In the next room, which doubles as guest bedroom and my official home office , sit stacks of books that have reproduced like rabbits since the last time I cleaned off the desk. Next week we will have guests to welcome in that room, so I have vowed to find places to store the books. Soon I can procrastinate no longer!

All of which is to say that Lee Kravitz had his work cut out for him when his publicist sent me a copy of the book that had to compete with all the rest.

But he won the battle.

I read his memoir, Unfinished Business, in a matter of days. As I said in a previous post, his thesis matches one of my most profound motivations for doing this blog.  He knew that he would be a better person, a better father, and a better writer if he took care of the unfinished business in his life. Where I work, we call that desire the power of love and forgiveness. I believe that memoir writing at its best resolves unanswered questions and teaches both the writer and the reader profoundly spiritual lessons.

Lee Kravitz is a name you might recognize. Until a few years ago, he was the editor of the largest circulation magazine in America–Parade. If he had not been fired from that job, we would not have his memoir, his father and his brother would still be estranged from each other, his high school teacher and mentor would not have gotten a thank-you visit, his friend would never have heard from him after his daughter was killed in Iraq, an old debt would still exist in the debit column, a Muslim friend and an Eastern Orthodox bishop would not be in his life, and an old enemy would continue to haunt him. The benefits of these redeemed relationships, will cause every reader to do an inventory of his or her own unfinished business. You may even find yourself hoping to get fired yourself!

The book falls neatly into a preface, ten chapters, and an epilogue. The deceptively simple structure, each the story of a memory or relationship that the author attempted to salvage, makes a satisfying package. But it could have been otherwise. If the author had not found ways to maintain the complexity and individuality of each relationship or had allowed a sentimental stew of good feeling to overflow without a real struggle to understand himself, he would have destroyed the value of the book to anyone outside his immediate family.

So how does the author keep us reading? He begins with aimless depression following the firing and the arrival of ten cardboard boxes of personal momentos that he, as a good workoholic, had stored in his place of work rather than integrate into his home.

As Kravitz goes through the boxes, he finds evidence of parts of himself long repressed–the world travelling adventurer who had been to Israel, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the 70′s, the puzzled and dutiful son who saved over 1,000 letters from his father full of capital letters, red type, and strange punctuation, a highschool yearbook brought back the fear he felt in the presence of his childhood bully, but also the love he felt for his history teacher and for the boy who had opened his eyes to the possibility of experiencing God. In the box was a recording of an interview he did with his grandmother Shirley. He listened to her voice again with awful guilt–he had skipped her funeral because he had had too much work to do when she died.

In Kravitz’ own words:  “There were signs in these boxes that there had been a better me: a more curious, adventurous, and compassionate individual who had taken risks to do the right thing.” He decides to wait to search for a new job and instead to devote an entire year to “tying up my loose emotional ends.”

The great spiritual traditions offered great support on this journey. Kravitz, a Jew by birth, rediscovers his own tradition as well as explores what Buddhism, Christianity, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Islam have to say about making amends. The book has an ecumenical, inclusive, joyful spirituality running like a current under a stream.

The author does not try to hold us in suspense. We know from the beginning what he is trying to do and that he will succeed in doing it. Yet we keep moving, page after page. Why? My own reason was to discover the nuances of the journey, the how and why of it. The what hardly mattered. Adventure in this book happens in the mind and in the heart not so much in plot devices. His narrative arc is readymade, but his real story has to be chiseled from his unique displays of courage and ingenuity. We follow him, still curious, as he checks one mistake after another off his list, because his approach varies adroitly every time.

Martin Buber, Jewish mystic and spiritual guide to many, provides Kravitz with the language he needs to describe his transformation. Throughout his ten journeys he learns to take time to listen, to recognize the holiness of other human beings, and to treat them as “thou” rather than “it.” Though this new ability to hold the other’s gaze with love and attention may seem like a small thing, it is in fact the beating heart of every spiritual tradition. Discovering how to love in daily life is the spiritual equivalent of scaling the Alps. Kravitz shows us how the smallest act can either slip into our metaphorical boxes of unfinished business or can elevate us to the place Buber talked about in another of his famous books–ecstatic confessions.

