Barrington selects some of the thorniest issues in memoir writing and creates a “practical guide to the craft, the personal challenges, and ethical dilemmas of writing your true stories.” In twelve chapters she exposes the flesh of issues such as naming names, writing about living people, and moving around in time. Deftly she filets each topic, leaving the reader feeling empowered and informed.

First, you should know that Barrington’s own memoir Lifesaving: A Memoir has won several prizes and praise from such creative nonfiction luminaries as Vivian Gornick, Philip Lopate, and many others. After reading this craft book, I ordered the memoir also. I trusted Barrington’s voice from the beginning.

Barrington’s advice to writers begins with the idea of apprenticeship–years spent reading, observing, experimenting, writing, revising, and editing–before attempting to publish your work. Those of us who have spent longer as apprentices than we were hoping to will enjoy this exchange recounted by Barrington:  a doctor at a cocktail party told writer Bill Roorbach that she was going to take six months off and write her story. “Roorbach’s satisfying comeback was, ‘You know, you’ve inspired me! I’m going to take six months off and become a surgeon!’“

Like many other craft book writers, Barrington advocates keeping a notebook ready at all times for the kinds of fleeting thoughts, sensory perceptions, that bring back memory. But unlike many other instructors in the art of writing, she spurns the advice to note all the “big moments” in your life. Instead, create a haunting story out of “lifelong preoccupations.” Let your journals record and guide you to your life’s signature story–the things that really matter to you. At the end of this chapter, and every chapter, are excellent exercises, some of the best I’ve seen.

Just as Virginia Woolf needed to kill the “angel in the house,” the totally self-abnegating, decorous Victorian woman’s voice in her head, so do most of us need to kill off inner demons. One can’t write a memoir without risking offense to others or to the image of ourselves others may have of us.

And yet. One of the greatest controversies in the field, and one that sparked the longest comment dialogue ever in this blog, is the question, “What does the memoirist owe to other people, especially those still living?” Linda Joy Myers tackled this question in an earlier post entitled, “How to Write Your Memoir and Still Go Home for the Holidays.” So I was eager to read Barrington’s chapter “Writing About Living People.”

She takes a moderately conservative position of whether or not to publish work that might hurt others.  I found this piece of wisdom very helpful: “I feel certain that, if faced with an unresolvable conflict, peoples’ lives are more important than my words.” And I smiled when I read Annie Dillard’s wry comment, “Things were simpler when I wrote about muskrats.”

Too much concern about others silences the memoir voice. Too little concern may reflect undigested experience or the author’s immaturity. Barrington quotes Teresa Jordan as saying, “I think that if you understand the true depth of the story, it’s surprising how much truth people will embrace about themselves.” The key to striking the right balance between self and others may be to go another layer or two deeper into the story.

This morning, as I was walking, I listened to a wonderful podcast of novelist Edna O’Brien being interviewed by Diane Rehm on NPR. Even novelists, who are obviously making up their stories, can become outcasts in their home towns, as O’Brien was after the publication of her first novel, Country Girls. Often these same home towns become devoted to the memory of the writer who first offended them when it becomes clear that this writer spoke the truth in love.

If I had to choose one memoir writing book from all that I have read so far, I would choose this one.

Have any thoughts to share on this book or others on the subject of memoir? Anything you want to remember to carry into your own work?

Ervin Stutzman, the current executive director of the Mennonite Church USA, gave himself an interesting memoir challenge: “How can I write the story that includes my own life (described in the third person) but is focused on my mother?”

Third-person autobiographies have appeared before. Henry Brooks Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, may have written the most famous one–The Education of Henry Adams.

Perhaps the category that best fits this book is neither memoir nor autobiography, but rather family history. Memoirist and memoir coach Virginia Lloyd recently offered five defining distinctions between the genres in this post on Lynette Benton’s blog.

I was curious enough about this choice that I asked the author a few questions. He graciously agreed to answer them below.

Q: Who was the audience you envisioned for this book (and a companion family history called Tobias)?

A: At first I chose to publish with Cascadia Press, who edited the book. When Cascadia editor Michael King went to co-publish with Herald Press, they bought the rights to publish it themselves. I envisioned a largely Anabaptist(Mennonite and Amish) audience, although it has sold much more broadly than that. Some of the most interested individuals were other-than-Mennonite. They write me on Facebook or contact me by email.

Q: What were the concerns you had as you thought about writing the book (s)? Did other people caution you against doing so?

