5-star read

First year of college - is there anything as memorable? For me it was my first year free of curfews and restraints. It was when I met the man I’d marry and live with for the next thirty years. It was a time in my life when books and higher learning clashed with the lure of parties and new friends and confirmed just how irresponsible I was.

Stephen E. Smith, in his warm and funny new book, The Year We Danced, remembers that first year as one of “brief, sudden, beautiful awakenings” and so before I’d even begun the book, I was enchanted.

Smith’s book is funny. He lands a strange roommate who collects - and methodically arranges - his bottles of cologne (and that’s not all). He ends up on a hilarious blind date (trust me, it’s unique). He sketches a seriously funny - and exaggerated - picture of his damaged loafers (he includes the sketch in his book) in an effort to get a raise in his allowance. And the stories of his hitchhiking adventures are fabulous.

Smith’s book is romantic. In a singularly brave moment he asks a beautiful girl he calls Blondie to go dancing with him and she accepts. Weeks of dances follow. Kisses at her doorstep. Then the year ends and Smith’s dad has a surprise for him: a flashy way to keep up with Blondie during the long summer stretch. But of course another surprise awaits Smith as he sets out to find his love.

Smith’s book is authentic. Parents are parents and many of us have a love-hate relationship with them. Smith seems to be no exception. The Vietnam war has begun and Smith’s dad seems to prefer that he enlist rather than go to college. The author seamlessly weaves in this conflict and pain.

Smith’s book is well-written. Through his own love of reading and a little of what he brought with him from college, Smith writes beautifully, carefully drawing out his stories but keeping every word relevant.

In the end, Smith found a balance of fun and study during his first year of college that would take me many additional years to find. But I share his fond memories and I loved his book.

Following Tom Ryan

Each time I finish a great memoir, I always ask myself, what made this one work? In Following Atticus, it’s clear that Tom Ryan figured out how to make this book work on multiple levels.

When Ryan is seven, his mother dies in a horrible accident. His dad, overwhelmed by her death and too many children to care for (nine), he shuts down emotionally. Ryan is the youngest and perhaps feels the loneliness and anger of his father most of all.

Instead of making this the central story, however, Ryan brilliantly weaves it into a much larger story. Ryan buys a wonderful little dog, who becomes the hero of his story, and they begin, together, to climb mountains. As he tells about his climbing adventures, Ryan weaves in the story of his relationship with his father. Perfect. Brilliant.

Knowing, perhaps, that a story about climbing mountains with a dog might not sell a book, however, Ryan adds two more facets and it works perfectly because both are fascinating and relevant to his bigger story. The first is the story is about a controversial newspaper he founded and wrote (as he climbs mountains, he realizes he no longer cares about the drama of the town he’s writing about), and the second is an informative walk through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The latter is central to his story for obvious reasons (those are the mountains Ryan is climbing), but Ryan thinks to bring in its history and ambiance and folklore. The result is a a Nautilus Book Award winning memoir.

Once Ryan has pulled you in with the captivating story of his newspaper and the craziness that brought to his life, he introduces you to Atticus, with whom you’ll fall in love. There’s humor and tragedy (no, Atticus doesn’t die at the end - whew!) and adventure.

What a great memoir.

No Neat Endings, Please

Lately I’ve been thinking lately about how messy life is and how much we clean it up in our writing, especially in memoir.

Recently I read a couple of books - or should I say I ended up skimming them - about horrific life situations, one in which a woman lost her family in a terrible accident, and another about dealing with mental illness.

For the first part of the story, I was really moving along with the author. I felt their pain. And then suddenly about half-way through, there was a change to chirping about how wonderfully they were dealing with their traumas. In one case, God had neatly allowed them to wrap up all their grief and problems. The ending was even tidier: there had been meaning and everyone was doing hunky-dory.

Life isn’t like that, though, and if you pretend it is, you’re going to lose readers. If life is still happening, then there’s no real happy ending. Life isn’t over. The mental illness is still there. The family is still gone.