Identifying unfinished business may in fact be the route to your own memoir. What aspects of yourself and your story lie buried in boxes, literally or figuratively? I’d love to hear questions and comments about Kravitz’s approach. What thoughts does his story evoke in you?

Lanie Tankard

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir  

by Ander Monson

 Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, April 2010 (208 pp., paperback)

Ander Monson jump starts your brain’s synapses with different connections in his new nonmemoir, Vanishing Point. He observes society. He muses. He sprinkles in a few personal experiences. And he does his edgy best to ignore the self in a genre that is nothing but.  He forces the reader to consider memoir in a creative new light.

Monson has also written a book of essays, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, and a book of stories, Other Electricities, which appear on his website: http://otherelectricities.com/.

In Vanishing Point, Monson has pulled together eighteen essays. Because some were previously published as stand-alone pieces, the volume bears a certain lack of coherence throughout, a few glitches in segue. Even so, this postmodern book kept me mostly riveted during the entirety of a nonstop evening flight from San Jose to Austin. And besides, isn’t that actually how we think, with one thought springing off another all the time — veering askew of the main idea with which we began and funneling our paths through labyrinthine conduits to a meetup in the nethermost region of our minds?

Because Monson perused close to one hundred memoirs to analyze the field, I thought the 100 Memoirs website would be an appropriate venue for reviewing the result. His list of eighty-three at the end of Vanishing Point includes some excellent reads.

He asks valid questions: Are we being obliterated by information? He compares journalism (verifiable truth) and memoir, discusses individualism and collectivism, looks at memory prevention drugs like Versed in surgery, examines the reliability of eyewitness testimony, delves into fact checking for family history, considers the rerouting of synapses in false memories, and compares fiction and nonfiction. He visits respected sources, although full citations do not appear in the book. The protagonist in this masterful chronicle is memory.

The author offers many strong points to consider, such as: “When technique becomes popular fashion, it becomes overused. Its special qualities fall away. All that remains is fad.”

Monson says that he is trying to find the courage NOT to tell his story. And yet, he also parses events in his own life — moving, death, jury duty, eating. Instead of merely stating that he is moving, he thinks about what leaving a city means. He compares floppy disks and the tenure of a book to our life spans: “Thinking about the memoir, or our lives at all, is thinking about death, about technology, about how obsolete we all are soon to become….”

Does Monson’s book succeed in defying classification? He appears to me to have written a memoir despite his best efforts to avoid doing so. Is Vanishing Point possibly a memoir about memoir? The author certainly evinces a strong resistance to the category. The subtitle is “Not a Memoir,” yet at several points in the book Monson refers to it as “this memoir.” Hmmm, perhaps memoir just sneaks up on you when you least expect it?

At the same time, the author has psychoanalyzed the field in a highly engaging philosophical treatise. He weighs the frame narrative in terms of presenting the truth, and ponders framing the future in terms of the past. He casts memoir as map. He comments that “with GPS, the whole idea of being lost is now entirely quaint.” Monson mulls over memoir as palimpsest, wonders whether the self is a wiki, steps outside of himself to observe the ubiquitous use of free wireless at places such as Panera Bread: “Earbuds are in, so we are partly in our inner space.” At times, he reminded me of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. http://bit.ly/5aEmK9

What is a page? Monson decides to find out. He plays with layout and margins.  He trims the sides off letters. He repeats the word me across an entire page, saying “I am putting the me back in memoir for you.” He examines “all that protects us from white space.” He seeks meaning everywhere, wanting to “leave some Borges behind the wall…something visionary and meaningful.” He digresses on self-Googling. He wonders whether communicating with old friends via social media is forcing us into being our old selves again. He believes that the rise of memoir coincided with the rise of role-playing games, and casts memoirists as gamers — role playing, battling conditions, and triumphing. He has some thoughtful turns of phrase: “your fellow Internetters” and “tiny fingerlings” for small potatoes.

And yet he tries so hard not to write memoir that occasionally (to use one of his own statements) he “makes me want to hit him with a rolled up REM/Losing My Religion poster.”