Ervin Stutzman, Executive Director, Mennonite Church USA

A: My main concern at first was that not many people would be interested. But I soon learned that many people were interested. I don’t recall that anyone cautioned me against writing.

Q: Did you fear that telling the story of your father’s financial challenges and your mother’s struggles as a widow would be a problem for you or members of your family?

A: I never struggled with fear–except perhaps in the case of my father’s business dealings. But I decided that telling the truth about our family was more important than keeping a particular reputation. That turned out to be one of the most formative experiences in my life, and gives me courage to speak the truth in many other ways in the church. I don’t worry too much about what people think, so I am bolder now. People tell me they notice it.

Q: It seems challenging to put yourself into the story without becoming a major character. I am fascinated by my awareness of your presence–or not–as you tell the story. How many scenes came from direct observations you remember and how many came from stories your mother or others told you?

A: In Tobias, I depended entirely on the stories of others, since I could not draw on a single memory. In Emma, I drew from much more personal knowledge, but I tried to write from my mother’s point of view rather than my own. Even so, 2/3 of the book is from other sources such as my sister’s diaries and journals. I also drew from many interviews with siblings, uncles/aunts, and others who knew her well.

To get feedback and buy in for the project, I shared the manuscript of both of my books with all my siblings and all of my mother’s and father’s siblings.

Q: Who/what was the major source of memory for you? How did you access your memories and get others to do the same.

A: I soon learned that story invokes story. I could ask individuals if they remembered anything about my father, and they had very little to say. But when I told them a few stories, it prompted many other memories and stories. And after I published the books, I got some of the best stories. I have recorded those in dozens of pages in my journal.

From various sources, I created a timeline that ran to 48 pages for each of my boxes. This helped me to keep the time chronology in order. I drew from diaries, newspapers, as well as many interviews.

Q: Have you encountered any hurt or opposition in your family after the book was published? While you were writing? How did/do you handle it?

A: I have not encountered any hurt and very little opposition. In fact, this project has been one of the most helpful projects to unite our family. All of the members of my family are enthusiastic about these two books. My oldest brother, who was not close to me, often thanks me for the work I have done for our family. My sister-in-law wrote me a letter telling me that Tobias of the Amish is the best thing that ever happened to her husband.

One of my uncles has not been enthused about my book Tobias. I think that’s because it does not paint his father, my grandfather, in a very positive light. He told me that everything in the book is true, but that I would not have had to write it all. It is because of his influence that the local bookstore in Hutchinson, Kansas stocks the book, but does not display it on the shelf.

Q: You have always been a very busy person. How did you find the time to write? What was your discipline?

A: I am a fairly disciplined person, so I subdivided these large book projects into a smaller series of many projects. For example, I made many lists, such as 1) cars or equipment we owned, 2) places we visited, 3) family traits or verbal expressions, 4) furniture or appliances, 5) the rhythms of the day, the week and the year, and 6) activities and artifacts in the various rooms in the house, the garden, the butcher house, the barn, the church house, etc. I also made lists of animals and plants, along with a variety of weather conditions.  I visualized all of these in my mind’s eye as I wrote. I also conducted a photo harvest in my home community. Each of these activities was a project in itself, and they prepared me to write in a more full-orbed way.

I have learned that all I need to keep making progress is to visualize the next physical or mental step that will move me toward the ultimate goal of publishing the book. That might be as simple as reading 20 pages of a diary, scheduling an interview, drawing up a list, or writing a paragraph that I know will be revised. All of these activities are more productive than allowing my psychic RAM to cycle endlessly with a blank page in front of me. All of them help to overcome “the power of the white (page).”

I integrated lots of interviews with people in different communities into my travel schedule for the church. I also scheduled times to write, whether I felt like it or not. Sometimes I took a week of vacation, which was very “expensive” in terms of commitment. I tried to make it pay by carefully planning my time. For example, it took me two weeks of vacation to search through all the copies of the Sugar Creek Budget from 1918-1956 that gave me information about Hutchinson, Kansas; Nowata and Thomas, Oklahoma, and Kalona, Iowa. I read 11 years worth of my sister’s diaries by scheduling this activity over a period of time.

I wrote an extensive chronology and plot development scheme for both books before I wrote the narrative. Some of the hardest work that I did was to envision my mother’s fatal flaw, and how she overcame it. I came to see the development in her life, which was hidden to me as I was growing up. Now I revel in the feedback from widows who tell me that I really described well what my mother was going through. Again, I tried to capture the ethos of my parent’s community by a simple and restrained writing style.

