Anthony and I look over the denuded mountains of Haiti, 1981.

I talked to Anthony about the speech, something I did with both children after this experience, because I could count on them to say something I would not have thought of.

“Put your head closer, Mommie,” said Anthony, “and I can tell you what your imagination looks like.” Totally enchanted, I locked heads with my little sage. “It’s a farm,” he said. “It’s got cows and chickens in it.”

Yes, Anthony, you were right. Now, as you prepare to become a father to your own little boy, and I prepare to write a childhood memoir, this is the landscape that has called me.

View of farms and cattle from our backyard, 2011.

Some day, I hope to take a set of pictures. One of Anthony and me looking at the mountains in our backyard (duplicating the first image above with a different set of mountains, almost 30 years later). One of Anthony and his son, whom we now call BBS (Baby Boy Showalter), due to arrive in this world in 24 days. One of BBS and his mother Chelsea. One of three generations of our whole family, looking at the mountains. Looking at farms. Looking at cows as they graze.

Yes, my imagination is populated with farms and cows and chickens. To find my writing voice, I have surrounded myself with icons of my youth:

The sign that hung across from our house, 1960-1990

This sign is now hanging in the alcove that leads from our first floor to the basement. It’s waiting for another icon to arrive–a mural-sized photo of cows under the Weeping Willow trees in our farm’s meadow–that will fill the far wall of the family room. The photographer of the large black-and-white photo was Grant Heilman, one of the foremost agricultural photographers in the world, whose business is centered in my hometown of Lititz, PA.

What do all these images have to do with the idea of voice, a writer’s voice, and especially a memoir writer’s voice? I’ll attempt to answer this question in subsequent posts.

In the meantime, what about you and your voice? If a little child put his or her head next to yours, what would your imagination look like? What images link to the sound of your own truest voice? Do you see a connection between the images that formed you in your youth and the “sound” of your voice on the page?

The Help spent 379 days in the Amazon Top 100 list. It has 1,751 reviews on Amazon.com and rates 4.5 stars. It is a novel, but, as Lanie Tankard argues, it deserves consideration from a memoir perspective.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

New York: Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam), 2009.

Available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, CD, and Kindle editions.

Movie in the works.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

The Help is a testament to the power of memoir, even though it is a novel. It’s actually a book about writing a book — a metabook. And the writing is clear and pure and true.

Kathryn Stockett has created powerful voices for three main characters, and alternates them in chapters much like Barbara Kingsolver did to great effect in THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. The reader is thus privy to different views of the events as the lives of the characters intertwine.

The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement of the Sixties, and eloquently illustrates the boundaries between the help and their employers. This wise book captures a time period important in our history as a country. Even the cover is brilliant both in color and design, and is a subtle portrayal of the book’s theme.

The Help captures the edge — that space between marginalized peoples and those in power by virtue of skin color, gender, age, wealth, heritage, wedding ring, beauty, or Junior League membership.

As a young woman of the privileged class begins to collect stories of the help to publish in a book, the activity changes them all. The maids without power begin to find strength through the telling of their stories, although they fear for their lives. Even the writer’s life is changed while collecting these stories as she begins to view her town through the eyes of the maids.

The simple act of putting down on paper the events of one’s life is empowering. The Help gives pause for thought and should foster deep discussions about prejudice of all types. The book is rich with insight for writers of memoir.

What do you think of this idea? How would we begin the movement?  Has it already begun?

Writing our own memoirs is a way to reflect and answer the big questions

by Shirley H. Showalter

Friday May 22, 2009, 9:07 AM

“This is the age of memoir,” declared writing expert William Zinsser in 1989.

Evidence all around us suggests Zinsser is right. Recently Rick Bragg held a full house at Kalamazoo Central High School enrapt as he told stories from the three memoirs selected by the Kalamazoo Public Library (“All Over but the Shoutin’,” “Ava’s Man,” and “The Prince of Frogtown”) in the excellent Reading Together series. A few days later, Susan Boyle’s appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” was the talk of America, and more than 33 million people have viewed the YouTube video of her instantly transformed life.

Personal stories completely infiltrate our lives. Technology and entertainment outlets sizzle with them: reality TV shows, blogs, vlogs, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, self-published books, podcasts, six-word memoirs, “This I Believe,” Story Corps, “This American Life,” the scrapbooking craze, birthing, christening, graduation, wedding videos on the Internet and “Life Story” funeral homes.

