A Response to the Robin Hemley Memoir Workshop at the Decatur Book Festival by Caitlin White9/18/2009 It may seem factual, but the following account of my experience in the writing workshop “Rewriting your Life” is actually fiction.
According to Robin Hemley, the author teaching the workshop, all memoir is. As writers, we are constantly engaging our imaginations, so that the things we have imagined intertwine with events as they really happened. This means that our memories, a rather important resource when writing a memoir, are not entirely accurate. They are, in fact, quite fallible. To prove it, Robin led us through an exercise. He first instructed us to close our eyes. We were to picture the room, a classroom in pleasant disarray on the second floor of Buttrick Hall, and to describe it as accurately we could. When he tapped a desk, that person was to share a detail about the room. It sounded fairly easy, but I was alarmed at how unsafe I felt without the comfortable assurance of my eyes. The fear of the unknown was something I had experienced before. How was it that closing my eyes evoked the same strange emotions I felt as I prepared to spend a semester as a Page in the House of Representatives? As I returned to a high school in South Carolina, where no one else had experienced the singular experience that now ruled my perspective, where my friends had grown cool toward me? As I contemplated how to go about sharing such an experience, to write it, to open it up to the judgment of the world? I frantically scanned my memory for some detail worthy of sharing. The sunlight streaming through the windows in the left wall, igniting the leaves of the oak tree outside and turning the dark wood of the window frame a honey gold. The pale, gray-green color of the carpet, perhaps the “industrial green” one professor had mentioned, a color once thought to have a soothing effect. Before I knew it, what must have been my unfailing good karma led Robin to tap my desk first. “Maps,” I said, “There are a lot of maps on the wall over the blackboard.” This tidbit, which was surely paired with a blind, erratic movement of my arms toward the wall in front of me, fostered a discussion of the maps. What were they maps of? What brand were they? How many were there? The group decided that there were three or four maps. When we opened our eyes, we discovered that this was one of the many details we got wrong. There were four sets of rolled, pull-down classroom maps above the blackboard, many of them disheveled, each with a least ten maps in the roll. I’d gotten one thing right though: there really were a lot of maps. Robin wanted us to understand the fallibility of memory not so that we would doubt our recollections of events, but in order to realize that details, like the number of maps on the wall, are often not the most memorable or most important elements of the story. What is more crucial is something that Robin called “emotional truth.” Even if you remember the details wrong, or have to make something up, you can express the truth of your experience through its emotional meaning to you. Sharing experiences through memoir exposes a part of your soul, in such a form that readers expect it to be true. What if someone judges you? Worse, what if they don’t care about your story at all? The workshop reminded me of the challenge of writing my stories in a relevant way that would reach out to people and move them. It also showed me that with my eyes closed in a room full of strangers, I have the power to speak my memories aloud. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Caitlin White is a first-year student at Agnes Scott College. She hails from Union, South Carolina, and plans on graduating in 2013.
