am now faced with a new list of questions as I think about what to write: is my story just MY story, or is it really about a unique time and place? What’s more interesting, the things we all had in common there or the individual experiences that were different? At a distance of more than 40 years, can I trust my own recollections? And if I can’t, how significant are my own biases in relation to the purpose of the book? I thought I was nearly finished. Now I find I must start over.

Tom Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” He was right.

Enslaved to Confusion

By Deborah Wright Yoho

As a writer, I feel buffeted by the pressures of globalization. Ever since I read Thomas Friedman’s iconic books on the subject, daily I feel like I am leaning into the wind, weathering the storms of merciless change. Deadlines. Competitions. Places to go and things to do if I ever hope to be published. Yet writing for me requires a slow pace and a measure of peace and quiet. I’d like to think of my writing as a refuge, at least a pause that refreshes. But more and more the mechanics of modern life reduce my writing time to a few moments, like taking a vitamin pill with the hope I’ll have more energy later.

My new intellectual hobby is keeping up with the effects of globalization. I am enslaved to perpetual confusion, dealing with the unrelenting learning curve required to operate my demon computer. I call it the Machine, and I refuse to talk to it.To do so would confirm the presence of another life form struggling to communicate with me in an alien language. While I know it is useless to ignore its demands, I maintain the delusion that the human mind by default should function as master over all machines. Entities with an assertive consciousness require respect I refuse to offer.

The joy of maintaining a connection to friends and family has become a chore. Nobody is ever home, cell phones are unreliable, email addresses constantly change, and who has the time for snail mail? Facebook just won’t cut it. I must plan for a three-day delay trying to reach anybody at all. Not that I am any different. People get mad at me if I don’t return their message in less than 24 hours. Half the time I want the world to just go away and the rest of the time I’m chasing after it.

My private life as a reader has been invaded. Should I buy a Kindle? Must I? Probably. The cost to feed a two-books-a-week habit is bounding away from me. I can’t indulge my preference for ink on paper much longer unless I want to spend more time with the Machine managing a waiting list at the library.

I suspect those who cherish the deliberative writing process, considering, drafting, editing, and then doing it all over again before releasing their thoughts to others, could someday become an extinct species.

The Luxury of Being Understood

By Deborah Wright Yoho

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "It is a luxury to be understood." Perhaps this is the reason a writer is a creature who craves feedback. We want to know we have communicated what we meant, that our words are received with all the nuance and meaning we ascribe to our efforts in our own minds.

We all want to be understood. Emerson noted the rarity of that privilege. The writer strives for the Holy Grail, an elusive instant that is precious. How can we know the reader 'hears' what we 'said'?

We have to ask. The SC Writers’ Workshops provide structured opportunities for readers to share what they 'heard'. As writers, we hope this is a reflection of our own voice, and if we are fortunate indeed, perhaps the reader's mind is challenged to follow our mental pathway toward something new.

I find that I get the most out of constructive, sincere feedback only after I reach a level of personal satisfaction with what I have written. So I don't share my work with anyone until I sense a fair chance that it is good enough for someone to 'hear' what I am trying to say. Like Emerson, I know the luxury of being understood. Perhaps I need to develop a thicker skin; it strikes me that writing is a risky business.

So if I don't really value what I have written--if it hasn't cooked long enough, or doesn't have enough ingredients yet, hasn't marinated to a richness at least in my own mind, I don't bring it to the workshop. I feel I can't expect a reader to value my writing (enough to give my words serious consideration and help me improve) if the selection isn't already close to the best I can do without the reader's feedback. If I want to grow tomorrow beyond whatever level I have reached today, I have to do my best first, and only then seek out the "luxury of being understood."

Conferencing

By Debbie Yoho

In the late '70s, I was lucky to participate in USC's First Draft of the Writing Project for teachers. The graduate course lasted only two weeks, but the Project met all day, every day. We learned by doing, striving to become better teachers by first developing our own writing skills, then stepping out of the process to track and discuss our personal journey. We learned how to transform writing instruction in our classrooms from a battlefield of grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and bleeding red ink, to a nurturing laboratory for communication and self-expression.

Our work was noisy. When we weren't writing, we were paired up reading our stuff aloud to each other. We called this "conferencing."

Conferencing is the key! We learned that published authors always have at least one partner to reflect on the writing, so that the written word can coax two minds closer and closer together in the direction of an intimate, shared experience—writer and reader developing a mutual understanding of what the words mean.