A new journal called Memoir (and) includes poetry, photography, graphic essays and short stories. Samsung just brought out a new camera/phone combo called the Memoir! Businesses have sprung up to help elderly people digitize photos, video, journals and memorabilia from their lives. A “viral” feature on Facebook, “25 Things About Me,” involved more than 5 million people within a four-week span.

The field of philanthropy is being transformed by social entrepreneurs who have discovered the power of personal stories. Kiva.org raised more than $36 million online last year by helping more than 93,000 people, who needed small amounts of capital, tell their stories.

President Barack Obama penned his first memoir at the age of 34. We have yet to comprehend how much “Dreams from My Father” (and, to a lesser extent, “The Audacity of Hope”) contributed to the making of our first African-American president. Had he not taken more than a year of his young life to wrestle meaning from the givens (his “Kenyan father” and “Kansan mother”) and the choices (community organizer rather than Wall Street lawyer, Christian rather than humanist or Muslim), he would not have become the leader he is today.

Some people decry and deride all this self-revelation. Too much information, they may say. Narcissism! The preening of celebrities and the role of media in making and breaking shallow identities make easy targets for critics, and rightly so.

But there is another side to the popularity of memoir, a side Rick Bragg showed us during his Kalamazoo visit. Good memoir teaches both the reader and the writer humility. St. Augustine, after all, is credited with the first autobiography that he titled, appropriately, “Confessions.”

We might all consider memoir writing, not necessarily for publication, but for the same reason the best spiritual memoirists examine their lives: to see the shape of our souls, locate our central tensions and conflicts, ask for God’s grace, forgive our debtors, discover our voices, and find the courage to continue the journey home.

In the decades ahead, 78 million baby boomers will reach the ends of their lives. We know from hospice workers that those who are dying face four main tasks, encapsulated in these words:

• “I love you.”

• “Thank you.”

• “I forgive you.”

• “Please forgive me.”

If a whole generation could find the courage to go through this process before they lay dying, we just might unleash the love energy this poor planet needs right now. That would be a new vision worth working for — a more humble, spiritual age brought to birth, and commemorated, in memoir.

Shirley H. Showalter is vice president for programs at the Fetzer Institute, www.fetzer.org and maintains a blog at www.100memoirs.com.

Since I taught both English and history to undergraduates, I was delighted to see Anderson’s emphasis on the need to learn how to write, and the value of reading history, especially biography and autobiography, for leaders in business.

Autobiography and memoir are not synonymous, as we have already discussed here, but a well-written memoir might well be a good primer in leadership.

Or not?  What do you think?

The last memoir I read, How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed, probably would not make it on to Anderson’s list, although it was a delightful read.

What memoirs, biographies, or autobiographies would you recommend as texts on leadership and good management?

What happens when we ask how “hot” the word “memoir” is?  Apparently hot and getting hotter:  When you search the word, you can discover all kinds of information–a history of the search volume over the last five years, the countries where the search is hottest, and how the search volume compares to news mentions.

One function that allows you to compare two words to each other.  For example, let’s look at memoir and autobiography.  Usage of “autobiography” is going down.  “Memoir” is advancing.  Take any two words you are interested in and spot the trend.  Here is “spiritual” and “memoir.”  Just for fun, try “recession, bling.”

Isn’t it cool to have this way to find out which words are hot?

Anybody have another Google application you want to share?

Now it is later–more than 20 years later.  I am writing, albeit very slowly.  This week I submitted two short memoirs and a poem to a local literary contest.  And I am writing to you, here, right now, in this moment.

A fitting way to honor Natalie Goldberg’s classic text, having just read the new and expanded version, will be to do a timed writing to illustrate one of her most important ideas.  First, however, I want to note a few other items of interest from the book.  The interview at the back sheds much light on the journey Goldberg has been on and contains a lot of her philosophy in nugget form.  For example, she explains why she loves memoir:  “Memoir is the study of how memory works.  It’s analogous to writing practice, to working with the mind.”  Goldberg loves that memory works in flashes and slices, not in linear chronology. By extension, one could add, the structure of a memoir should help us see the writer’s mind.  Memoir.  Memory. Mind.  We can call them the 3-M Company–the magic behind writing down the bones.

