Welcome to the new look for 100memoirs.com! The old site still exists and has migrated to the new location, shirleyshowalter.com. I have now met the original goal of reading 100 memoirs! I discovered over the last three years and 315 posts that readers love lists of top memoirs for their own reading selection. So you can find many good lists here.

As you may recall, I announced the good news of signing a book contract for my own childhood memoir. After my hair color transformed from auburn to grey, I invited readers to help me choose photos here. If you’ve been riding the waves of change with me through the past three years, thank you! Stay on board because the fun is just beginning.

If you are new to this site and this blog, welcome aboard.

From now on, my emphasis is shifting slightly from reviewing memoirs and musing about memoir as a genre (although I will still feature guest interviews, author interviews, etc. from time to time) to sharing some of my own struggles, questions, and triumphs as I complete a manuscript. I have now drafted six chapters out of fourteen.

I’m sticking to my schedule, but I’m also finding that writing is hard work. Mary Karr recently said writing (especially memoir writing) is like hoeing a long row in the hot sun. I know all about hoeing, since I grew up hoeing tobacco. I think Mary’s metaphor is absolutely perfect. If you are a writer also, or if you are a reader who dreams about writing, I hope you will come out in the hot sun with me.

That’s why I created the video (see right-hand column) to introduce an e-book on the subject my readers care about: How to Write a Memoir. I hope you have watched the video and have signed up to get the free book and the weekly Magical Memoir Moments. I had so much fun creating them while thinking about you.

With Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Fetzer Institute colleagues

One of my strongest beliefs is that we are all connected to each other, and that good things happen when we tell our stories. One of the great blessings of my life has been the opportunity to spend time with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Along with a group of leaders from The Fetzer Institute, I was able to sit around a circle with this remarkable man for several hours on several occasions over four years.

Archbishop Tutu has made the South African word ubuntu (Xhosa language) legendary worldwide. He explains it to students engaged in the Semester at Sea program in a short video here:

The words that inspire me most from this video seem at first blush to be antithetical to the idea of writing memoir: “There is no such thing as a solitary individual.” But when you add the rest of the Archbishop’s words, you see why memoir writing is much more than a single writer with a pen in her hand. It is a radical act: “I want you to be all you can be so that I can be all that I can be. I need you to be you so that I can be me.”

I invite you into a writing journey that will help lead you to be more you than you ever have been before. I feel myself becoming more me just by extending the invitation.

How shall we begin the next phase of this journey? What is your reaction to this idea?

But in his journals, Merton is always complaining of the same thing about himself! One of his most famous confessions goes like this:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that is I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem  to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

On September 1, 1949, Merton was a young monk seeking sainthood in a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky.  I was just an infant not yet ready to explore the world of a 100-acre dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania.

For Merton, the question was, “How can writing help me in my quest for sainthood?” Putting down on paper what he has become as he evolves spiritually is his goal: “It may sound simple, but it is not an easy vocation.”

To be as good a monk as I can be, and to remain myself, and to write about it: to put myself down on paper, in such a situation, with the most complete simplicity and integrity, masking nothing, confusing no issue: this is very hard because I am all mixed up in illusions and attachments. These, too, will have to be put down. But without exaggeration, repetition, useless emphasis. To be frank without being boring: it is a kind of crucifixion. Not a very dramatic or painful one. But it requires much honesty that is beyond my nature. It must come somehow from the Holy Spirit.

A complete and holy transparency; living, praying, and writing in the light of the Holy Spirit, losing myself entirely by becoming public property just as Jesus is public property in the Mass. Perhaps this is an important aspect of my priesthood–my living of my Mass: to become as plain as a Host in the hands of everybody. Perhaps it is this, after all, that is to be my way to solitude. One of the strangest ways to far devised, but it is the way of the Word of God.

Now that’s intimidating–the memoirist compared to Jesus!

To write is to make oneself public and transparent and yet through this means will come both solitude and the best chance Merton sees for sainthood.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agpH6EJyyec&w=480&h=390]

Wow. Does anyone else find this both exhilarating and daunting? Can writing a memoir be an act of purgation? Should it be? Merton at his best comes very close to this goal. So honest. So real. So humble. So enraged by the right things. So kind. So eager to learn.

There is a bias toward conflict in all literature; yet, at least some writers believe that the end of literature is peace (Seamus Heaney) or wisdom (Robert Frost). I have always been drawn to this type of writer, perhaps because my own life story seeks these goals.

Sanders himself explains why the audience is small for stories about ordinary goodness: “Trouble is more interesting than harmony. It’s paradoxical: we wish to lead happy lives but wish to read about miserable ones. We hope for peace and read about strife.” In his book A Private History of Awe, Sanders tells how he searched for works of fiction that focused on sustained marriages over a lifetime but could not find enough artistic works to merit a college course.

Sanders calls A Private History of Awe a “spiritual memoir” because it contains his search for answers to the perennial questions about the meaning of existence. It took him a long time to admit that his primary quest as a writer is spiritual, because, as he explains in his author’s note online, “For years I shied away from writing about religious experience, in part because of the hostility that many literary readers show toward all references to spirituality, in part because these matters have always seemed to me better left private. Yet the questions I’ve kept returning to in my adult life are essentially religious ones, and I found myself unwilling to abandon this terrain to the televangelists and fundamentalists.”

Sanders may not be following the dominant contemporary literary fashions, but he is following the oldest of all traditions of autobiography, which most historians of the genre trace back to St. Augustine’s Confessions. He also follows in the steps of Thoreau, Emerson, Annie Dillard, and Kathleen Norris.

Do you have favorite spiritual memoirs? Is trouble always more interesting than harmony? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Also, if you enjoy reading this and other 100memoirs.com blog posts, I would love if you would join the growing community who subscribe to this blog. It’s easy! Just plug in your email address where it says “sign me up” on the right hand side of this page and get new notified by email when a new post arrives. Thanks!