Our Writing Workshop meetings offer one way for writers to conference with one another. However, I find that the bi-monthly meetings are not enough for me. So I have enlisted a friend. She reads my manuscript a few chapters at a time, and then meets with me once a week to talk about it.

We don’t discuss the challenges of point of view, continuity or the need for more dialog. Instead she re-tells the story back to me, reflecting what stands out to her, what conclusions she is drawing, what she "sees between the lines", what strikes her as unusual or confusing, contradictory or distracting.

I am free to ask questions to draw her out: "What picture do you have of the mother?" "How do you think the boyfriend felt?" "What do you think will happen next?" "Describe the interaction between these two characters."

If what she tells me matches what I meant to convey, I have crafted a piece of writing that achieves my purpose with at least one reader.

I chose my conferencing partner carefully. She is analytical, articulate, brutally honest but constructive, and she is interested in tracking and contributing to my growth as a writer. My friend functions as my writing teacher by communicating with me about her experience as a reader, a thrilling process.

What I've Learned So Far

By Deborah Wright Yoho

What goes through your mind, Gentle Reader, when I tell you that I teach adults to read? How can an adult not know how to read in this day and age, in this country? Oh, maybe she works with retards, or welfare mothers, or rednecks?

I became the director of a non-profit adult literacy program in 1994, after I left my job as the principal of a rural South Carolina high school - straight from three years of dealing with kids who lived on dirt roads and showed up in August barefoot or with lice. One student asked permission for dismissal at noon so he could pick cotton to earn a few dollars for his family. Another forgot to leave his loaded shotgun at home. He parked his truck, unlocked, on school grounds with the evil thing still mounted on a gun rack behind the front seat.

So when I accepted the job as an adult educator, I thought the guy at the “fillin’ station” on The Andy Griffith Show, Goober, probably represented the typical adult who struggles with reading. That is, until I met James Lazarus.

I had been on the job a week when a newspaper reporter with The State called me asking to interview an “adult illiterate” for a feature story about the United Way campaign. “Sure!" I answered, eager to grab the media spotlight. "I have someone here right now. If you have a close deadline, you can come right over."

"I'll be right there," Bill McDonald said, delighted to get this chore out of the way. I gave him directions and waited impatiently for him to arrive.

It never occurred to me to ask the adult learner and his tutor if they wanted to be interviewed. When Bill arrived, I escorted him to the classroom and introduced him. I also had to introduce myself. I had never met either James Lazarus or the lovely elderly lady who volunteered to tutor him. Luckily, James didn't care about my presumption or my rudeness.

Bill posed his first question. "Tell me, Mr. Lazarus, what do you do for a living?"

"Huh?" asked James.

"Your profession."

With immense dignity, this quiet middle-aged man stated, "Oh, I'm a pastor."

"A pastor?!" Bill's jaw dropped only slightly lower than mine.

"Yes, I have a congregation of about 300 souls just outside of town. Preaching is my profession. But I also work for the county painting playground equipment."

"What does your church think about their pastor not being able to read?"

"Well," said James. "They don't know." There was a pregnant pause as James drew a breath and then grinned. "But I guess they are about to find out!"

James Lazarus understood his secret was about to be divulged to the whole world while Bill and I never considered that he may not have wanted his face plastered six inches high on page one of the Metro section. But that is how his congregation found out their pastor couldn't read.

As for me, I learned something about stereotypes, dignity, patience, consideration for others, and plain good manners from a gentleman. To this day, I am very proud to call James Lazarus my friend.

Capturing Pictures or Voices?

By Deborah W. Yoho

How do you know when you are finished with a piece of writing? I can’t seem to figure this out. I was flabbergasted when my new friend Ilmars announced that he had “finished another novel”.

I had to ask, “You mean you are finished with the first draft? Did you write it straight through?”

“Yes,” he answered, “now I will go back and edit it.”

I wish I could do that, write straight through. I can’t compose a sentence without editing it as I go. (I just changed the last sentence to substitute compose for the word write. But I’m not at all sure the result is better.) Ilmars’s method seems much more efficient.

Fifteen years ago I wrote a short self-help book. At one point I decided I was finished with it. But when I pulled it out six months ago with the idea of actually publishing it myself, it was clearly not ready. Here I am now still fooling with it.