I recommend Vanishing Point to any open-minded reader interested in memoir as a broad playing field. Monson posits, “It’s likely that we are not as individual as we would like to think” and offers solid food for thought on that idea.

            Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas.

The Steppes are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir. By Connie T. Braun. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008. Pp. 245. $24.95

More than any other book I have read recently, Connie T. Braun’s The Steppes are the Color of Sepia left me asking questions about the nature of memoir (note the subtitle) and its relation to two other genres it traverses—history and fiction. Braun’s book makes a major contribution to the reconstruction of repressed memory of suffering and survival among the Russian Mennonites, and, coincidentally, but less clearly so, to the burgeoning field of Mennonite memoir.

Braun tells the story of three generations of Mennonites in Russia who struggled for survival on the vast prairies of the Ukraine and Siberia: her grandparents, Jakob and Maria Letkemann; her parents, Peter and Erna Letkemann; and herself. She divides the book into three parts: an introduction called “Promised Land” and Parts I and II titled “Russia: A Pastor’s Record of Repression” and “World War II: A Boy’s Recollection of Survival.” These parts correspond roughly to reconstruction of her grandfather’s memories of Russia and her father’s memories of WWII. Interspersed throughout the book are very helpful maps and evocative photos, both of which the author uses effectively to help establish another of the book’s subjects: place. A trip with her parents and family to Russia and Ukraine in 2005 allowed her to suffuse the book with a poet’s appreciation for landscape, fecundity, and a “promised land” mythology, even as the same setting evoked her father’s memories of cruelties endured under two of the twentieth century’s harshest dictators—Hitler and Stalin.

Braun brings three extraordinary gifts to this tale. The first is passion and love of language. Her preface begins with a description of rivers where her father’s memories flow:  “ along the river bank now and then are stretches of sugar-white beaches, various hollows where willow trees cast deep blue shade over fishing holes, and, further along, near the old quarry, high rocky ledges from where boys whoop as they slice, like blades of pocket-knives, through air and water” (ix). The second is a thorough comprehension of the relevant works of Russian and Canadian Mennonite history combined with literary and philosophical texts on the nature of memory itself (see her fine essay “Silence, Memory and Imagination as Story: Canadian Mennonite Life Writing” at http://www.mennonitewriting.org/journal/1/3/silence-memory-and-imagination-story/ for evidence of the scholarship that underlies her book.) The third strength lies in conscientious detective work—uncovering deeply repressed and thus scantly recorded memories. She wants the truth, she deeply respects the documents and recorded history she uses, and when she imagines, as she often does, she “shows the work,” to use Julia Kasdorf’s apt phrase.[i]  We trust this author’s voice, both for the narrative she constructs and the silences that remain within it.

As a descendent of Swiss-German Mennonites, I eagerly read this story for both its similarity and difference to my own. One thing that struck me is how inadequate our labels are for various kinds of Mennonites living in Canada and the United States today. Braun says in her preface that although her progenitors lived in Russia for a century, “we are not Russian and not Ukrainian. We are descendents of a migratory people, the Mennonites. We are survivors of dictatorship and war, and are now a Canadian family” (x).

The fields of Mennonite history and literature, at their best, illustrate the power of what Braun calls “peoplehood” to transcend the boundaries of time and space.  They accomplish this feat well when they are the most particular. Braun never conflates the story of her family with that of the Amish or Mennonites in Pennsylvania or Indiana, for example,[ii] but she tells it in such a way that any descendent of the Anabaptists can recognize age-old issues—separation from the world, pacifism, family, community.

The kind of suffering detailed in this book is alien to many Mennonites who, after escaping persecution in Europe, found land and freedom and have never lived under dictatorship. One of the questions history asks of us is, “Do I have the courage of my ancestors not to take up the sword, or not to recant my faith under the threat of death or imprisonment?” The complicated answers to these questions from those who lived with them under communism and national socialism in Russia and survived to tell the story are important contributions to twenty-first century Mennonite identity—not just in Canada and the U.S. but also in places where Mennonites have suffered more recently—Indonesia and Ethiopia, for example.