Contrast that with another book I recently read, The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont. In her sequel to After Long Silence, Fremont tells us right up front that her family disowned her after the publication of her first book. Then she goes back and digs through facets of her childhood that she didn’t uncover or hadn’t really seen when she was writing her first book. Why? Because she’s searching for an explanation of why the family she both loved and struggled with could cut her off.

Fremont succeeds with her book in part because she’s so honest about how she feels about her family. “Both of us preserve within us the inconsolable core of an injured child,” she writes of her sister, then elsewhere, “[my sister] had always counted on being able to jump me in my room, or to get at my diary, or to ransack my belongings when I was out.” Fremont presents her sister from every angle and her agony in trying to understand and sympathize with her is evident throughout the book.

“I don’t know how or why these windows of joy opened and closed in our lives,” Fremont writes, and again, we see that life and relationships aren’t black-and-white, and we know right off the bat that there is not going to be an easy resolution. We relate to this teeter-totter. We know life can be wonky.

A book, of course, has to have some kind of resolution. Some level of healing or progress or a decision. I remember reading Augustine Burrows’ stories years ago and his solution was simple: he decided it would be healthier for him to walk away from his emotionally sick mother and figure out his own life. That isn’t a happy ending, but it’s a resolution. Fremont manages to both distinguish and merge her sister’s inner goodness and her outer maddening behavior and she, too, decides it’s best to retain distance. Not a feel-good ending but an honest one, and for most of us, honesty is what we want.

So if you’re working on a memoir and you have an ending in mind that’s too pretty, rethink it. Even if life seems good at the moment, acknowledge that you know there are challenges ahead. Tell us about one you’re having now. Don’t risk losing readers by pretending your life is better than it really is. We all want authenticity. Work hard to let it show.

Coming Up!

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Here’s a preview of what’s coming up THIS WEDNESDAY:

How does a mother cope when two of her three daughters face insurmountable obstacles? Read my interview with J Mark Stacy as she tells her heartbreaking, yet hopeful, story. Her book, Tapped and Skipped, tells of a daughter’s descent into the hell of schizophrenia, just as she nearly lost another daughter to drug addiction.

August is back-to-school month and I’ve featured a fun writing contest with prizes. You don’t have to be a professional writer - or a writer at all - to enter.. Just have fun with it!

What’s my favorite read for the month? I’ll give you a hint. It’s a memoir! And it’s a really, really good one.

You’ll also find another fun writing contest related to August and, um, it’s a “hot” one.

If you want to discover a new, paying writing market, you’ll find one here. I offer writing advice, links to some great events and sites, and more.

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Thank you for reading my blog!

Happy end-of-summer!

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Mary

Writing Conferences

Last week I traveled to New York City for a writer’s conference. After paying fifty dollars for a short taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, and feeling the culture shock of being surrounded by all that concrete, I posted the picture shown here on Facebook and mentioned that I dislike New York City. Actually, I said I hated it. With some venom.

But seriously, that isn’t entirely true. I’m just not a city person. I dislike noise and crowds. I love nature. I live on forty acres in the country right outside the Shawnee National Forest, next to a string of orchards and the Southern Illinois wine trail. But wow, did New Yorkers react. One of them blocked me. Wow.

So I bought a New York t-shirt and posted a tongue-in-cheek explanation. Here’s what I wrote:

“To all of you who suffered psychotic breakdowns and PTSD because I don’t like NYC, this may appease you: this is my fourth time here and I think the people in NYC are some of the nicest anywhere. The 9-11 Memorial is astounding, the food is delicious, the Statue of Liberty is unforgettable, the Broadway plays (I’ve been to six) are top notch, and getting to sit in Seth Meyer’s audience was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Here’s a t-shirt I bought that has a picture of NYC. I hope you can now sleep tonight.”