Had I simply starting writing out of my limited memory, it wouldn’t have been much of a story. My research added depth and breadth to the plot as well as the descriptions. And of course, I discovered much more than I could put into the book. In fact, I cut out more than 50 pages in the last draft of Emma, just to keep it focused and short enough for people to read.

Q: Did you find “flow” easily after you got started writing? Did your energy and attention sometimes wane? What did you do then?

A: I can really get into the flow when I get started. At times when my energy waned, I talked to people about my project. They expressed enthusiasm for it, which gave me new energy. Few things energized me like learning new stories from people.

Q: Did you do a book tour? Participate in any other marketing events?

A: I have spoken to groups about one or both of these books in Harrisonburg, Virginia; Sarasota, Florida; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Walnut Creek, Ohio; Hutchinson, Kansas; Kalona, Iowa; Laurelville, Pennsylvania; Palm Springs, California; and Middlebury, Indiana, always to receptive audiences.

When people ask me if I enjoy writing, I tell them that I enjoy having written. There is a difference.

Which do you enjoy more–writing or having written?

Have you ever read (or written) a third-person memoir or family history?

Do you have any further questions for Ervin Stutzman?

Foer spent more than two years researching and writing his book even though his experience on the memory circuit only lasted one. He controls both the subject and the structure of his memoir with the same kind of precision and passion he used to imagine Einstein moonwalking in one of his “memory palaces.”

For a very young author with a journalist background, Foers handles the “long form” of the memoir very well.  He weaves the story of his year-long adventure as a memory competititor, complete with eccentric “mental athlete” characters, along with the latest neuroscience reseach and historical discussions of classical Greece. Moonwalking with Einstein both entertains and educates in memorable ways.

The book’s publication was well-timed for me, since I am preparing for a speech on “The Purpose of Memory” and Foer’s book has provided a few really provocative ideas. For me, his story about becoming the world memory champion, while well-told, held less fascination than his occasional philosophical and historical inquiries. Here are five points of his extracted from my notes:

1. “We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory.” Kindle 4652.
2. Many human functions depend on memory—humor, aha moments, common culture.
3. “Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.”
4. Take a stand against forgetfulness. Remember the wisdom of the ancients—those who never published a word—Socrates, for example.
5. Recover some of the attention to memory that the ancients practiced. Memorize poetry! There is wisdom in some of the old-school emphasis on memorization.

These are some of the ideas in the book. What do you think of them?

By now you know that when Lanie Tankard pens a guest post review of a memoir, you want to read the review whether or not you read the book!

Bird Cloud: A Memoir

by Annie Proulx

(New York: Scribner, January 2011)

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx has housed her life in a memoir. During the design and construction of a home in Wyoming, she began thinking about other houses in which she’s lived. She also started wondering about previous inhabitants of the terrain upon which her new abode was taking shape. The resulting framework became Bird Cloud, a name she gave both to her book and her ranch.

Within this memoir, Proulx scatters bits of herself along with research about the property, superimposing her life and the life of the land onto the building design. The triage is akin to a configuration by Frank Gehry, with no clue about what’s around the next corner.

Proulx, known for fiction, broke away from predictability here in a nonfiction nonlinear creation that distorts structure. As in some architecture, the expectation of a work unfolding in a conventional way sets up the tension of lines on a grid being erased. Proulx herself tells us in the first chapter: “Observational skills, quick decisions (not a few bad ones), and a tendency to overreach, to stretch comprehension and try difficult things are part of who I am.”

While Proulx employs the basic unit of chapters, with footnotes and sketches, the story itself runs off in all directions. Bird Cloud chronicles the purchase of 640 acres of prairie and wetlands in Wyoming, and the placement of a house there. Writers can catch glimpses of Proulx’s work habits. Architects may glean insights about flashpoints with clients — and builders. Archaeologists will love her expeditions to uncover fire pits and chert flakes. Birders will go wild over lengthy descriptions of the species inhabiting this tract that she bought from the Nature Conservancy. A river runs through it — the North Platte, accented by cliffs four hundred feet high.

Readers jump from house design to examination of Proulx’s childhood, with tangents of history, biology, archaeology, genealogy, and anthropology tossed in for good measure. Then we zing back to house construction while hunting for Indian artifacts. Suddenly we’re in a lengthy Audubon bird guide, until hopping in Proulx’s truck for a trip to town.

Well-known author Michael Pollan also designed and constructed a building in which to write, documenting the process in A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. Pollan’s book is a more smoothly flowing philosophical meditation on architecture, the natural world, and himself. The process employed by Proulx is akin to a jerky handheld movie camera capturing the difficulty of living one’s life amidst the chaos of construction or remodeling. And that’s not necessarily a bad approach.