The book might have benefited from stronger editing. Even though the author’s lyric prose captivates many times, occasional lapses occur. Sometimes the meaning is unclear [“At times, these distinctions of tense become blurred, but essential truths are sharpened” (xiii)]. Sometimes purple prose combined with conjecture seems jarring: “Was this pregnancy a whisper of hope to Jakob and Maria in the depths of winter’s hush?” (56). An occasional cliché — “new life emerges from brokenness and ashes” —in a dramatic place—the end of the preface (xiii) —blunts the effect of a poetic description in the previous sentence.

These are small matters. But I am left with one larger regret. Ironically, it is the same regret the author has in relation to her grandfather’s telling of his tale in writing:  “Unfortunately, Jakob did not reveal much of his interior life” (xi). I wanted more of the interior life of the author.  We catch glimpses of her riding her bicycle in the suburbs. We can tell that she has scholarly training. But how have these stories affected her life? Her presence is strongly felt, but more in her imagination concerning the silences of others than in the impact of their stories on her.  I expected more of Connie Braun’s story. Her mother Erna and grandmother Maria’s voices were effaced by circumstance. Connie’s should ring out. Readers don’t even know if she is writing from the perspective of someone who claims the name Mennonite for herself. The author description uses the phrase “of Mennonite heritage,” which suggests, but does not confirm, that her location now is not inside a Mennonite community. She has a right to this story whether or not she claims the faith as her own, but she should claim her location now. Memoir promises insight and intimacy. It stirs curiosity in the reader that cannot be satisfied by biography of ancestry alone.

Finally, we know from a few details in the story (her father’s Italian leather shoes, allusions to business success in Canada) that his life and his family’s life changed drastically after immigration. The story of a “Mennonite memoir” should not end, like an old high school text history text, with WWII, but should, at least in epilogue form, “show the work” that takes the present into the past as well as bringing the past into the present.

[ii] Keeping the categories of different narratives and nationalities clear while also showing what all Mennonites have in common is a complicated task. Braun’s diligent treatment of this subject stands in contrast to the recent humorous memoir of  Rhoda Janzen. See my review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: http://www.100memoirs.com/2009/11/mennonite-in-a-little-black-dress-an-old-mennonite-review/

I attended the same lecture Richard refers to below (Scott Russell Sanders) while at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing this year. I love seeing memoir through other people’s eyes and think Richard makes excellent points not duplicated elsewhere in my reading about memoir.

Memoirs and the mystery of life

by Richard A. Kauffman

Judging by my reading habits, the memoir is my favorite form of literature. I’ve read scores over the last 15 years.

A Private History of Awe by Scott Russell Sanders is my favorite. I first encountered Sanders via his collections of essays. I was drawn to his sense of place and rootedness, his nature mysticism and Quaker sensibilities and his incredible powers of observation and description. His memoir is a love story of sorts, an account of his relationship with his wife. But Ruth doesn’t enter the stage until about halfway through. The book tells a larger story about the interconnectedness of generations.

In the first paragraph, Sanders recounts his father taking him out to the porch when he was four to watch a thunderstorm. He did the same for his own daughter 20 years later—and for his granddaughter 30 years after that, wondering whether she felt what he had felt those 50 years earlier:

. . .the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything. The search for communion with this power has run like a bright thread through all my days.

After Sanders spoke at this year’s Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, one person marched to the book table, picked up this book and read this first paragraph. Then she put the book down and reverentially uttered, “Wow.”

Much ink has been spilled over the current popularity of memoirs. It’s too easy to write them off as expressions of American self-infatuation. Many memoirs are self-absorbed, and some expose more about the authors and their loved ones than we need to know. But writing a memoir is not simply an exercise in narcissism. If it was, who would read them?

We humans are aware of our mortality, and we want to know what life is all about. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” As we get older we think of all the roads taken and not taken and we ponder: why this particular life? Would a different life have more or less purpose?

The best memoirs lead us into these mysteries. Memoirs of redemption give us hope; memoirs of heroic acts inspire us to greater heights. We no doubt read the memoirs of disgraced people to enjoy the schadenfreude. But perhaps we read memoirs mainly because we only get to live one life, and by reading about others we vicariously live 1,000.

