Remembering as You Write—One Way to Memoir

(Photo from Flickr)

I often do not know what I will write about when I begin working on my memoir on any given day. I simply begin writing about something that occurred, perhaps even that day, and let my mind flow freely in whatever direction it will. If there have been some particularly sensory moments that stirred me to memory, ie. the smell of rain coming or leaves burning, the morning's first bird song or kids shouting as they play in a backyard, the taste of a tomato and mayo on bread – all the better. But I find if I simply begin writing with memories in mind, something from my past, like the Mummy from that old film, will rise to the surface to freak me out.

I have created for myself an alternate route as well. The way I see it, there are short term memoirs (which may have occurred as recently as that morning) and long term memoirs which may take us back to childhood or youth. There's no reason, as far as I can see, to actually separate these into different notebooks. Quite often, one leads to another. Mostly likely, remembering something that happened yesterday will key a memory from years past, or remind me of the original causal root for why I act the way I do now.

For instance, my book is called "Frankly I Think I've Been Freaked Out All My Life." Here is an answer to how the present may be affected by the past, at least in my case. The question you must ask yourself is, "What's your excuse?" Don't take any of this too seriously. Let your memories be stimulated by anything that works. I don't advise alcohol or drugs simply because they will take their toll in the long run. Ask me how I know.

Here's a quick "for instance." I was writing about going to the VA and how that freaks me out, and I remembered that, in actuality, I've been freaked out for most of my 50-something years. Although the military really put some shine on that old PTSD, I have to admit they had something they could work with when I joined up. I don't think I'm the only one either. Not by a long shot. Thousands of people get a lot more freaked out than they started by joining or being drafted into the military.

But really, I've been weirded out from infancy. Mom said I cried frequently and loudly as an infant; so much so that as a seminary student and a young nurse, my parents, in desperate need of a good night's sleep, wrapped cloths and padding around the faucets and knobs in the bathtub and closed me up in the bathroom to see if they could ignore their big-mouthed baby. By the age of just a few months, I found myself in my first padded cell. Was this a precursor of things to come?

I'm sure they believed I would wear myself out, cry myself to sleep, but I was already extremely sensitive to my environment and was way too freaked out to slumber peacefully. Who knows how much these early childhood experiences affect us as we get older? I am an insomniac to this day, tossing and turning and reading until I have worn myself down enough to finally pass out. Obviously, this is somewhat hereditary since neither my dad nor my middle sister sleep well. Luckily, both my sister and I maintain a secretive chocolate stash we raid in the middle of the night, and that seems to help.

After all that bawling as a mere babe, my parents should not wonder at the need I feel to use my voice, even if they do wish I would shut up and quit telling all these stories about our family. I have never had much of a sense of privacy. That fact alone makes me quite different from the rest of them, and could be the real clue that I am not really from them, but an alien life form as I expected way back when.

I'm not saying freaked-outness is all bad. The freaked-out have a way of noticing things other, more "normal," people miss as they move along at high velocity making money or acting properly. This is why freaked out people need to become painters or poets or crafts people or something, so that people will think of them as ARTISTS and we can find gainful employment and even happiness. That is if your parents or teachers or SOMEBODY eventually recognizes you are freaked out, not simply behaving badly, and tries to steer you in a perhaps slightly more creative direction.

Like that...

Write me if you have any questions so far. Try to answer them yourself first, though. On paper. Then you'll be starting your own memoir.

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Writing Your Own Life–Getting Started (Part 2)

Let's confront some of the fears writers must face as they begin working on their memoirs. Simply considering these fears is capable of preventing many of us from ever beginning in the first place. In order to write our reality, we know we must be fair to our readers; we need to be honest. We can do no better than to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as we remember it. This will be your escape clause. There may be a great deal of distance between what really happened and how we remember it.

Memory is a tricky character, after all. Think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Clark Kent and Superman. Remembrances love to dress up and disguise themselves, especially as superheroes and monsters. But that doesn't mean they aren't the TRUTH–the author's truth. Be compassionate with yourself, even if you don't have the facts just right. It all will be forgiven if the story is well written. Nobody else remembers the order of events, how things unfolded exactly, unless it's Aunt Susie with the photographic memory.

Tell yourself you'll never publish your memoirs anyway. You're just doing it for you, and maybe the audience at the open mic you attend monthly. They love the stories, so why not read them there? It's just a bunch of beatniks, poor poets, and queers. You can let yourself go. Once you begin writing and reading, you may quickly realize how addictive memoir can be. You'll want to work on it all the time. Your poetry will wither on the vine; your essays dry up and fly away like WalMart bags after a Mack truck has blown by. Don't worry, you'll find them stuck among the roadside branches once you're memoir writing has cooled. I can't think of a better reason to keep more than one iron in the fire at all times.

