I think memoir writing is a much more serious task than it’s often considered to be. It’s not informal, it’s not casual. It really is the writing of history. And I think as young writers and beginning writers begin to grasp the importance of what they are doing, may be a little intimidating at first. But it gives them a much greater scope for what may seem to be only personal experiences.
I often ask people in my class, whether they get can think of one international date that affected people in their families. I’m usually thinking of one of the great wars. As you know, the U.S. has been involved in wars now for more than 100 years. And interestingly enough, that’s not what most memoir writers think about. They think about personal things, who said what to whom, whose feelings were hurt, who got left out of the wedding, and so forth, all of which is important. But equally important, is the background is the background we all share of national and international politics. And that’s what I always am urging my writers to bring in.
It means doing some research, doing some more reading, maybe you never really understood very much about what caused the US to embark on what became a disaster in Vietnam. And yet, you may have had a brother or an uncle or father, who was involved in some way in Vietnam. And so the whole family was touched by the results of that experience.
It is very helpful to writers to enlarge our vision, not to get so preoccupied with the personal that we forget that, as Gloria Steinem said years ago, the personal is always political. What was put on the breakfast table this morning has a political significance.
I’m hoping that I can make my writers a little more ambitious. Not ambitious to publish, that’s a whole separate and very difficult issue, but ambitious to expand their own visions. So that what they’re writing about is as important to them and to their readers, as I think it is, can’t be trivialized can’t be put away as “Oh, just something for my children to read one day,” but something that fills in an absolutely essential aspect of our history, particularly essential now, because as we know, letters are not being written anymore. Email is not a substitute, we will have no letters for the next generation, they won’t exist. And so that’s history.
Often the history of this country in this world is written by women. Because women have always been the great letter writers is lost. It can’t be found in official histories. It’s not there. And so we are we’re probably the last generation of people to write and receive letters must stress, they’re absolutely unique importance. I so often to speak to a writer who says, I inherited a whole box or a whole trunk full of family letters, when the older people in the family died. I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t believe they’re interesting to anybody. And probably in the end, I’ll either just put them in the attic or throw them out. This is a disaster. This is the need of history. It’s what needs to be recognized and taken seriously seriously. It needs to be archived and written about. It’s the reason I started the sadly Bingham archive for women’s papers in history at Duke University 30 years ago, though I archive is taken particularly for the papers of women who are artists, writers and feminists. But there are many other archives for papers all over the country, all the universities have them. And it’s so important if you are the inheritor of a collection of these papers to make certain that they outlast your life. They are not thrown away when you die, or when your children if you have children die.
So this is another aspect of teaching memoir writing, it’s to teach my writers to value the tangible evidences of our history that may fall into their hands. They may not even just be letters. They may be things like the kind of needlepoint that women used to do. The kind of embroidery, the kind of mending, the kind of patching, the kind of quilting that women used to do. It may be the drawings and may be the watercolors, it may be the paintings, there is so much evidence of our lives, that is crucially important if we’re going to understand a certain period of history. So I feel it is—I dare to say—a sacred calling to teach these classes and look forward very much to the next one I’m going to be teaching later on this year.
Q: Who would benefit from these workshops? (05:30:00)
Sallie: They are for anyone who has written more than one page of handwriting, not computer. Because I do think the the feeling of putting words down with ink on paper is what makes you into a writer. However, I do expect my students to know something about the basics of the English language, to have done some reading a read aloud to have listened to some reading aloud, because so much of writing is in the sound of the words not just the way they look on the paper. And also to be a really thorough and deep reader. You can’t write if you don’t read, there just isn’t any way. So even though I said it’s for everyone who’s put words down on a sheet of paper, it also means you have done your reading, you have done deep reading, not just superficial for five minutes before you fall asleep, you’d have tackled some of the so called break books, so that you have a formal and noble framework for your efforts. Even though you may feel your efforts would never live up to these great examples that you’ve given for yourself. Every great example is worth it to a writer, even if it frustrates you and you feel you could never get there. So actually, there are those prerequisites, I would not try to teach memoir writing to someone who’s never written anything. But I also would, would be glad to teach it to someone who has made a stab at writing something I don’t expect people to have published it’s way too difficult now. And that’s really an impossible barrier and doesn’t even mean very much about the value of the work.
Q: What have you learned from writing memoir? (07:20:00)
Sallie: You know, I’ve come out of my long history is I guess most of us have, with maybe a slightly oversimplified version of those people now most of them long gone. And those events. And what diving into this, this kind of memoir writing reveals to me is the enormous complexity of the lives of the people that I have known. I think it reduces my tendency to rely on cliches to explain people. We all know how our friends employ cliches to explain people, oh, my mother had a bad temper. My father was never around. Whatever it is, is a shorthand. It’s not the full picture of who these people were. And I think what I learned is how very complicated and fascinating all these people were, even the ones that I never got along with and at the time didn’t understand
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