Bird Cloud almost requires several readings to focus on the disparate elements. I found aspects I hadn’t noticed the first time around when I went back to zero in on the memoir theme. Proulx has a good handle on her identity. Perhaps writing memoir assisted her definition of self.

More reticent than Pollan, Proulx tells us straight out that “complexity and clutter are my style.” She employs house not only in the traditional sense of a building made for people to live in, but also in the metaphorical sense of revisiting previous dwellings in her mind to retrieve impressions from those periods. A memory can sometimes arise swiftly from its storehouse, as a bird disturbed from its nest will shoot skyward. It’s easy to visualize these recollections clustering overhead as a cloud of fine feathered friends.

Clouds are opaque, though. If memoirists place recollections down on paper without reflection, the images will remain impervious to light — obscure and unintelligible in meaning. Proulx uses her reminiscences here to delve deeper into her own character in an effort to understand who she is and how she came to be that way. She speculates at times, starting from oral history and searching for facts to back it up.

“I don’t trust the tricks of memory,” Proulx says, bemoaning the difficulty of locating evidence about intriguing stories from relatives. She is plagued by “questions of family origins.” Her need to connect the dots in her ancestry is a universal one, “a burning need to complete the puzzle, to find the missing pieces.”

People write memoir for many reasons. Some merely spout facts and dates. A few assign blame for past events. The adventurous use it as a data-mining device to dig deeper into the cave of memories, bringing up nuggets. Gutsy writers hold a magnifying glass up to these abstract chunks, using the lens of introspection to gain insights about the forces that shaped them into the people they are today.

Proulx offers brief glimpses into her work process as a writer, as well as quick peeks at her soul: “Well do I know my own character negatives—bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see, but I suppose a fair dose of sympathy and even compassion is there, a by-product of the writer’s imagination. I can and do put myself in others’ shoes constantly.”

Before Proulx broke out into short stories and novels, she wrote several factual volumes about the making of cider, fences, and gardens. Search “Annie Proulx” on Amazon under Books, and you get 245 results.

The stage of her childhood is set with sharply rendered scenes from as early as two or three years old. Becoming ill, she recalls “the dizzy sensation” as she climbed the stairs and “the relentless nail” that snagged her sweater, holding her fast. She details cleaning out the objects of one house, saying, “I still sometimes think I can go back there and see these things.”

Proulx reminisces about the many, many houses in which she’s lived: “We moved and moved and moved. Over the years we lived in dozens of houses.” She reflects on the possible reasons for that itinerant lifestyle, fleshing out “a hard-to-know father.” She calls the death of a childhood pet crow dubbed Jimmy an “introduction to tragic and inconsolable loss,” but never offers specifics about later losses.

Does memoir have a hard-and-fast rule that a writer must tender an entire life to merit membership in the genre? Or is the field more flexible, responsive to variety? Proulx chooses to put the spotlight on her ancestors and her childhood, skipping the middle chapters of education, work, three marriages, three divorces, three sons, one daughter, and four sisters. She picks up the story thread with a visit to her mother in the 1980s, continuing the exploration of her heritage. Perhaps such concentrated attention on one facet of an existence enables greater clarity.

What is a successful memoir? Is it a “tell all” that makes readers feel like voyeurs? Do we have that right? Can’t a memoir work if it presents only a certain number of details in a way that enables readers to feel their own lives reflected somehow?

The construction of Bird Cloud the house shapes the structure of Bird Cloud the book. Right there on the first page, in her choice of the word “squirted” to describe the way speeding trucks moved gravel into ditches, Proulx is in command of her sentences. And often, they dazzle.

Take this deceptively simple one, as she and her sister set out to visit their mother: “The day was mild for late November, heavy overcast, light rain and fog, one of those dark days that New England breeds in autumn.” Look at the way it’s created. See how it draws the reader in, takes you along with the two women as they set out on their journey. It implies a slight leaning in of the shoulders, with a nod of the speaker’s head, as if to say to the listener, “You know the kind of day I mean, don’t you? You’ve encountered them, too, right?” You could cast the description of that day a dozen different ways, but you wouldn’t catch the same elusive lost-in-thought spirit that allows us to hear the individuality of Proulx’s voice. She is so observant, noticing qualities such as “the scent of wet leaves and rain.”