But here’s my new I-love-New-York thing. The conference was fantastic. If you’re a writer and you want to connect with an agent, that’s the place to do it. I met eight and out of those, seven made partial or full requests of my most recent manuscript: Ambiguous: Growing up in the Violence of the Coal Mines with a Sexually Confused Mother. What that means is that two agents requested my proposal and entire manuscript, and five others requested either my proposal and/or sample chapters.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough that, if you’re a writer who wants to get traditionally published with the larger publishing houses, you gotta go to conferences. It’s way too easy for agents and editors to overlook queries in the hundreds of emails they receive every day. Or maybe they just want to find writers who have made the effort and spent the money to come to a place where we can hone our craft, understand what we face in order to sell books, and prove that we can be social and presentable.

Yes, all of those requests have me pumped, but it’s only the first step. Will one of those agents decide to represent me? Will they be able to sell my book? Will lots of people read it?

With all that’s left before me, however, here’s what encouraged me the most. About half of the agents present at the conference are interested in memoir. The genre isn’t dead and it isn’t dying.

Vive la memoire

Vive la New York City

Adventure on Catalina

The swells jostled Doug and Ray’s patrol boat as they surveyed the disaster in front of them. Two fishermen had wedged a sixty-five foot boat in between two boulders and the boat was quickly being torn to pieces. Doug saw two men clinging frantically to the rail, screaming for help.

The area in which the men had wrecked the boat was a morass of jagged rocks. That, and the storm, made it nearly impossible for Doug and Ray to get their patrol boat close enough to rescue the two men. Finally, they spotted a small area of the sea that looked calm enough to draw a little closer, at least long enough to allow them to rescue the desperate men.

“Get us out of here!” one of the men on the doomed boat screamed. “Hurry!”

Doug instructed them to put on their life jackets. “You’re going to need to swim out to us!” Doug called to them. “We can’t get all the way to you.”

“I can’t swim,” one of the men shouted back, frantically.

This is just one of many true stories in Doug Oudin’s fabulous memoir, Between Two Harbors, a book I just finished reading.

Doug and his wife, Maureen, fresh out of college, were looking for a brief adventure and Catalina Island seemed like the ideal place. They thought they might stay a year or so, but it didn’t quite work out that way. What followed was a thirty-two year odyssey with Doug serving as Harbormaster for the Santa Catalina Island Company, as well as vice-president of Harbor Operations for Two Harbors Enterprises.

Before the move, Maureen had been offered a job as a bookkeeper on the island. Doug was hired to do repair work around the harbor. The couple moved in to company housing - a 700 square foot home with a view of the bay - and settled in.

After Doug and Maureen had been on the island for awhile, Doug began taking additional Coast Guard exams and soon was harbormaster with a crew of twenty-eight men and women. Emergency calls woke Doug regularly in the middle of the night and he quickly dressed and headed out to the harbor to deal with sinking ships, broken bones, lacerations from, say, hooking a live shark while fishing, and drownings, including that of Natalie Wood.

But life was sweet. Doug loved his job and he loved the island. He loved fishing (who knew there were so many methods based on what kind of fish you were after?), loved helping people get their boats organized in the harbor, loved the small-town festivals, and loved the wild, quiet, adventurous, remote life he was living. Maureen loved it, also, especially after the birth of their two boys, Trevor and Troy.

The boys could wander safely almost anywhere and they did, along with the other children growing up on the island. They built forts, fished, and found whale bones and unusual shells. Although there was television and internet on the island, the boys gravitated towards the adventures of the island. Buffalo roamed the island, as did goats, wild boar, deer, and other animals. Before a small school was started on their end of the island, Trevor took a bus (and sometimes a boat) to Avalon for classes, a two-hour daily round trip.

Some of Doug’s stories had me on the edge of my seat, biting my fingernails. The family’s personal life wasn’t always easy: water shortages, lack of a decent road system, and isolation. But it was a life they continually chose. And both of their sons grew up and went into marine work. Trevor remained on the island and, along with his wife Lauren, works in the marine university science center, a branch of USC. Troy attended California Maritime Academy and became a marine engineer.