Now, to illustrate a timed writing.  Here’s how it works.  First, you pick a subject.  If you are in a workshop, Natalie picks the subject.  But I am going to pick this one myself, something Natalie recommends when you are ready.  She prefers that students write by hand, just as fast as they can keep a pen moving over the paper, but that won’t work with a blog.  So I will give myself ten minutes to write on one of the ideas I enjoy after reading this book and attending the workshop:  what does it mean to go slow and be dumb?

I have rushed at life.  Born first of five children, I exploded out of the womb and then tried my hardest to grow up before anyone could slow me down. I liked friends who were older because I thought they would induct me in the mysteries.  I remember convincing Mother to buy me high-heeled shoes at the age of 12 so that I could know what it was to be an adult.  I am amazed now that she did that.  I can only assume that Mother was reliving her own childhood and adolescence and enjoyed pushing forward to new adventures also.  I liked to finish as many books as possible and only read a few favorites slowly.  So when Natalie says a writer must learn to be slow and dumb, I feel a little chastened by all that pellmell speed in my life. I think I am only slow when it really matters.  I hope it will really matter more to me to be slow.  They say it is amazing to watch Thich Nhat Hanh move in the world.  I got a glimpse of that by walking behind Natalie in the workshop for ten minutes.  I tried to think of each foot as an anchor and to think of all the bones that ground me in each step.  I don’t know what it means to be dumb because I have spent my life aching to be smart.  But even that is not true altogether, because I have not had the luxury of others plowing the field of higher education before me.  I discovered on my own that people will tell you much more if you ask them how to do something (treat them like they are smart) rather than try to show them how smart you are.  I have called this being a “babe in the woods” and noticed how helpful people are if you humble yourself.  Buddhists call this beginner’s mind.  I think I have changed jobs every 4-8 years all my life because that way I got to have beginner’s mind again.

I stopped because the time was up.  If I were handwriting, I think I would have written a little more than that.  I will refrain from judging–and invite you to do the same! If we were in class, and I read this piece aloud, Natalie would ask what you recall.  If you said something like, “I was the first person in my family to go to college, too,”  Natalie would wave dismissively.  “Just the words.  What were the words?”  People might say things like high-heels.  And I could only assume my mother was living her own life over again, etc.  The writer learns quickly that the specific image is the one that lingers.  I did not have too many sensory-rich images in this piece, so it will not likely stick in your memory or mine.  However, I hope the illustration helped you see what happens in the workshop and imagine how valuable it can be to learn from direct experiences like these.  What it cannot do is replicate what happens to your mind when you practice writing every day.  Ironically, writing as fast as possible, trying to capture all the random thoughts as they come, is the key to becoming slow and dumb. Sounds like a koan?! 

What kind of writer are you?  Fast? Smart? Slow? Dumb?

I love the story, whether it be true or apocryphal, that Einstein saw himself riding on a beam of light before he was able to come up with the general theory of relativity.  I too see visions, or more frequently, read something or feel something, that shouts, “Pay attention.  This is what you are looking for!  This is a clue to the meaning of your existence.”  When this happens, I become alert as a beagle with a fresh scent.

My experience with writing has been extensive.  But almost all the writing I have done has been instrumental–writing to persuade, to inspire, to connect, to explain.  The Roman poet Horace said more than 2000 years ago that poetry’s purposes boil down to three words;  “utile et dulce,” usefulness and sweetness.  Today we might say instruction and entertainment.   Or ethical and beautiful.

Oscar Wilde and other aesthetes exult in “dulce” and scoff at “utile.”  Propagandists push “utile” and incarcerate “dulce.” Most modern literary writing values “dulce” most but has at least some “utile” motives, whether they are overtly acknowledged or not.

Robert Frost described the dream of making one’s vocation and avocation one and the same.  I have that same dream.  In some ways, I have been able to live that dream because I have been involved in two vocations–education and foundation leadership–that unite my values and strengths.  I sense that I am ready for a deeper kind of marriage between these two.

Ever since joining the Fetzer Institute four years ago, and then again before my 60th birthday last summer when I created this blog, I began to feel one of those strong intuitions about my vocation of leading people and programs that foster awareness of the power of love and forgiveness and my avocation of writing, including the kind of writing (literary memoir? blogging about memoir? teaching workshops about memoir?) that allows “dulce” to emerge yet maintains an important role for “utile.”

“What is the connection between memoir and love?”  This was the question that prompted my quest.  So often, when I frame the question clearly enough, some new gift of words or image floats into my hands or unto my screen.  This week, my answer came in the form of a poem of Wendell Berry’s in Wednesday’s Writer’s Almanac .

Thursday I told my colleagues, in program staff meeting, that I would be content to have this poem serve as my eulogy or even my epitaph.  Children, writing, and work–all of them came from the same nameless place of Love.  These Wendell Berry words about wordlessness stung me.  I recognized the tears of truth:

The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

The October 12 entry introduced me to Lester Dent, a writer I had never heard of before.  Here’s the text that caught my eye:

Scholars prefer particular research to universal generalizations such as Campbell makes, but no one has refuted the validity of the patterns he observed.

Entering contests was not at a new phenomenon for me either.  I identified with both the mother and her writer-daughter in the memoir, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio. My own mother loved contests and showed me how to send off for free things in the backs of magazines when I was growing up in the 1950′s.  Going to the mailbox was fun because a fat envelope might be lurking there.  I entered lots of contests and won more than my share of prizes–all with my mother’s encouragement, and sometimes, with her help.  A number of my most vivid memories focus on contests; my young imagination was fired by them.

My mother herself was a housewife “prizewinner”–someone who found scant opportunity to exercise her gifts of speaking, writing, acting, and making music as she laundered on Monday, ironed on Tuesday, cleaned on Wednesday, etc.  She loved reading stories and telling stories to her five children.  She even published a few feature articles and spoke in many churches.  She praised the stories and pictures we brought home from school.  In addition, she encouraged us to enter newspaper and magazine contests.  This eagerness to compete and to create has never left me.  The legacy it left in my life is a mixed one.  I have “won” many contests–4-H, the Bobst Award, admission to graduate school, grants, scholarships, various jobs, a presidential leadership award, etc.  However, it is hard to listen to the still, small voice of the spirit with the roar of the crowd in one’s head.  And it is easy to get attached to winning.  Like Sylvia Plath, I went into depression at one juncture of my life when I failed to win a fellowship I wanted badly.

At age 60, I am able to turn away from some contests, like nominations for prestigious jobs, even if I might win them.  This seems like spiritual progress to me.  To make such decisions well, I have to pause, meditate, seek counsel, and interrogate the greatest sources of wisdom I know.  If I don’t, I can still be addicted to my own adrenaline.

In the last two years I won memoir writing prizes in the Kalamazoo Gazette contest and also two other honorable mentions, the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and the Soul-Making Literary Competition in San Francisco.  These contests got me started.

I also entered a handful of other contests and did not win!

External recognition can be one of the signposts we look for when asking how to use our precious time and exercise our gifts in the world.  But it is not enough.  I desire to follow my heart and soul to deeper levels of reflection through reading and writing memoir–even if I never win another contest in my life.

I would never have thought of Max as a memoir writer had I not begun this blog.  Max has written three best-selling books on leadership and one on volunteer boards: 

Those books contain personal stories from his years of leading the Herman Miller furniture company, his family life, and his service on nonprofit boards.  They exude a rare combination:  confidence, authority, humility, and accountability.  Max lives his philosophy of leadership, best exemplified by the title of this book:  Leading Without Power:  Finding Hope in Serving Community.  Max has been generous with his time.  He was the first mentor in my life to ask me the kind of questions I described in my last post:  personal, ambiguous, and anxiety-producing.  I look forward to our infrequent one-on-one meetings because I will inevitably be surprised by one of his questions and ponder them long afterward.

Max has written one book that is evidently out of print now.  It is a memoir in the form of a letter to his granddaughter Zoe.  Called Dear Zoe, the book describes the Max’s love for the premature baby born to his daughter, a baby so tiny that her arm fit inside Max’s wedding ring.  Max helped Zoe cling to life by gently stroking her tiny body while talking to her.  A nurse in the hospital told him,  “She has to connect your voice to your touch.”

Max will be celebrating an important birthday in a few days.  I won’t tell you which one it is, but if you guess it by looking at this picture taken in August, you will guess too low. Max continues to connect his voice and his touch with his family and many friends.  My life has been immensely enriched by Max’s voice.  His questions echo in my mind.  His stories instruct my own.  His spirit inspires me to be a better person.

Happy Birthday, Max!