Michael Jones, Lauren Artress, and Jen Louden discuss the nature of transformation–and its relationship to art and the artist.

Do you think everyone is creative? What do you do allow your creative side to flourish?

The Dalai Lama has said, “My religion is kindness.” A few years ago, I wrote an essay about the desire of a young Amish boy to be “kinder than the dickens.”

Why is it that these declarations of striving to be kind strike us as so very surprising? Or do they seem natural to you? What are your own experiences with kindness? John O’Donohue includes kindness as a special form of beauty. Do you agree?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDY2bBcK8rY&version=3]

This video reminds me that one can listen deeply without head nodding (which I do too much of here). I’ll try to remember that when I listen to you answer the following questions:

When did you first find joy in art?

Do you nod your head while listening to others?

Paulus Behrenson was another remarkable participant in last April’s Writer’s Retreat at the Fetzer Institute. He has created within so many art forms, he may have lost track of some of them. He’s not counting, anyway. But he’s an ecologist, potter, poet, dancer, and philosopher. He was interviewed on ABC in 2003. I highly recommend you read the transcript linked to the previous sentence. A powerfully original voice. And then rewatch the video to see a grounded man dance with words.

Kurtis Lamkin has been interviewed by Bill Moyers, and has been a star at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Below, you can see him tell two stories. The first is a perfect visual memoir, which I hope you will share with young parents, especially those who have suffered from miscarriages and difficulty in childbirth. The second is a song accompanied by Kurtis’ West African kora called “We Are Going Home.”

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Here is a second video, this time of a song. You can imagine Kurtis playing the kora as his daughter dances.

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Marty, Gayla. Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Along America’s highways, wooden barns used to reign, their blue or white silos standing like sentries. Today those wooden barns with their high hay mows and accompanying silos are slowly being replaced by low steel buildings or allowed to decay, their wooden ribcages emerging like skeletons after years of neglect. Under this seemingly innocuous change in architecture lies a great American drama.  You will want to read this book if you are interested in the story of transformation of the family farm in America. Gayla Marty has told this larger story inside the particular story of her own family.

In this memoir of a Minnesota girlhood, Gayla Marty turns the Marty and Anderson farms into characters in their own right. To give these characters weight, she surrounds them with four generations’ histories and introduces chapters about them with passages from the King James Bible like those she memorized as a child. To give them breadth, she relates them to the little-told agrarian tale of how the Roman republic fell as the empire grew, history she learned first-hand as an international student in Tunisia. To give them life, she intersperses chapters on the various kinds of trees she first came to love on the farm, in the Bible, and in her travels: nine trees paired with nine chapters.

Marty’s gifts as a writer include: a fabulous memory for detail, sensitivity to the lyric sound of language, excellent documentation and historical research skills, and honest descriptions of her own spirit, creating a very credible, authentic voice.  The structure and pacing of the book may discourage some readers, but those who persist will be rewarded.

Two churches—East Rock Creek and Rush City Baptist–play an important role both as an anchor for family and community life and as a place where Marty’s inner life was formed, as in this passage:

On the last Sunday of the year, we walk into our old church, the furnace burning for the last time. Facing the painting of Jesus the shepherd in the field with his sheep, we sing.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day, their old familiar carols play. Mama and Daddy’s voices harmonize, different notes but close together. And wild and sweet the words repeat, of peace on earth, good will to men.

Inside my head, I hold the words: wild and sweet the words repeat (58).

With this book Marty joins the ranks of many wonderful storytellers and memoirists of rural America. Readers may be reminded of Wendell Berry’s poetry, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Kathleen Norris’ Dakota, and Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Marty has Norris and Berry’s spiritual attunement along with some of the zestful documentary voice of Kalish.

But Marty also speaks with the voice of a prophet, wailing a lamentation even as she finds solace in trees and the abiding divine spirit they represent. When she leaves the farm for college and then again for an international education experience in Tunisia, she learns the history of the Roman republic, rooted in agrarian yeoman farming, which gave way to forced large-scale agriculture that fed the Roman Empire. She skillfully connects memory, culture, and characters in a Muslim land: “At every call to prayer, I thought I heard Uncle’s and Daddy’s clear voices” (164). When she hears a street vendor cry out in Arabic, she thinks it sounds like “C’m baaaaaaaaas!”—the calling of the cows in Minnesota.

The connections to home continue, in a sharper vein, as she describes how the inexorable movements toward growth haunt both places: “I felt the movement of ghosts, wandering peoples and languages scavenging for places to plant, graze animals, satisfy hunger, build a shelter and hearth—sending legions ahead in clanking metal, enslaving each other to dig and build, . . .” (176).

The antagonist of Marty’s father is her Uncle Gaylon, her father’s business partner whose family lives in an adjacent house. Uncle makes Gayla feel special when she is a small girl through his attention and storytelling about the history of the Marty farm. Later, he becomes angry and unpredictable, like his father before him. Moving full circle, he becomes an ally in a failing cause. Marty and her Uncle want to keep the farm as a spiritual inheritance. The rest of the family wants to sell it and view it as an investment like any other.

So years of labor, love, harmony and community end up on the auction block. The needs of one generation do not align smoothly align with the next. And a daughter who loves the land can seldom own the land. Since trees serve as her primary metaphor, she voices her protest this way: “Daughters have been like apple trees, transient, adaptable, wandering the earth with their sweetness and tartness and promise, bending to the will of men in exchange for roots.”

In the epilogue, the daughter has given up the struggle for the land itself. Uncle gives her one final gift before he dies, reciting long passages memorized from the King James Bible all leading to this conclusion: “Then shall I fulfill my promise and bring you back to this place.”