With their sons grown, Maureen longed to be back near her family and to re-experience “civilization”. They now live in Oregon. But Catalina will never be out of Doug’s soul. He goes back often for fishing trips and he’s remained on the Board of the Catalina Island Seabass Fund, a foundation established to help restore the depleted white seabass fishery. “I could have lived there forever,” Doug says, and a part of him, of course, still does.

Doug Oudin wrote a weekly column for the Catalina Islander newspaper for twenty one years. Buy his memoir - Between Two Harbors - from Amazon.

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Don't Demonize (Writing Your Memoir)

Some months ago I read a book - or at least I read part of it - by an author who was writing about childhood trauma. About thirty pages in I was emotionally exhausted, and another thirty pages found me questioning the story. I had no reason, really, to doubt the author’s truthfulness but as I stopped to skim her book reviews, I discovered that a lot of other readers felt the same way I did.

Why is this?

Here’s why: few, if any, children grow up without some kind of joy or friendship or love or hope, and a writer who doesn’t acknowledge this risks losing the trust of their readers. So as you write, ask yourself these questions:

What in your childhood brought you happiness? Did you have a friend’s house where you took refuge? Was there a book or television program that took you to another place and time? Even a special toy or an animal or a place you escaped to can provide relief for the reader. Go to these places with as much depth and enthusiasm as you go to the areas of your pain.

By the same reasoning, few people are all good or all bad. When I wrote of my mother in my third memoir, it would have been easy to rob her of maternal tendencies towards me since she was emotionally absent for most of my childhood. But then I remembered her pressing a cool cloth to my forehead when I leaned over the commode retching with the flu, I felt her love as she rode beside me in an ambulance (actually, a hearse, but you’ll have to read my memoir to find out about that) as I was taken to the hospital ninety miles away, saw her joy as I opened the slew of presents she bought me for Christmas.

These tender moments, if written with passion and honesty, can make the tragedies of which you’re writing even more powerful.

A writer who does this beautifully is Tracy Ross in her memoir, The Source of All Things. Ross was abused by her stepfather, but leading up to this central part of her story, Ross writes not only of family get-togethers and camping, but also of tender and innocent and loving moments with the only man she’d ever called “Dad”: the afternoon he helped her pull a loose baby tooth, the times he saved her from her brother’s mischief, and the days when he soothed her bruised ego.

Ross never truly lets go of these moments and I get it. There was this beyond-awful side of her dad - a sickness, a perversity - but there was also a dad who hated himself for what he did, a dad she could remember in moments of father-daughter innocence, and a dad who - wow! - could actually admit what he’d done. That doesn’t mean Ross found it easy to forgive. She didn’t. But she did a masterful job of letting us see her conflict. And conflict is what’s real.

If you’re writing this type of memoir, then, take time to steer away regularly from the heaviness of tragedy. If the person about whom you’re writing truly has no redeeming qualities - and this is unlikely - then pull someone who does into your story. It will offer you more credibility and will give your readers a more authentic look at your life.

You can buy Tracy Ross’s wonderful book here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0043RSJFO/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0 (The Source of All Things by Tracy Ross, Free Press, 2011

Not Your Typical Minister

I arrived at God’s house and found Him truant - Dean R. Krosecz, Tsunamis

Dean Krosecz never imagined himself as a Christian. After he became one, he never dreamed he’d one day reject the supernatural in his desire for a more perfect love. But that’s exactly what happened.

As a child Dean lived in an unhinged household. His dad, a member of the outlaw motorcycle club, the Cossacks, left when Dean was eighteen months old. With little supervision, Dean roamed the alleys looking for trouble. By the time he was a teenager he was immersed in drug and alcohol abuse.

At seventeen Dean joined the Air Force, although his dream was to become a rock star. He also loved writing poetry, which he’d been doing since junior high. Scoring high in linguistics, Dean was sent by the Air Force to California where he spent a year learning Russian. But substance abuse followed him into the military and he was sent - by the Air Force - to rehab. When he was released, he went right back to the superficial comfort of drugs and alcohol.

The chaos of his childhood and his inability to get a grip on his life made Dean rife for the clutches of a “name-it-and-claim-it”, get-rich oriented branch of Christianity. At age twenty-one Dean fell whole-heartedly in love with what seemed to be a vibrant, loving branch of Christianity. He fell in love, married, began a family, and took an interest in becoming a minister. The church promptly told him he’d need to give up playing secular rock music.

I have always longed for a life that fits me

Right away problems arose in the marriage - Dean wanted a life devoted to something meaningful - at this point, the ministry, but his wife, whom I’ll call M., didn’t want to be married to a minister. Still, she promised that she’d put her husband through Bible school. That didn’t happen. Even though Dean and M. had three children by this time, M. wanted out of the marriage. Within the first year of their separation, Dean took custody of all three children, ranging in age from two to ten-years-old.

As difficult as it was raising three children without a traditional job, Dean made ends meet by opening a music school in his home, and traveling around the country leading worship and serving as a lay-minister. He became involved in both homeless and prison ministries. He met with some of the biggest names in his denomination. At evangelistic gatherings, after he’d led worship, he’d wander through the crowds offering them “prophetic words of God”.

Something was working for Dean. Serving people had become important than drugs or alcohol.

Thoughts of you become more infrequent

As Dean began to study theology more deeply, however, contradictions and anomalies confused him. A couple of years earlier, when Dean was living in Houston, he’d set up a place for all the churches to come together to pray for the city. A wealthy donor had entirely financed the project. But various denominations opted out because they felt that they couldn’t pray with other denominations. Why was God not willing, wondered Dean, to bridge these differences? Shouldn’t God be a better communicator than, say, Tony Robbins?

Struggling financially, Dean stopped by to talk with his pastor. “You’re no better than an infidel,” the pastor spat at him, “because you’re unwilling to take a traditional job.”

“What?” Dean wondered. Other ministers had told him that the highest calling in the world was in the ministry.

Doubts pressed into him. Shoving “the gospel” down people’s throats seemed antithetical to love, the very core of what his faith claimed to epitomize. Dean came out against the Iraq war, then two years later, in favor of gay marriage, and he watched as the people who claimed to have unconditional love turned their backs on him.

I felt like a broken piece of glass

Drawing blood from all I came in contact with

Not surprisingly it took six years of questioning for Dean to realize one day that he could no longer deal with the dissonance. The so-called unconditional love that Dean thought he’d embraced with his faith was actually based on a person fulfilling a certain set of conditions: you do this and that and you get our love. Dean realized he no longer believed in the kind of deity that his church laid out for him. Slowly, without any fanfare, Dean pulled away.

“How did everyone react?” I asked.

“The worst came in 2015 when I was supporting Bernie Sanders,” he replied. “I lost nearly half of my guitar students overnight. One parishioner said I was part of the enemy and people I’d been friends with began to pummel me on Facebook.”

“And the up side of leaving your faith?”

Dean didn’t have to think about it. “My oldest son and I were driving somewhere and he looked at me and said, ‘Dad, something’s different’, and I realized that I wasn’t scared any longer, that I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t screwed anything up.”

What is this life for if not finding your heaven on earth?

As the dust settled, Dean moved to the Poconos, got in touch with nature, wrote poetry, and played his guitar. Recently, though, due to financial concerns, Dean moved back to the city. “I’m focused on finding deep peace within myself wherever I live and whatever I’m doing,” Dean told me. “I’m still a minister. I still want to help people find better lives. I just realized that I don’t have to believe in the supernatural to do that.”

And there’s his guitar.

And poetry.