Proulx, now 75, tells us in anticipation of building Bird Cloud: “This place is, perhaps, where I will end my days. Or so I think.” At that point, she has the prospect of a refuge, but the second sentence foreshadows the book’s ending. After the house is finished, Proulx realizes it could never be “the final home of which I had dreamed.” She alludes to eagles, wasting “no time on tears.” After the book was published, she placed the ranch on the market for a time, but then took it off. In a recent interview from Australia, Proulx indicates she will move back to the property when the snow clears.

Annie Proulx has taken a slice of her life, as if shaving reminiscences from a plank. Before sweeping them up, she examined the wood curls and then put them in her outstretched hands, offering to share them with the world. That takes courage. It’s not fiction this time, but real life. And it’s hers.

****

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, TX. She is a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Photo by Joanne Hill

I searched on Lanie’s name in this blog and found 17 posts in which you can read more of her reviews.

Let’s ask Lanie’s question again, to stimulate your comments. Do memoirs have to cover a whole life? Do your favorite ones go deep into one period of time, expand over a long life, or move between childhood and later life using flashback and flashforward? Talk amongst yourselves!

The author in second grade in the 1960's

Saloma Miller Furlong 2010

Saloma Miller Furlong has an amazing story. The little Amish girl on the cover of her memoir and the Smith College graduate on the back cover represent two worlds. These two photos illustrate a life journey that has covered, so far, a relatively short distance in time and space, but a huge one in world view.

Naturally the reader wants to know the story between the covers. How did Saloma escape a dysfunctional family in a closed community and find happiness as a professional woman living in New England?

Since being Mennonite is central to my own life story, and since Mennonites and Amish were once the same Anabaptist faith and retain some distinctive traits among Christian groups, I was happy to receive this book from the author and to read it with care.

The book tells the story of both worlds–the Amish childhood and the contemporary professional woman working at Amherst College. Most readers will come to the book because it promises secrets of Amish life that are often hidden in romantic images popularized by mass media. The truth is that Amish families contain some extraordinary resources for collective support but that this support is not equally distributed to all. And they have their share of sin and shame hidden behind closed doors.

Strong boundaries between the Amish and the outside world are maintained by language like Hochmut (for high, prideful, independent living) and Demut (for low, humble, community-focused Godly living) and by a theology that focuses on eternal punishment for being Hochmut. Inside the community, there are more complex layers of social control. Saloma suffered under one of these.

If she had broken her leg or their house had burned down, the whole community would have gathered round to sympathize and to work collectively to restore the innocent victims to wholeness. However, if someone (such as her father) was thought to be lazy or simple-minded–or was depressed and just looked lazy or simple-minded–the community had other explanations and reactions designed to turn this person and his entire family into a cautionary tale for the edification of others. Furlong describes the result this way: “The Amish way was to ‘shame’ the person into working harder and helping himself–and likewise, if someone was simple, he should just ‘smarten up.’ So instead of trying to help Datt (Pennsylvania Dutch name for Father) improve his situation, the people in the community shamed him. He was still included in all the community events, but the Amish have a way of both including and isolating someone at the same time. . . .the pressure to conform never ceases, and so in this way, the person–a person like Datt–feels like an outsider within the community all his life.”

Furlong shows a depth of comprehension of the positive and negative in her life that probably would not have been possible had she written her memoir earlier. I have a sense of deep forgiveness and calm when I read even the worst things in the book–especially when her brother abused her.

Which brings up another issue, one that memoirists face directly when they write about family members, especially those still living. How tell your own truth when it sheds a very bad light on someone else? I criticized Rhoda Janzen in this review blog post, which started up a storm of comment, for displaying gratuitous condescension toward her sisters-in-law in Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.

Rhoda Janzen

But what if the criticism is not gratuitous but central to the plot? What if it “outs” a brother who apparently has gained good standing within the Amish community? What if it tells old secrets about a father after he is gone?

Clearly, Furlong has had to face these questions before approaching a publisher. She has had to prepare heart and mind for whatever reaction she might receive from her family, the Amish community, feminists, and anti-feminists.

I think she hits the mark between honesty of detail in describing the abuse and non-romantic appreciation for the good times just about perfectly. This is no small feat. She has Mary Karr’s maturity without her hilarity. She has Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s nostalgia for rural life without her rosy life story.

Furlong’s book arrives on the scene at a time when memoirs from Anabaptist (Mennonite, Amish, Hutterite) women are sweeping North America. Ankita Rao, of Religion News Service did not include Furlong in her survey of the scene, but if you are interested in reading about three other books, you can find summaries here.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in a clear-eyed look at Amish life told by a woman who has maintained the best of her tradition outside the church.