Is writing an art form, an activity suited to spontaneity and experimentation? Or is it more like a craft, the result of carefully honed skills perfected only by consistent practice? If it is an activity to be practiced, I have surely had plenty of that! Yet the more I practice, the more unsure I am about my ability to put two words together sensibly.

There is something profoundly visual about how I go about this activity. So often when writing, I stop, cock my head sideways, stare at the print, and ask myself, “Does that look right?” Look right, not sound right.

When I am reading, the words become sounds in my head. Authors speak to me, rather than write to me. I think I’ve got this all backward, or inside-out, or something.

So I’ve decided to tack into a new direction. I’ve bought a digital recorder, and I will try to speak my thoughts “straight through” before putting them to paper.

I’ll let you know whether or not this works. But I know what you’re thinking, and I agree. The written word is not the same thing as the spoken word. Many articulate speakers are not good writers.

Perhaps what I am after is to match my written words with the pictures in my head. What I see in my head, I think, is what motivates me to write. I want those thoughts to have life!

Hmmm, maybe writing is about visualization after all.

A Cautionary Tale

By Deborah W. Yoho

“Someone must have seen this happen,” I said out loud, staring at the tiny pellets of automobile glass scattered everywhere. As I opened the car door, more glass fell out of the window frame onto the front seat. That’s when I realized I had been robbed as well as vandalized; my laptop and briefcase were gone.

In broad daylight, in this neighborhood? I ran back into the Cracker Barrel and found the manager. No, no one had reported anything, she said. In sympathy, she dropped everything and waited with me by my violated Saturn SUV until the police arrived.

“We haven’t had a smash-and-grab for six months,” she told the officer.

“How often does this happen?” I shouted at her.

“A lot. But not lately.”

Is that supposed to make me feel better? I know, I know. I shouldn’t have left anything in the car, even though it was locked. “But I was only in there a half hour! And the car is within sight of the front door! At high noon! And look at all the people coming in and out!”

I spent the rest of the day getting the shattered window fixed. Eventually the laptop was replaced. But a week went by before I noticed my most serious loss. The first four chapters of my manuscript, carefully polished after hours of help from my writers’ group were, of course, backed up onto a flash drive.
But the flash drive was in the briefcase.

THE LATEST ADDITION

Meet A New Writer

DEBORAH W. YOHO





Deborah is the Director of Turning Pages (http://www.proliteracy.org), a non-profit program that helps adults improve their reading skills. She serves on the National Governance Council of ProLiteracy, the world's largest literacy organization (http://www.proliteracy.org/). She has been published in Reach Out Columbia and in a number of professional journals related to adult literacy.

My Memoir

By Deborah Wright Yoho

Why would somebody like me want to write a memoir? After all, I don’t have any progeny who might be interested in the details of my life story. Neither am I ready, at age 57, to succumb to the luxury of spending hours in blissful nostalgia for the good ‘ol days.

My good ‘ol days weren’t so great anyway. Yet after forty years, my mind still ponders the significance of just 24 months.

In 1967, I found myself living in the closest proximity to the Vietnam War that was possible for an American of my age and gender. I was sixteen, the daughter of a military career man, a baby boomer whose brothers were slightly too young for the draft. Not that Dad spent any time in Vietnam. Instead we were stationed at a huge Air Force base in the Philippines.

The memories are disturbingly vivid: a roaring flight line clogged 24/7 with screaming jets; the coffins loaded each day onto the C-141 Starlifters; the time I was in the emergency room at the hospital with a North Vietnamese prisoner under heavy guard on the gurney next to me; the nurses who came to our school weekly to line up anyone over 17 they could coax into giving blood; the painful cholera shots we endured every six months.

Most of all, I remember the young, lonely airmen who hung out at the base swimming pool when they were off duty to talk to any American girls willing to listen to them. Eventually, I married one of those airman.

These were the years I learned about sex, death, the power of unquestioned authority, and the disconcerting embarrassment of living in an underdeveloped country. By the time I returned to the States to attend college, I was no longer an American teenager but a citizen of the world.

Perhaps the experience seems worth writing about because I believe this country has never come to terms with the shadow of 50,000 lives squandered in a lost cause. Not only I, but an entire country seems confused, struggling to identify and affirm basic values we once held to be uniquely American. Vietnam was the watershed.

Much has been offered about those days by politicians, retired generals, disillusioned veterans, Hollywood producers and cynical professors on college campuses. What might be learned through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl?