The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Lexington KY. Photo: visitlex.com
I face this crucial question whenever I am about to begin teaching another workshop, always now in memoir writing, which over the last twenty years has become a crucial form of self-expression for many women and some men who aspire to shape, refine and share their stories. That is my goal when I teach my next workshop at the redoubtable Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, May 19-21 from 1:30 to 4:30pm.
I’ve never been able to answer the above question. The writing classes I took every semester in college taught me nothing except how much opposition I would face, as a woman writer, in those years of accepted misogyny, to which we are returning today. My belief in my ability as a writer, although shaken, did not crumble, and the stubbornness I would need to succeed in my chosen career was strengthened. I hope the students in my class, not so buffeted, may be supported in their efforts and reassured that stubbornness is always a useful tool.
I’m calling this Lexington class “Beyond Memoir: Empowering the Imagination by Writing Historical Fiction,” as in my most recent book, Taken by The Shawnee (Turtle Point Press, 2024). I hope that each participant will bring several pages of whatever she is working on to read aloud so we may discuss how including historical context may strengthen her memoir.
For example, I begin my historical novel, Taken by the Shawnee with a two-word sentence: “News travels” modified by “Slowly” and then with the note that bad news tends to travel faster than good—and there was a lot of bad news on the frontier in 1799 when my five-times great grandmother, Margaret Erskine, began her trek from Virginia to Kentucky and was taken captive by a Shawnee war party.
How do I know that news travels? I experience it every day, reading my local newspaper, the inestimable Santa Fe New Mexican, listening to my local NPR station, and picking up comments from friends.
But is that enough?
Probably not since I’m writing about a period on the frontier when there were no newspapers and no radios although plenty of gossip.
But is gossip news?
That depends on its source. When Daniel Boone, returning from a trip to Kentucky, reassured his neighbors in Virginia that it was safe for them to travel the same route, his accepted authority made it easy for them to believe him. But did they know that one of his sons had been recently killed on the trail by the Shawnee as they struggled desperately to cling to their hunting grounds in Kentucky in the midst of a settler invasion?
I think Margaret and John must have heard—bad news travels faster than good, as I know from personal experience—but I chose to ignore that and to imagine Margaret’s husband, John, of the “itchy foot,” choosing to believe that a recent treaty with the Shawnee would keep them safe. He wanted to go to Kentucky, as so many did at that time and in that place, and we know how easily we are persuaded that what we want to do is our best option.
But is that enough to justify my first sentence?
Probably not.
I’m fortunate that here in the mountains outside Santa Fe, Google is a some-time thing. Until I know who writes its entries and whether they are edited, I remain suspicious. So I fell back on my enormous Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, which informed me that the first daily newspaper published in the colonies was the Pennsylvania Newspaper and Advertiser in 1793, the same year the first New York newspaper, Minerva, was published in that city. Although it is possible that a traveler or a circuit rider would have brought one or the other newspapers to the remote Greenbriar Settlement, it does not seem likely, especially since most of its inhabitants came from the south. So I stand behind my opening sentence: “News travels. Slowly. But it travels”—leaving room for the possibility that newspapers reporting on the journey west might have appeared in the Greenbriar in the late 1790’s when Margaret and her husband John were living there.
This is a tiny example of what I will be teaching next month. I am not depending on memoir writers doing extensive research, but rather on the potential for backing our profound and important intuition about our lives with the “facts”—so called—of history.
A recent example here in my own neighborhood is the success of Picuris Pueblo in finally, after many years, establishing their connection with far-off and much better-known Chaco Canyon. Picuris tribal tradition had long held that travelers from Chaco settled their pueblo, but it was only when a DNA link was proved that they were believed.
As memoir writers, our own experience and memory are the basic and most important foundation for our writing, but in a fact-obsessed age, a glance at history will prove to be empowering.
[For more information and to register, visit the class page on the Carnegie Center’s website.]
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