As for any deficits in the book, I had only one disappointment (and a few minor editorial quibbles which I won’t mention). The disappointment centers on wanting to know more about the current Saloma Furlong and more about the psychological, spiritual, and emotional journey she took after she escaped the Amish community. The material about childhood is important and well crafted, but how did she create her currently thriving life? What were the obstacles, ingredients? Who were the other helpers along the way? How did she meet her supportive husband? How did she not end up with an abusive partner? How did her Amish upbringing help and hurt her in establishing this new life?

Perhaps Saloma Furlong will write a second memoir that both traces the steps to independence and then leads her back again to the place where she is now–free, forgiving, and more than forty. She has bucked the odds a thousand different ways. How did she do it? She seems to understand that readers will find her Amish past interesting, but perhaps she minimizes her current life because it seems too ordinary. I don’t think it is.

So let’s ask for Volume Two!

Readers: how many Amish or Mennonite or Hutterite memoirs have you read? What makes them interesting (or not) to you?

Most people rate themselves as happy–as 7′s. In a 2006 survey 84 percent of Americans ranked themselves as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy.’”

If your number is anything lower than 10, you can benefit from reading The Happiness Project. And even if it is 10, you can appreciate and understand your good fortune more by also reading this book. Our book club rated this book a 4 on a 5-point scale, and it generated more-than-usual conversation.

This book intrigues me because of its excellent marketing. Rubin created an outstanding “platform” four years ago through the establishment of a website which featured a blog that helped her write the book. In the book she offers the backstory of how her blog came to be, how she committed to posting six days/week (wow!), and the happiness benefits that resulted.

Through the blog Rubin built relationships to readers as sources who shared stories later published in the book. Of course, the blog readers also became book buyers and likely “buzz” generators. The processes of writing, interacting online, and marketing became intertwined.

Here are a few ideas I am going to try to implement after having read this book:

• clean a closet and leave an empty shelf.
• laugh out loud more than 20 times a day.
• eat more vegetables and exercise regularly
• consciously cultivate friendships new and old (including family)

The most important philosophical principle I derived from reading this book is that the search for happiness, when entered deeply and consciously, serves the welfare of others even more than it serves the seeker. One cannot be happy by oneself. We get happy by making other people happy.

The golden rule not only makes us moral. It also makes us healthy, wealthy, and wise.

This is a great book to give someone for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah,  or New Year. You can make your own resolution chart (an idea borrowed from Ben Franklin) and turn 2011 into your happiest year ever.

Caldwell, Bo. City of Tranquil Light. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010.

If Barbara Kingsolver’s masterpiece The Poisonwood Bible, has formed your image of Christian missionaries in the twentieth century, you need an equal and opposite set of characters to round out (not replace) your historical, theological, and literary imagination. Bo Caldwell’s Will and Katherine Kiehn are not as dramatic as Kingsolver’s Nathan and Orleanna Price, but their quiet faith, love of their adopted country, and devotion to each other will stir all but the most callous readers. If you are immune to quietness as a form of passion and simplicity as beauty, beware. Otherwise, you are in for a treat. This is a great book.

The narrator of this tale, Will Kiehn, is an unlikely hero—clumsy, slow, sometimes lazy—by his own confession. A Mennonite farm boy from Oklahoma, he is so humble that he thinks his biggest sin is pride. Having heard a clear call to go to China, he leaves his home and family and joins a company of other missionaries, including Katherine Friesen, the 22 year-old deaconess he will later marry.

The book opens in the 1960’s with an elderly Kiehn in a California retirement community, reflecting over his past, remembering a place—Kuang P’ing Ch’eng—City of Tranquil Light. A widower, he cherishes his Chinese bible, his German bible (the language of his parents), and his wife’s journal chronicling their 27 years as missionaries. An encounter with a Chinese-American Fuller brush man who recognizes him as “mu shih”—“shepherd-teacher” who baptized him in China—sets the stage for the opening chapters describing his religious heritage and his Mennonite formation on the plains of Oklahoma.

The scene then shifts to the year 1906, when both Will and Katherine set sail for China. We follow them through their introductory culture shock, to their demure courtship, quiet marriage, and their post as the only westerners in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng. Will narrates in the past tense while excerpts from Katherine’s journal offers a contrasting immediacy of the same scene in real time. Her italicized words bring her to life as her own character, full of vivacious energy even though she suffers from headaches and low physical stamina. She nevertheless applies her medical skills to the amazement and gratitude of villagers. Will learns to preach. And slowly a church begins to form.

In the midst of early success comes the greatest blessing of all—a daughter named Lily. The plot of the novel pivots around the death of Lily and the fact that medical supplies that could have cured her dysentery were stolen by a bandit named Hsiao Lao who then continues to enter and exit their lives through wars, famines, floods, and other near-death experiences. The book concludes after Katherine’s death, when Will’s mind returns to the remembered deepest places in his soul. His room in the retirement home is on the west side—the one closest to China.

Faith is the most obvious theme of this book. Will and Katherine both learn the lesson early in their sojourn that China will not bend toward them. They need to listen and bend toward China, trusting God to be wiser than they are. They do so gracefully, usually, and with difficulty at other times. Their church grows, not from hellfire preaching but the same way Jesus grew his motley band of followers—through the telling of stories and ministry to human need. Menno Simons, for whom the Mennonite church was named, said these words:

True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant.
It clothes the naked.
It feeds the hungry.
It comforts the sorrowful.
It shelters the destitute.
It serves those that harm it.
It binds up that which is wounded.

Will and Katherine lived this kind of evangelism; they applied to missions the first rule of medicine: first, do no harm.

But this is not a theological tract or a short course in up-to-date missiology. Caldwell’s vision stretches beyond admiration for faithful simplicity and for storytelling about the adventures of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. She connects the lives of Will and Katherine with a life force that emanates from the land, with memory older than time, and with the great traditions in literature.

On nearly every page of this book lie traces of another great book. The simple conversion story when Will kneels beside the plow in his field contains echoes of St. Augustine, e.e.cummings,   Francis Thompson, St. Paul, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. When Will’s father, who might have been angry to see his son leave the farm, instead embraces him, saying “you have chosen the better part. How could I refuse you?” he is the archetypal good father, echoing the words of Jesus himself in Luke 10:42 “Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

The two books that came to my mind most often when reading this one were Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead. In addition to quiet mystical experience of their main characters, these novels all root their deepest spiritual lessons in the power of place. Will describes how this kind of love penetrates:

“Each morning when I begin my daily walk, I start out by heading west, toward China. At times my life there seems almost imagined; bandits and soldiers and magistrates, floods and droughts and famines and war, seem as distant as the moon. On other days it is the present that feels imagined and Kuang P’ing Ch’eng that seems more real than the poached egg and toast I eat for breakfast. Certain smells make China instantly real to me: anything cooked with garlic, freshly cut wood, antiseptic, the crispness of the air on the first autumn day. These scents stop me in my tracks.”

As he kneels by his bed at night, in a scene reminiscent of  his conversion years ago in an Oklahoma field, he gives thanks for his parents and for Katherine and Lily, working his way from the names of his Chinese friends to the City of Tranquil Light itself and then to the country where he can no longer go. As his heart settles on China, he feels a familiar homesickness, a gift that tells him this earth is not his home.

Joseph Conrad and Barbara Kingsolver took us to the heart of darkness. Bo Caldwell arouses the hope, even the conviction, that beyond darkness of all kinds lies a heavenly city—a city of tranquil light.

The cover of Rosanne Cash’s memoir Composed: A Memoir arrested me. The author is sitting on a bench looking directly at the viewer. The blurry background invites us to concentrate on her face and the costume she is wearing. Johnny Cash fans will notice the black shirt, an iconic Cash color his daughter borrows without fear. Women will examine the gunmetal gray nail polish and matching boots, the diamond wedding ring, the tight-but-not-skinny jeans, and women over fifty will love the gray roots showing under her red hair. Everyone will notice the kind but knowing gaze and the slight smile. Here is a woman come of age, says the cover. Her smile contains secrets she just might share with you if you open this book.

But before you succumb to the visual seduction, a single word jumps off the cover: Composed. The yellow, weather-beaten letters of the title are smaller than the bright red CASH and the white Rosanne above them. Down below are two small words in white: A Memoir. When I first heard this title, I called it perfect. That was before I read the book. Now that I have allowed Rosanne Cash’s story to speak to me, I admire the title even more. Here’s why: It’s singular and simple on one level–short and memorable. Yet it contains layers of relevant meanings–a single word with seven different definitions. The American Heritage Dictionary defines compose as follows:

v. com·posed, com·pos·ing, com·pos·es

Becoming a Life-Change Artist: 7 Creative Skills to Reinvent Yourself at Any Stage of Life. Fred Mandell, Ph.D., Kathleen Jordan, Ph.D. Avery, 2010.

