Richard seems to be walking a parallel path in Appalachian Ohio to mine here in Brooklyn. When I found his blog Narrative a year or so ago, I reached for my shepherd’s crook and snagged it!

Richard has written about my post about the idea of Ubuntu and memoir on his blog. He also interviewed me. Part One of a two-part series asks me about my memoir’s working title, Rosy Cheeks and about how I structured my writing process over the last five years. While you are on Richard’s blog be sure to click on his favorite memoirs and read a few of his reviews. You’ll understand why I consider myself a learner in Richard’s classroom! And give him a little blogger love — leave a comment!

What other blogs do you love to read? Do you have any to recommend to me or to my readers?

Terry Helwig signing her memoir Moonlight on Linoleum

Remember the wonderful interview with Terry Helwig in which she shared her book marketing strategies? Well, thanks to the gentle nudging of one of that post’s most engaged readers, Linda Gartz, Terry is back. Here’s how she found her agent and publisher, in her own words. I suggest you go to her site to learn even more. The link will take you directly to a set of great writing tips.

I like how Terry takes the process of writing, editing, and publishing seriously and herself lightly. I hope you’ll enjoy and learn a lot.

From Terry to Linda (and all of us):

Linda, in addition to the writing/publishing tips on my website http://www.terryhelwig.com/terrysdesk.aspx (open tab on writing tips), I strongly suggest authors go into a bookstore and leaf through books similar to the type of book they want to publish.  Oftentimes agents, editors and publishers will be mentioned in the acknowledgments which means these people and publishing houses likely have an interest in your genre.  I have been writing off and on for thirty years.  It wasn’t until I wrote Moonlight on Linoleum that I sought out an agent.  When my manuscript was finally read, I was told that I had a diamond in the rough; but in order for the agency to represent my manuscript, they suggested I hire a NYC editor to help me polish “my diamond” to make it more marketable.  I was told that publishers now prefer complete, edited manuscripts ready for publication because so many places are short-staffed and feeling the economic crunch.   The truth is, the cost of hiring a reputable editor gave me great pause—the cost was thousands of dollars, plus there was absolutely no guarantee that my manuscript would be accepted anywhere.  It was a gamble to be sure.  In the end, I decided to take the risk and, after undergoing the editing process, I was lucky enough to get an advance that more than covered the cost of the editing. I am well aware the ending could have turned out very differently.  I certainly don’t recommend this path for everyone, but it worked for me.

Do you have your own publishing story? What else do you want to know from Terry? Isn’t she generous to share so many ideas with us? Please thank her. And if you are interested in family history, check out Linda Gartz’s fascinating website also.

If Mikey likes it, it’s got to be good.

Well, in memoir query critique, if Marla Miller likes it, the same is true. She’s a tough critic, but kind. And she’s seen a lot of query letters in her role as columnist for The Writer magazine. You’ve met her here before in four previous posts. Now she has gathered all her memoir critiques in one YouTube location.

Her last memoir query critique got two thumbs up! Watch below:

What have you learned about memoir by watching Marla? What else would you like to know from her? She’s generously answered questions here before. I’m sure she will again. Don’t you just love Mikey? Wasn’t it fun to see him again?

You can learn a lot about what grabs and keeps an agent’s attention by watching Marla Miller critique query letters. Often she makes substantive revision suggestions. Here are a few Marla liked. Watch and learn:

Recently an interview with Sedaris appeared on his page that reminded me of something I am struggling with as I write memoir.

Dialogue.

Remember picking books from the library when you knew nothing about them and you were craving a really good read? One that took you out of your time, place, maybe even out of your own body for a little while? Did you do what I did in elementary school–look for the white space on the page?

White space= dialogue. Dialogue equals speed of reading and engagement with character.

The interview shared on facebook comes from this story in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Sedaris can sell out a house, not only here in America, but in Europe also. He’s compared to Bruce Springsteen in the article. He himself seems bemused by his success.

Here’s the paragraph that jumped out at me:

Q. Do you think that the performing – that constant reading out loud – has affected the way that you write?

A. Yes, definitely. If you’re reading something in front of an audience, you need to have dialogue in your story and it has to clip along in a way that if it’s just on a page, it doesn’t have to. People can just say, “Oh, that’s nice that he put that word in front of that one. Oh, I always liked that word. Look! That word has seven syllables in it.” But when you’re reading a story in front of an audience it has to move along.

Memoirists treat dialogue in many different ways. Right now I am reading Miriam Toews’ memoir about her father called Swing Low: A Life (recently reviewed in The New York Times.) So I thought I would observe the way the author handles dialogue in this unusual memoir–a daughter writes a narrative pieced together from fragments of information about her bi-polar father’s life.

Since the main character — Mel Toews — is notoriously silent unless he is in school or in church, the dialogue is mostly internal. So the lack of quotation marks makes sense. In general, it makes sense not to use quotation marks in memoir, I think. It takes some of the burden off memory when the reader does not see punctuation as a promise of fundamentalist truth.