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A Response to the Kaylie Jones Memoir Workshop at the Decatur Book Festival by Paige Sullivan9/18/2009 I was, quite literally, surrounded by stories. That sounds trite, but in a workshop called “Structuring the Memoir,” in which every member is looking for the right way to recount what has happened in his or her life, such a description becomes rather apropos. By some stroke of luck, not only was my first writing workshop centered on my favorite genre, but it was also led by Kaylie Smith, keynote speaker of the day and author of the newly released memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me. Though only two hours were allotted for our group in this workshop sponsored by the Decatur Book Festival, Smith still managed to convey profundities and solid pieces of advice alike. For me, the up and coming English major suffering from a combination of writer’s block and harsh bouts of self-criticism, the time led by Smith, who possessed refreshing frankness about writing and the publishing business, was just what the doctor ordered. We started with the usual ice breaker: going around the room introducing ourselves and our occupations. Surrounded by a variety of people, from a psychoanalyst to an attorney to a freelance editor to me, a college freshman, we were quite a patchwork quilt of ideas and backgrounds, providing nothing less than a basis for fascinating discussion. Smith dove right in to the heart of the workshop’s goal: how does one structure a sound memoir? We focused first on what was most logical: the beginning. Smith emphasized how crucial the beginning of one’s story is. “Make it fascinating,” she said, else one left him or herself open to the problem of losing the reader before the second chapter ever saw its sunrise. Discussion then meandered through plot and pacing and of not “dropping the ball”—the key, Smith said, was to use “forward momentum” to propel the story along, creating something irresistibly engaging. In the corner of the room I sat, furiously scribbling in my spiral notebook, trying to absorb not only the author’s words, but those of the people around me. Amidst hearing stories of death, attack, disconnect, abuse, deceit, and even exorcism, I came to understand the root of my attraction to the memoir and its pervasive effects as a literary genre. It was all in the universality. As an eighteen year old, life has shown me a fair hand of conflicts and upheavals, but such was the same for the person sitting to my left, to my right, across from me, three desks down—it was everywhere. More than the savvy advice of a published and experienced writer, Smith provided us with the means by which to uncap the pen, to differentiate between our past and present selves, to “quiet the censors” in our heads, and to simply begin. I cannot speak for the other members of the workshop, but there was something therapeutic, almost cathartic, about being in that Buttrick classroom. Two hours came and went quicker than any of us would have liked, but before walking out the door, Smith shared her favorite meditative technique to quiet the voices in our heads that ever so often ebb the flow of words and ideas. Essentially, it was our task to shut out all of the voices telling us what we couldn’t or shouldn’t do with our stories. The only voice that mattered was our own. “Now you’re ready to write,” she finished. I wish I could say that I raced back to my dorm and began to pen the story of my adolescence, full of irony and beauty and poignancy. I have instead let myself become caught up in the whirlwind of homework, class, sleep, trips to Decatur, and other college ventures. There are moments, though, when my mind meanders and snags on a memory. Maybe it’s the moment that changed my life, the one that caused my “story” to begin. Maybe—or maybe I’m just still looking. -- Paige Sullivan is a first-year English major at Agnes Scott College. She hails from Monroe, Georgia, and plans on graduating in 2013. The “Celebrating Eudora” Concert featuring Mary Chapin Carpenter, Claire Holley, Kate Campbell, and Caroline Herring at the Decatur Book Festival did just that: Celebrate. With only one song directly about Eudora Welty, the concert still managed to capture the essence of Welty’s work and existence through musical storytelling based on Southern and feminine experience.
The contradiction between an outsider's perception of Southern history and an insider's Southern experience and feeling reveals itself in Welty’s work and the songs that the women sang. In Kate Campbell’s song “Look Away,” she describes the burning of a mansion in Alabama, and how a non-Southerner would view the mansion as a symbol of hatred, but all she remembers is chasing lightening bugs, non “angry mob[s]” or “cross[es] on fire.” Welty captures the story of the people that as a culture were seen as bigots and racists in her time, but individually the subjects were just people with stories that needed to be told. Mary Chapin Carpenter sang her song “John Doe No. 24” and noted that what she loves about songwriting is storytelling, and she felt if she could be moved by an obituary for a man with no name and no identity, than his story was worth telling the world. Eudora Welty’s stories were of the common people, as was her language, and even though these four musicians did not sing or quote Welty directly, they found stories to tell and that was more powerful than a discussion of why Welty’s work was acclaimed. The music spoke volumes about the identity of Southern women and with each woman coming from a slightly different Southern background, including Mary Chapin Carpenter “the adopted Southerner” of the night, their music linked the stories together and provided moving and enjoyable experience for all of the attendees. Somehow, the packed event remained intimate and homey, quite the spirit of Miss Eudora herself. -- Emma Kearney is a student aide at the Agnes Scott Writing Center. She's a member of the class of 2013 from Peachtree City, GA. | Blog posts are written by a range of students from Agnes Scott College. Some are tutors at the Center for Writing and Speaking. Others are students who engage in writing through local festivals and events. ArchivesApril 2010 CategoriesAll |
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