The lives of artists fascinate me. Actually, all lives fascinate me.  I hold a secret hankering to be an artist, and this book helped me understand why, inspiring me to use my own life as the canvas and the principles in this book as the viewfinder, paint, and brush.

Co-authors Kathy Jordan and Fred Mandell have studied artist’s lives, searching for patterns, and have emerged with a number of findings that might surprise you and a list of seven creative skills all of us can hone.

The “elevator speech” about this book describes it as The Artist’s Way meets What Color is Your Parachute. I’m not a student of those two books, but I can say that this one deserves as much success as they have had.

Why? Because the authors guide the reader seamlessly back and forth between in-depth biography of artists and into real life stories of ordinary people. Their skills as researchers, psychologists, and coaches combine to create an elegant book with relevance to almost anyone at any stage of life. One of my favorite quotes from the book says it best. “The ultimate work of art [is] a life of meaning and purpose imbued with hard-won self-awareness.”

Three sections comprise the book’s structure: The Process, The Skills, and a synthesis chapter called “The Way of the Life Change Artist.”

The Process (Part One)begins with recognizing when one has come to a “creative dilemma” in life. Dante’s famous description in The Inferno came to mind when I read about this sense between knowing and not knowing, whether to act or not to act:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself in a shadowed forest.
For I had lost the path that does not stray
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
That savage forest, dense and difficult,
Which even in recall renews my fear:
So bitter-death is hardly so severe!

The fear so powerfully described by Dante affects all of us in transition. The key to overcoming fear lies in welcoming change, knowing that we have an artist’s tool box to create something beautiful from whatever mistakes we have made or whatever external force threatens to overwhelm us.

The rest of the process, after recognizing and entering the creative dilemma, consists of exploring, discovering, and integrating. Each of these parts of the process can produce a variety of feelings, both positive and negative, that require our attention and strengthen our ability to remain open even when we don’t know the outcome of our search.

The heart of the book, however, is the discussion of the seven skills of the life change artist based on the patterns in all great artists’ lives. For each skill, the authors use side bars to describe how individuals follow the four-steps of the creative process to strengthen the skill, an ingenious way to bring process and skills together.

The seven skills are:

1. Preparation–walking, writing, going outside the familiar, listening to music, doing physical chores, soaking in a bathtub, helping others. . .

2. Seeing–the linchpin creative skill. Blake said it: “The eye altering, alters all.” In this section I was reminded of the thrill I felt back in the 80′s when I encountered the concept of negative space in the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

3. Using context. Pay attention to trends in the world around us. Be aware of social identity and how it can bias our thinking.

4. Embracing uncertainty. Recognize that change is constant and don’t rush to resolution prematurely. Adapt, seek, and allow opportunities to unfold. Creating rituals, meditation, are useful practices as we learn this skill.

5. Risk taking. Acting without certainty of outcome. This might mean following our intuition, going against the crowd or even our own friends, managing our fears, and converting mistakes into opportunities for learning.

6. Collaboration. Braque and Picasso invented cubism together. Neither one could have done it alone. Likewise, Renoir, Cassatt, Degas and all the Impressionists. This section was the greatest “aha” for me. Most of us are trained to think of artists as loners, individuals haunted by their own dreams. In fact, they almost always have some kind of supportive artistic circle, often consciously cultivated. Here’s what the life change artist needs in an advisory group:

a. An empathetic listener like Rembrandt

b. A mentor like Pisarro

c. A catalyst like Picasso

d. A strategic thinker like Leonardo da Vinci

7. Discipline. Acting consistently whether or not we feel motivated. This is the “perspiration” part of inspiration. We adopt habits that allow us to overcome distraction, disappointment. We “sit in the chair” as long as we have to to get the job done. Leonardo da Vinci:  “You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.”

The end of the book contains an assessment tool called the Creativity Calculator. The calculator told me that I am highly creative in all areas except “using context” and “discipline” where I am a high medium. I find it helpful to see the places I can improve while also identifying with both process and skills that I learned through trial and error, careful observation of others, and learning to listen to the voice within. Among the most important gifts a book like this gives the reader are new names for one’s own experiences and new eyes for seeing the mountains yet to be climbed.

Here’s a final story from p. 125 of the book and Japanese artist Howard Ikemoto. “‘When my daughter was seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college–that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”‘”

We were all artists once. We all can become great artists with our own lives. Before that can happen we need to develop a deep process that develops these seven skills.

Now, memoir readers and writers, check out these seven skills in the life of the memoirist you most admire. Can you see them–both in the life and in the construction of the life as a work of art?

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.”