However, I also picked up a copy of Toew’s novel, A Complicated Kindness, and I note the absence of quote marks there also. Yet there are more white spaces in the novel because the main character, a teenage girl, is voluble compared to the terse Mel Toews. Toews skillfully uses dialogue, both internal and external, to establish character and bring the reader close in as an observer.

Dear reader, what are your own preferences? Dialogue, description, or philosophic musings? If you are a writer, do you employ the same mix you yourself prefer as a reader? Do you like or dislike quotation marks?

Hershey family, circa 1966. L-R: Doris, Sue, me, Henry, Linda, Daddy, Mother.

Since television was not allowed in my Mennonite home when I was growing up, magazines, newspapers, and radio were an important link to the outside world.

The magazines I read from cover to cover included The Saturday Evening Post, Boy’s Life, and Life. But these were special treats not always available. Usually, they followed some magazine drive that were standard fundraisers at school.

We always had Farm Journal, Hoard’s Dairyman, The Gospel Herald and Christian Living, which I read only when desperate.

However, we had one tried-and-true, omni-present consumer magazine friend. Can you guess which one?

Of course, it was The Reader’s Digest. I gobbled up a new copy as soon as I found it in the mailbox, and the old copies found their way to the single bathroom our family of seven shared.

“Humor in Uniform” and “Real Life Drama” were some of my favorite sections, taking me into places far outside my small, Mennonite world. I sometimes did the “Word Power” puzzles and loved to find witty quotations I could try out with my friends. In some ways, the magazine predicted the future of mass media. It valued the pithy, poignant, sound bite before that word was coined and before USA Today and Twitter carried those values to their logical conclusions.

So, when I found this essay about memoir from the online version of Reader’s Digest, I was led to a little reverie about the past, not only of my own early reading habits but of the cultural role played by this magazine. If a little Mennonite girl found a window to the world here, imagine how many other Americans did also? The stories reflected the conservative values of the founders, Lila Bell and Dewitt Wallace, but they refrained from political endorsement and had none of the shrill ideological language of today’s media.

The magazine was, and is, filled with memoir–real people’s stories with names of the authors attached. I used to pore over the page that described how anybody could become an “author” in one of the many special sections devoted to real life humor and drama. Again, the popularity of these mini-memoirs may have forecast today’s reality television and enlarged memoir section in libraries and bookstores.

The article below, from a recent issue of Reader’s Digest online, does a great job of describing some critical memoir issues, especially psychological ones, and includes quotes from Jeannette Walls and other famous memoirists. So I guess you can say that even today Reader’s Digest is enlarging my world.

You won’t be able to read the article in the bathroom, however, unless you print it out or view this post on a smart phone. Ah, the benefits of print media.

How to Write Your Memoir

By Joe Kita January 2009

CLIPART.COM

Jeannette Walls had a hardscrabble youth. Nomadic, poor, often hungry, she grew up in the desert Southwest and the mountains of West Virginia. She eventually escaped her poverty and moved to New York City, where she became a successful gossip columnist. Her parents moved there too. Only, they soon found themselves homeless. One night on her way to a party, dressed in designer clothes, she saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. She lowered her head and asked the cabbie to take her home. My, how people would gossip if that were known.

“I was terrified,” says Walls. “I had this great life, a husband who loved me, a great job, a house with flush toilets, yet I felt like a fraud. I had a compulsion to write about this embarrassing stuff even though I knew I was risking everything.”

Walls made false starts on her memoir four times over 20 years, on each occasion growing so frustrated and fearful that she threw out the entire manuscript. Finally, when she was 44, The Glass Castle was published. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for almost three years, has sold more than two million copies, has been translated into 23 languages, and will soon be a movie.

“One of the lessons I’ve learned from writing this memoir is how much we all have in common,” says Walls. “So many of us think that certain things only happened to us and somehow they make us less of a person. I’m constantly urging people, especially older folks, to write about their lives. It gives you new perspective. It was hugely eye-opening for me and very cathartic. Even if the book hadn’t sold a single copy, it would still have been worth it.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Do you have any Reader’s Digest memories from childhood?  Please share!

Dora Dueck, author of This Hidden Thing

This week one of my own favorite bloggers, prize-winning Canadian novelist Dora Dueck, interviewed me on her blog about an issue central to my reason for starting this blog: to learn to write by reading better writers than myself. You will want to click the link above and explore her thoughtful blogs, but in the meantime, here is what I told her earlier this week:

From Borrowing Bones blog.

Shirley H. Showalter

A talented and determined young writer I know (Angeline Schellenberg) commented on my previous post and in the process raised with some good questions on the relationship between reading and writing. While thinking about this, it occurred to me that I must ask Shirley Hershey Showalter, whose blog 100 Memoirs  I read regularly, for her thoughts on the subject. Shirley — “a farmer’s daughter turned college professor, then college president, later foundation executive” — is writing a memoir about growing up Mennonite in America (1948 to 1966) and she’s going about the learning/reading side of it very deliberately.

Today, between a visit with a friend and picking her green beans, Shirley graciously sent me her answers to three questions.