Writing memoirs is like planting a marker to one’s own life, an extended epitaph for one’s own gravestone. Memoirs implore us to take notice, to remember the storyteller. Memoirs can also be a legacy to future generations.

When I was a pastor it was a profoundly rewarding experience to walk alongside people who knew they were dying, weren’t in denial and wanted to reflect on the mysteries of life and death. I encouraged these folks to write or record stories about their lives, if they were still physically able. I suggested that the result would be a legacy to pass along to their children. But I really wanted them to do this for themselves, to think back on and derive some meaning from their distinct journeys. I even put together a list of questions to help jog their memories.

William Zinsser, the great practitioner and teacher of writing, has some helpful advice to those who want to write their memoirs: just write stories from your past as they come to you. After awhile, a theme will emerge that ties them together.

I don’t know whether I will ever write my own memoir, but I am taking Zinsser’s advice: I write stories from my past in a journal as something sparks their recall. No theme has emerged. But I know this already: my own human follies and foibles pale in relation to the incredible grace and faithfulness of God.

I’ve asked Richard to provide the questions he described above. If you want to see them also, let him know in the comments section!

If you do the same–Google “best memoirs”–right now, you will come across this article in the Wall Street Journal by new memoirist Norris Church Mailer. I have not read her memoir about life with her husband Norman Mailer, but I am intrigued by the reviews, especially by this one in the New York Times.

Here’s my favorite quip from Alex Witchel’s review above: “That she managed to stay with Mailer — self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, perennially womanizing to the point of even his own humiliation — for almost 33 years until his death in 2007 was a feat most women would not have attempted. When people asked, ‘Which wife are you?’ her answer was, ‘The last one.’”

Increasingly, memoirists are being asked about their own favorite memoirs. I try to take note when this happens and share the suggestions here.  Right now one of the most frequently checked posts at 100memoirs is Mary Karr’s Top Ten List.

If you know of other lists, please share them. And continue to offer your own!

One of the goals of this blog focuses on the quest to understand memoir as a genre. What differentiates it from other forms? Why is it both popular and maligned in the contemporary literary world? I named this category “books about memoir,” and you can find the posts stored in this category by using the handy category list in the right-hand column. Or you can follow this link to find previous posts which reviewed those books, sometimes commenting on how they define the genre. 

I have cited a few other writers on this subject, but none of the definitions in these posts were as fun as these from Chris Offutt as taken from Harper’s. Open the link and enjoy a laugh.

Do these definitions work as well as the serious ones for you? What do they reveal that the others lack? Or vice versa?

Twitter feed:

“The rocks are on fire everywhere. Everything is magical.” Richard Rodriguez. Concluding story brings audience to their feet. #ffw10 about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck  “Dare to remember…The act of writing is a form of prayer.” Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck “I’ve never read a blog that has the elegance and passion of a 19th-century letter.” Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck I’m feeling conspicuous tweeting as Rodriguez is decrying what digital media is doing to our language and relationships. #ffw10 about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck  “There is a reciprocal relationship between the reader and writer. Without an audience, you cannot write.” Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck   “I memorized the Latin mass about God bringing joy to life. And, boy, did he.” Being an altar boy was high drama! Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck “Writers tell secrets. There are some things so personal you can only say them to a stranger.” Richard Rodiguez #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck “The reason I began to write Hunger of Memory is because I was so lonely. Writers, dare to be lonely!” Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck “The primary story I want to tell you tonight is one of class.” Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck “We have decided in this country to be quiet about religion. All over the world, however, religion is on fire.” Richard Rodriguez #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck   Richard Rodriguez “Why anybody would want to be a writer in the age of Twitter, I don’t understand.” #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck Richard Rodriguez being introduced at #ffw10 as a writer who blurs the boundaries between memoir and social commentary. about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck There’s a yearning to “come down in a place just right,” (Shaker song) and join soul with role, says Parker Palmer #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck Quakers pass on the story of their tradition through journals–Parker Palmer #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck Parker Palmer’s bumper sticker: “I was born baffled.” #ffw10 about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck “In the Badlands I quit typing and learned to write in a way that invited participation.” Eugene Peterson #ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck “Write what you see in a book.” These words to Paul on Patmos became the name of Eugene Peterson’s vocation. #ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck Eugene Peterson holds full arena in thrall, describes his revelation in the Badlands, during a desert time in his life. #ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck “No pain is ugly in past tense.” Eugene Peterson poem read at Calvin College. #ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck “I knew from teaching that each reader reads the same book in a different way. But as a writer, I learn anew!” Rhoda Janzen #ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck Eugene Peterson is now working on a memoir. His previous books are focused on the Bible. “I never had myself as a text before!” #ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck “I didn’t set out to defy the (Mennonite) church. I just wanted to stretch my mind. I don’t see myself as fallen away.”Rhoda Janzen#ffw10 about 12 hours ago via TweetDeck Crowd forming in Van Noord Arena to hear Eugene Peterson speak on Poet & Pastor on Patmos. #ffw10 about 13 hours ago via TweetDeck Rhoda Janzen reminded her audience today that Charlotte Temple was 1st American bestseller–because it (falsely) claimed “truth.” #ffw10 about 13 hours ago via TweetDeck Rhoda Janzen speech on memoir and the captivity narrative totally captivated an audience of 300. #ffw10 about 13 hours ago via TweetDeck Ready for day 2 of the Calvin College Festival–Rhoda Janzen! #ffw10 about 14 hours ago via TweetDeck Writer Wally Lamb shares advice he received: “Don’t write for an audience. Investigate your own questions. The readers will find you.” 9:33 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck “Most people live ordinary lives. That’s why they’re called ordinary.” Scott Russell Sanders 5:37 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck “We live in a culture obsessed with idiosyncracy. That which makes ‘me’ different is trivial.” Scott Russell Sanders 5:32 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck “Confusion is that which we are capable of clearing up. Mystery is not. Try to be clear–and focus on mystery.” Scott Russell Sanders 5:29 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Scott Russell Sanders calls himself hopeful but not an optimist. He went looking for hope and found–community, family, skill, beauty. 5:24 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Scott Russell Sanders writes essays out of confusion and the desire to explore the big questions–not to share his certainties. 5:09 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck   Writer Scott Russell Sanders reminds his audience that an “amateur” is someone who loves something deeply. 5:02 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Writer Michael Perry calls himself agnostic but attends a Mennonite church that meets in a Jewish temple one week and a UU church the next. 4:50 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck “I loved the austere acoustic worship…the poetic, simple, rhythmic prayers,” says Michael Perry of his childhood church. 4:45 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Michael Perry’s childhood church was called by critics The Damnation Army. He says if they call it that, he might be tempted to join. 4:43 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck “When we become parents, we revisit out parents’ parenting–and our parents’ faith.” Michael Perry 4:38 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck  “Mine is a chastened apostasy. I’m not prepared to scoff. There is enough derision in the world.” Michael Perry on being agnostic. 4:35 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck  “What’s the key to success?” asks writer Michael Perry, rhetorically. “Low overhead!” 4:13 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Waiting for Michael Perry, poultry farmer/memoirist, to speak. Crowd of about 300. Expecting laughter and nostalgia for the farm. 3:15 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck “Drifting somewhere between map and maelstrom.” Kazim Ali 12:39 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Building my “dance card” for the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing–Michael Perry and Wally Lamb today. 12:12 PM Apr 15th via TweetDeck Waiting to hear Lisa Samson read at Calvin College–first event! 10:23 AM Apr 15th via TweetDeck

Name shirley h. showalter Location Kalamazoo, MI Web http://www.100mem… Bio Former professor, college president, now foundation officer. Memoir writer, blogger. Love, Compassion, Forgiveness. 384 Following 369 Followers 23 Listed 731Tweets Favorites Lists business contests philanthropy memoir-life-writing lifestyle-design improv View all Following View all… RSS feed of shirleyhs’s tweets RSS feed of shirleyhs’s favorites

here

I invite you to read the descriptions of these ten books. What do they have in common? What can we learn about the nature of truth from this list? Of the genre of memoir? Of the marketing dimensions of book publishing?

One wag said that the recent memoirs purporting to be survival tales of different ethnic groups get past the editors because they confirm mistaken impressions that the elite hold about “the other.” I’d love to have your thoughts on this subject.

One of the things I like most about this book is that it owes its origins, in part, at least, to a course taught by Jeff Gundy at Bluffton University when Lee Snyder was president. You can find the syllabus for Jeff’s class here and imagine deeply engaged class conversations as Jeff and the students, including Lee, read books by Anne Lamott, Thomas Merton, Dinty Moore, Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, and Cynthia Yoder. The topics included the finding of vocation, since all these texts have a spiritual dimension, and the course was developed as part of a larger, Lilly Endowment-funded, emphasis on vocation in liberal arts colleges and universities.

 Spiritual memoirs have their own tradition, and, according to some, it is a gendered tradition.  Those who have studied the history of the form usually begin with Augustine’s Confessions  and also recognize the important contributions of cloistered, powerful, medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and Marjorie Kempe.  Jill Ker Conway, herself both a former college president and a scholar of memoir, has observed, “There are archetypal life scripts for man and for women which show remarkable persistence over time. For men, the overarching pattern for life comes from adaptations of the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity. Life is an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength.” Conway notes that St. Augustine, in the prototypical memoir, Confessions,  assumes strong authorial agency through hundreds of pages and then, even when he surrenders to God, “he makes us believe that his inner struggle is of vast and world-shaping significance”    (When Memory Speaks, 7, see first chapter here).

The first women memoirists were, like Augustine, religious figures. But unlike him, they told their stories not as heroes but as meditators on the nature of God and as ones who experienced direct revelation of divine illumination. They did not focus on the will or the intellect, and thus were not heroic action figures but receivers of revelation. Conway traces this archetypal pattern of female surrender and service, which may include ecstatic visions but does not include what she calls “agency.” Women, even spiritual leaders, frequently do not think of themselves as actors on the world stage but as players called by God to partake in the divine and to give witness to it. Conway goes on to trace the evolution of this archetype from spiritual to secular in the 18th and 19th centuries, when finding the ideal mate and acquiring domestic security replace the surrender to God in women’s narratives.

Why this historical analysis as background for reviewing the memoir of a Mennonite woman college president? It’s a bit of a side question, but I wonder whether Mennonites, with their emphasis on community, peace, and servant-leadership follow this gender division in their autobiographical writing or whether both men and women adopt more of Julian’s position toward God rather than Augustine’s. I’ll take up this question when I review Rudy Wiebe’s of this earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, a Canadian bestseller, and winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award.

But now to Snyder’s memoir itself. First, a few minor criticisms. The title At Powerline and Diamond Hill: Unexpected Intersections of Life and Work and the hard-to-decipher cover art do not serve the author or publisher  (Cascadia Publishing House) as well as they might. Also, I could not uncover the logic in the organization of the book with its six parts, an introduction, and three epilogues. If I did not know and admire the author, I might have gotten confused by the loose thematic structure which sometimes jumps decades between paragraphs. Non-linear structures can be excellent 21st-century forms, but they work best with strong thematic focus. This book celebrates both calling and challenge and the ordinariness of everyday life–life and work flowing together and apart over almost 70 years. It works well as a series of pearls strung on one thread, or stacks of laundry neatly folded. It does not have the tightness of construction of Karen Armstrong’s  The Spiral Staircase, reviewed here.

I’m looking right now at the cover of Kathleen Norris’ Dakota, one of the books Snyder read in Jeff Gundy’s class. I own the hardcover edition, which is evidently no longer in print, and love the cover of this edition.  The image starts with blue sky, cumulus clouds, and ends with flat stretches of red land and black hills running along the bottom of the cover. The simplicity of the word Dakota with the subtitle A Spiritual Geography floating in the sky and clouds draws the reader into the work in a way that one might covet for this book, which is so much like Kathleen Norris’ (down to the way weather is discussed in both books). I can picture Oregon: A Mennonite Woman’s Journey with Mt. Hood on the cover and strong themes of what Oregon means as the place of birth and childhood but also the place, physically, spiritually, intellectually, and psychologically, to which Snyder keeps returning throughout her life.