Writing the truth of our lives is incredibly freeing. We remember more and more as we go along. We often find keys to locked doors that contain creaky skeletons; letting them loose to dance and rattle across the page. For this reason, you don't want to take the act lightly. Remembering can be hard, painful, sometimes brutal work. Having a support group of other writers willing to delve into their own past is helpful.

Using humor to offset some of the more difficult passages is crucial. It gives you the leverage you may need to open the next rusty-hinged basement door. Humor also opens hearts and minds so that your audience or reader can swallow the more bitter realities of your (and perhaps their) lives. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" is not just a phrase from a silly song after all. Look up the word "levity."

Do not hold yourself to a timeline. The events don't have to be sequential, written in the order in which they occurred. That's not how memories work, after all. They come and go, fired by the smell of coffee one morning; the breeze off the lake on a hot summer day; the crisp pink taste of watermelon; the saltiness of tears that run down into the corners of our mouths as we grieve a loss.

Your best writing is there, just a few blocks away. Your very own interesting, inspiring, outrageous life story. You know somebody needs to write the thing. It might as well be you. At least then the tale will be told with your slant of the light, instead of bitter old Uncle Floyd's.

—Mendy Knott is a writer, poet and author of the poetry collection A Little Lazarus (Half Acre Press, 2010). To order your copy of A Little Lazarus directly from the author, please click here. Or, if cookbooks are more your style, get a copy of Mendy's family cookbook Across the Arklatex at www.twopoets.us.

Writing Your Own Life–Before You Begin (Part 1)

Now, we come down to the brass tacks, or knuckles as the case may be, concerning family memories. Preserving them for posterity, "just for the family," is one thing. Writing as the author of our own memories is quite another. There's nothing I like better than a well-written memoir. I even prefer the word "memoir" to "autobiography" because it implies, not just a recording of the facts as they occurred, but the author's perception of what actually went down; how it affected them and their behavior, forever and ever amen.

A couple of really good memoirs that will help acquaint you with the process of memoir-writing are: The Liar's Club by Mary Karr; A Girl Named Skippy by Haven Kimmal; Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, and absolutely anything by Anne Lamott and/or David Sedaris. In fact, there are nearly as darn many memoirs out there as there are authors. I encourage you to find the ones that appeal to your sense of story-telling. Don't let the sheer numbers of memoirs stop you from writing your own. You need to believe that your life story is as interesting and educational to others as anyone else's. It's true. Really.

My favorite writings within my writer's group, Hen's Teeth, are the ones that tell their stories. Memories are so intimate and real that they can terrify us in a way. We ask ourselves, "What if that got out? What if someone outside this small group heard how redneck my family was; or that it was full of criminals; or that Uncle Pete had an affair with the Baptist minister in our home town whose population numbered in the high hundreds? We don't want just everybody knowing about that. What will Mummer 'n' em think? They could excommunicate me. Not that I would lose anything financially...but emotionally I can just feel the hate rolling off them like heat off a Southern blacktop in July." When you start asking yourself these questions, you are getting to the good part.

I want to spend some time blogging about this memoir stuff because I think it's important to us as creatives, and to me, since I'm writing my own now. My working title is "Frankly I Think I've Been Freaked Out All My Life." The title is good for a few reasons. One, the term "freaked out" is pretty much dated to my childhood, or at least teenhood (hmm...a good made-up term, so don't steal it. I was a teen hood). For instance, "My first trip to a gay bar in Jackson, MS was really freaky!" or "I was so freaked out I shook the screen loose, leaned out the bathroom window and fired up another joint."

The second reason it's a good working title is that I can reinstate the term whenever I get off track. It gives me a kind of base of operations to which I can return and find my focus. "Do you know what really freaked me out?" Like that. Especially since I tend to wander all over the place, between past-past, present-past and fear for the freaked-outness of my future. And finally, I don't want people to think I got this freaked out just in the past few years, due to climate change or Congress or something equally as freaky... (cont'd next Monday)

—Mendy Knott is a writer, poet and author of the poetry collection A Little Lazarus (Half Acre Press, 2010). To order your copy of A Little Lazarus directly from the author, please click here. Or, if cookbooks are more your style, get a copy of Mendy's family cookbook Across the Arklatex at www.twopoets.us.