1. You set out to read 100 memoirs, with the intention to write one yourself. What are you looking for?

2. How does the experience of reading affect your own project?

I am just now starting on what I call the long arc, or a full childhood memoir of 40,000-60,000 words, having published five short memoir essays of 2,000-5,000 words that received modest praise. ( I am easily encouraged.  )

3. Do you find, as A.S. noted, that reading other examples of what you’re doing can be reactionary rather than generative, and that it makes it harder to hear one’s own voice? What advice do you have to make the experience generative, to keep your own voice?

Harold Bloom has written about the anxiety of authorship here summarized, and Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar responded. I personally prefer Willa Cather’s imagistic explanation better than all these post-Freudian theories. A woman writer stands in the stream of literary history, but lets it fall away to reveal the purer self that sings naturally in her own body, in her own voice.

Thank you Shirley! You’ve given us some wonderful wisdom here (and some provocative links), for writers, yes, but for practitioners of anything really, from preaching to parenting, all who must absorb the influence of others while honing their unique approach. I’m very much looking forward to the song you’ll sing in your memoir!

Thanks, Dora. And now readers, here’s your turn. Can you give one example from simply reading another book that has made a difference in either your writing or your life??

Rooted in the land. Tree near Bellingham, WA.

Recently I had an inquiry from a writer who asked if I had a list of excellent first lines from memoirs. That sounded like something I should have. First words contain the vital “hook” that overcomes the reader’s resistance and skepticism. Think about how you challenge a book to speak to you when you gaze at its cover or open its first pages.

A really great memoir does more than hook the reader in the beginning. The first sentence takes you right to the heart of the matter, announcing one of the themes of the book. Often, the first paragraph in a work of art is like a haiku. It says in one breath what the whole book will say more fully as we follow the red thread of meaning.

Most of the lists of best and most famous opening lines come from novels. I shared some, and readers offered others, here. But what about memoir-specific opening lines?

Here are the first lines of some of the memoirs I selected as favorites in my personal top ten list.

Marla manages to offer some pointed critique in a very kind way. That’s not always easy, but writers really benefit from this kind of tough love. What do you think? Any feedback for Marla?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yqaE1Wx1b4]

The subject matter of the memoir embedded below is a mother’s perspective on father-child incest. Marla treats the subject very sympathetically and offers the possibility that the writer in this case might be able to appeal directly to a publisher and not need to convince an agent first.

Comments welcome, both about the content, the critique, or the idea of going directly to a publisher with your memoir idea.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hymZKUAitG4&w=560&h=349]

Easy to say. Hard to do.

In another post on voice, I described how helpful it was for me to try to visualize my voice as a farm. Today I am pondering the role of another of the senses–touch. How does one sense inform, enlarge, or restrict, another one?

Here’s a thesis to consider: a writer whose voice touches us usually has been touched profoundly by others. Have they been touched gently, intimately, wisely? Or has the touch been rough, unknowing, uncaring? What places inside us do they reach, and how do they touch us?

I first learned about voice and touch from Max DePree. Max likes to joke that he is a “born leader” because his father owned the company he later led. He eventually became CEO of the progressive, high-quality furniture company Herman Miller Inc., makers of the ubiquitous Aeron Chairs and famous for hiring the team of Charles and Ray Eames, who designed the quintessential modern chair included in the MoMA collection, the Eames Chair. When Max agreed to be my mentor, back in 1998, two years after I became president of Goshen College, I was deeply moved. I love to hear his voice, and his presence in my life has influenced me in ways neither of us can fully comprehend.

Max and me, 2008

Max has written a lot of books about leadership, most famously, Leadership is an Art (1989, 2004) and Leadership Jazz (1992,2008)

But the story that touched me most from Max comes from his experience as a grandfather rather than as a CEO. It comes from a now out-of-print book called Dear Zoe, one of the most beautiful childbirth and childhood stories ever written. Max wrote this book as a series of letters to his granddaughter Zoe, who was born prematurely (24 weeks inside the womb) and weighed 1 pound 7 ounces and was eleven inches tall. Max could slip his wedding ring up Zoe’s arm all the way to the top. When he dies, he wants to give Zoe his ring on a gold chain.

Here is the passage from that book that catches me in the throat every time I read it. It describes Grandpa Max’s encounter with a nurse after Zoe had, to the amazement of all, survived her first few days. Listen, please, to Max in his own voice:

“While we were looking at you, a wonderful nurse named Ruth came over to chat. After a few minutes she turned to me and said, ‘For the next several month, at least, you’re the surrogate father. I want you to come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe, and when you come I would like you to rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you’re caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch.’

I’m sure Ruth’s suggestion is going to be very important in our relationship together. I also have the feeling that she has given me something enormously profound to ponder.”

As I write these words, a little boy is getting ready to be born in New York City. I don’t know his name yet, but I do know that I want to touch him and that I will love his voice. He will make me a grandmother for the first time, and I hope that he will always connect my voice to my touch. His doctor says he could come any day now, and we wait prayerfully for him and his mother as they prepare for the amazing journey toward birth.

Have you learned anything about the connection of voice and touch from your children or grandchildren, if you have them?

What touches you in another person’s voice? You can describe either physical or metaphorical reality. As you read or write, are you aware of times when your voice and your touch connect? What happens?