In any case, Oregon does figure prominently in this book, and Snyder opens with an introduction that lays out her purpose beautifully, placing herself squarely in the women’s spiritual autobiography tradition of accidental leader following a spiritual path. “Growing up in a Mennonite family,” she says, “I did not know women who had career goals. I never had any.” Sometimes statements like that sound disengenuous coming from leaders who have a need to deny their power, and Jeff Gundy, who writes the foreword, challenges a similar one where Snyder says, “While I never actually rebelled against the community’s strict expectations, rituals, and beliefs, I gradually began to see that the sharp lines of separation and supposedly clear boundaries were much murkier than anyone wanted to admit.”  He is right to question her, even with tongue in cheek, because Lee Snyder’s career trajectory is amazing–from farm girl with only a year of college to young wife and mother, years of voluntary service during the Biafran war in Nigeria, administrative assistant at Eastern Mennonite University, assistant dean, academic dean, president of Bluffton University, and denominational head for several years during a decade of presidential leadership. Along the way, while working and mothering, she somehow finished three degrees, concluding with a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Oregon with a dissertation centered on Joan Didion.

“Why do you want to go to college?” asked her father before she set off across the country with her high school sweetheart for one year of college before they married. “Will you have a good man to work for?” came from her mother when she took the position of academic dean at Eastern Mennonite University, and “Why would you want to do this?” asked a board member’s wife when she interviewed at Bluffton. All three questions indicate how radical her path was when judged by traditional Mennonite standards for women. How did she resolve them? By her thorough knowledge of the Bible and its narratives of unusual people called by God to do particular work in the world, by her careful reading of great writers, by her loving relationship with Del, her supportive husband, and by her daily practices of contemplation, some of which included traditional tasks like folding laundry. When she gets a particularly nasty letter in her work as academic dean, she goes home and scrubs the toilets!

What I find most amazing about this book is exactly what I find most wonderful about Lee Snyder in real life. Just barely five feet tall, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, she never commands with her presence. I think about a poetic line describing Emily Dickinson– “demure as dynamite”– when I look at her. Like the frangipani blooms that perfumed her days in Africa, she permeates a place with a spirit of love and power combined. This memoir,written out of gratitude to those who have loved and taught her, comes out of a place of genuine humility. Desiring to serve, she was called to lead.

Let me conclude with just one final observation. Snyder’s story could be told as a tale of rebellion, will, heroic struggle against the odds, and even sexual abuse (she briefly and somewhat enigmatically describes an incident with a construction worker when she was seven years old). In our feminist age we might want to see more criticism of all the people and structures that held her back. That would be the tale of “agency” that Conway seems to desire for women.

But this story is not about the individual hero. It celebrates God’s surprising mercies, forgiveness (even to the man who molested her), learning, and above all, the community of faith that formed her in the beginning in that special place in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and has continued to draw out her many gifts over a lifetime.

“Is life’s purpose something you create or discover?” asks an unnamed professor in this book, probably Snyder herself. Lee Snyder would never claim to have created her life, but she has not been the passive recipient of it, either. Somewhere between the Oregon sawdust trail of her youth and the president’s corner office, she discovered harmony, a peace that passes understanding, something larger than the mere resolution of the contradictions and conflicts in her life. Her story is not a testimony to striving, or “agency;” instead, it testifies to the possibility that the still small voice inside, when rooted in faith, love, and a physical home in the world, can lead both to great adventures and to a larger spiritual home that we carry with us always.

On Wednesday of this week, writer, teacher, and therapist, Linda Joy Myers will be doing a guest blog about the memoir writer’s relationship to family and friends–”How to Write Your Memoir and Still Go Home for the Holidays.” The next day, I will post an interview with her in this space.

The giveaway works this way.  Read both blog posts, add your comments, and you will be entered in the chance to win your own copy of  The Power of Memoir. I will draw the winner from the names of all commenters.  Hope you will be among them.

If you want to become acquainted with Linda Joy now, I reviewed two of her previous books, and you can click on the following links: the memoir Don’t Call Me Motherand Becoming Whole.