I made myself smile today. The joke was OK but the smile was luxurious

Check out Dean’s books at https://www.amazon.com/Dean-Krosecz/e/B00DJ595A4?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1654617851&sr=8-1

All italicized phrases are from the following books and are used by permission:

I have always longed for a life that fits me - Dean R. Krosecz, Thoughts in Winter, 2022

Thoughts of you become more infrequent - Dean R. Krosecz, Thoughts in Winter, 2022

I felt like a broken piece of glass

Drawing blood from all I came in contact with - Dean R. Krosecz, Dangles, 2020

What is this life for if not finding your heaven on earth - Dean R. Krosecz, Sacredness of Mountain Solitude, 2016

I made myself smile today. The joke was OK but the smile was luxurious - Dean R. Krosecz, Thoughts in Winter, 2022

Why Do We Read Memoirs?

Occasionally (though rarely) when I’m reading a memoir, I feel as if I’ve just stopped to gawk at a massive accident on the highway. It’s sensationalism at its worst. The writing is poor. There’s nothing redeeming in the story. I don’t finish these memoirs. I donate them to someone who enjoys a good train wreck.

Actually I’m not the type of person who can handle suffering at all. I stopped eating meat thirty years ago when I learned about the horrific conditions that many animals live in if they’re being raised to provide meat. I have nightmares when I see something awful on the news. When I’m with someone who’s suffering, I feel their pain as if it were my own. Images remain with me for months.

So why do I - and hundreds of thousands of other people - love memoirs?

Here’s why:

Humanity is fascinating. These past several months I’ve read memoirs about searching for a biological parent, one that detailed an escape from an island when an earthquake shattered her vacation, a humorous memoir about finding a second home in a new country, a surprising story about what a Chicago police officer faces during a typical month, a story of a harrowing escape from Iran, and a fascinating memoir about a woman who lived on a boat year-round. Life bustles all around us and memoir is the best way to discover it.

Memoirs are also an incredible journey into the mind, exploring the way other people think. More than most genres, memoir provides the space for deep reflection. We begin to understand why people love adventure over security (or vice-versa), how we struggle with marriage and make decisions to remain or leave, and how we cope with and rise above pain and sorrow. We see the intricate process of change and the mechanisms at work that lead to new belief systems. We understand how someone chooses to forgive - or why they didn’t. No other genre allows us to wander inside another person’s thought processes in quite the same way as a memoir.

As we read a memoir, we also feel a sense of community. Yes, that person’s story is unique but the theme is universal. They’ve loved wildly, had exquisite moments of joy, relished life as an adventure, experienced loss, felt excruciating physical and/or emotional pain, survived the onslaughts life has thrown at them, and found out that whatever they endured to enjoy that new slice of life was worth it. Yes, you think as you read a memoir, they know how I feel and what I’m going through. Yes, you think as you read a memoir, I can do this and it will be worth it in the end.

Obviously, many memoirs involve childhood abuse and I wonder if that’s why the genre sometimes gets a bad rap. I’m reading one right now, in fact. And yes, I cringe at the occasional paragraph that gets a little graphic. But the vast majority of this memoir is how the author survived. If we don’t read stories about childhood abuse, we’ll never truly understand the extent of it, how easily it can happen right under our noses, or how excruciatingly difficult it is for a child to tell an adult what’s happening. Abuse memoirs are, without exception, not tales of abuse but of survival. I stand in awe of these authors.

Selfishly, a memoir can make us feel grateful for our own lives. As a child I was never the victim of sexual abuse but I’ve read enough memoirs that I know the telltale signs in a child and I keep an eye on the children in my life. Recently I read a fabulous travel memoir and realized that adventure comes at a cost - and it isn’t one I’m willing to pay for. The woman who wrote the spellbinding memoir about her child being diagnosed with a brain tumor? I’ve had nothing in my life that compares. I close these books feeling a fresh rush of gratitude.

Uniquely, memoirs provide an escape from our own lives while remaining in touch with reality. It’s real life. Many memoirs are beautifully written and I’m swept away by the way an author has crafted his story, the perfect alignment of finely tuned sentences. The story crests and explodes and gently meanders, and then restarts the process. We’re in this thing called life together and we’re telling our stories. I’d love to hear yours.