The Memoir Project: Marion Roach Smith’s Video Book Marketing

One of my friends, Susan Neufeldt, whom I met at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference years ago and who is writing her own book about wisdom, sent me a link to the NPR program that featured Marion Roach Smith, an author and teacher in the memoir field I had not heard of a week ago. Her brand new book The Memoir Project is getting lots of media attention.

What makes her book different from all the others? Take a clue from the subtitle: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing and Life.  Like many successful authors, Smith challenges conventional wisdom: for example, throw away the morning pages and the writing prompts. This advice might come as a shock to fans of Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg.

I haven’t read the book yet, so this is not a review. My focus today is Smith’s outstanding use of video to promote her book. Take a few minutes to watch both the book promo video and the “homemade” family story below. Then offer your comments below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpNgltJnw1Y&w=640&h=390]

Did you love the idea of Galileo in a box store above? Now listen to a “thoroughly non-standardized” metaphor for marriage below. Enjoy the laughter and see how sophisticated a simple video can be.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5yjwOJeyTg&w=640&h=390]

When you buy a new book, do you usually watch the video about the book? Have you made your own videos? What advice to writers do you have concerning video? Did viewing these samples and/or listening to Marion Roach Smith on NPR through the link above make you want to read her book?

Mary Karr’s Secret–Humility and Confidence–Interview in the Paris Review

Mary Karr has done it again. Maybe I should say that Amanda Fortini has done it–meaning that the interview Fortini published in The Paris Review with Karr as a subject is wonderful. If you haven’t read any of Karr’s poetry or her three memoirs, you will want to do so after reading the interview. If you have read lots of Karr, you will find the interview doubly gratifying. It will fill in some cracks for you in her published memories.

Karr comes across as both totally honest in her colorfully Texan way and also as a bit reticent. Her new-found faith in God has transformed the way she writes. She prays before she writes each day. Ironically, this submission to God’s will in writing also strengthens her joy as she reports on her latest triumphs in the literary world. She would sound like a braggart online if she were only speaking from the ego. Instead, she is cheerleading for the “team”–God the Author, herself as author, and her readers as community.

On Facebook (you can sign up to be a fan here) she loves to share her triumphs with her fans. On Twitter (you can follow here) her inimitable voice comes through as well (check out her August tweets).

One of the most frequently visited posts among the 215 archived here is the Top Ten List (it’s really eleven) from another interview Mary gave on NPR. My review of her latest memoir Lit is here. If you aspire to greatness in memoir, you will want to read all these books plus Mary’s own. I’m still working on the list myself.

What do you find most attractive about Mary, the Paris Review interview, the Facebook and Twitter pages, or the Top Ten List? Fans and critics are both welcome here!

A Perfect September Day

What is more beautiful than a day in September? Today the answer was, “nothing!”

I am looking out the window in my office right now as the sun is setting in the west, lighting up the weeping willow tree that has doubled in size since we planted it three years ago. Straight ahead, the last roses of summer are blooming, adding a splash of red to the landscape. Along the flagstone path to the rose arbor, pink sedum flowers wave on long stems next to the Autumn Flame Red Maple tree.

Of course, I think of Keats’ “To Autumn”

John Keats (1795-1821)

TO AUTUMN.

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I’m listening to these same autumn sounds, thousands of miles and almost 200 years since Keats wrote these words. And I am remembering a perfect day.

The day began without benefit of alarm clock–at 8:30 a.m. After a light breakfast, Stuart and I drove to get our flu shots at the doctor’s office. No charge–covered by insurance. Then to Starbucks for a seasonal treat–Pumpkin Spice Latte and a copy of The New York Times. The sun inspired us to take our bikes to the Kal-Haven trail and ride to Gobels 13.1 miles away, eat at late lunch at our favorite spot, Jan’s Trailside Cafe, and then ride home again. The picture above was taken along the way. Here are a few more:

Stuart ordered “goulash” for lunch. I had a bowl of homemade ham and bean soup–excellent. We discussed whether the shape of pasta (such as the macaroni in his goulash) made a difference in the taste. Tonight on NPR we got the answer, “Yes, indeed.” Here’s the delightful All Things Considered segment describing the new book called The Geometry of Pasta, studded with fascinating facts (did you know that tortellini’s shape was inspired by Venus’ navel?) and lovely drawings.

Today allowed us many kinds of conversation, good use of our muscles, silence, revery, meditation, dreaming, good food, a chance connection with other bikers on the trail, sunshine, ripeness to observe in nature–harvest time, and above all, gratitude for all of the above and more.

We are so blessed by love and health, community and solitude, good books, good friends, family, our faith, and dreams for the future. But today was all about the present moment. We lived all 86,400 seconds in this one wild and precious day.

What does your perfect day look like? If you haven’t had one lately, describe it here; then go make it happen. Come back again and tell us what mischief you made.

Who’s Being Bagged–Alexandra Penney or the Buyers of Her Memoir?

Remember when we looked at one of the casualties of the Bernie Madoff scandal–artist and blogger Alexandra Penney who got a book deal to tell her story? Here’s the blog post from February 12, 2009 catalogued under the catagory “memoir in the news.”

Just one year later, the book is not only written but published, and today NPR did a feature on the author, including an excerpt from the book.

The comments are highly critical of NPR for “shilling” for a writer who seems to evoke little sympathy for her small misfortunes compared to the truly indigent women she compares herself to. She may fear being turned into a “bag lady,” but in reality, she came nowhere close to that fate. I read the excerpt on the NPR page and decided not to buy the book.

What do you think? Who is the audience for a book like this? Do you expect it to succeed or fail? Commenters on the NPR website were disgusted that NPR ran the story. Are you?

Listen to Six-Word Memoirs on NPR

Want to hear people from all over the country call in their life stories in six words? It’s a pretty good way to spend 17 minutes! Just click here.

Mary Karr’s Lit: A Monumental Achievement

The key to writing a great memoir is seducing the reader to fall in love with you. After reading first The Liars’ Club and now Lit, I am totally smitten. I have Karr’s second memoir Cherry on my shelf and will need to read it also.

Lit is the story of a girl from Texas whose hard-drinking father worked in the oil fields and whose psychotic mother aspired to art. She grew up to be a poet, wife, mother, divorcee, alcoholic, and best-selling memoirist. Lit is a humdinger of a story told the way a sharpshooter and straight talker from Texas would serve it up. You can read so many other reviews of this book that I will simply provide the link to the publisher’s website for a sampling of the overwhelming, well-deserved praise larded on by reviewers.

Karr can tell a good poem by the way it makes her feel. I judge memoirs in much the same way. Then I try to rummage around in my mind to define what quality is after it hits me between the eyes. What makes Lit better than most other memoirs?  Above all there is the author herself, whose voice trembles and resounds inside a steel echo chamber full of opposites–vulnerable/fiesty, earthy/spiritual, loving/selfish. Karr is a complicated human being who respects herself and all who have come into her life. She believes in evil, both the evil in the world and in herself. Since her mother tried to stab her with a knife , her father fell off a bar stool in the VFW, and her blueblood husband withdrew into a separate world before they divorced–a small sampling of pain in her life–Karr could have written the standard “misery memoir.” But she didn’t. Nor did she write a sentimental salvation story. Instead she carved out of her own life a set of stories rich and unique enough to revisit in three books. No wonder she attracts a larger readership every time–the by-now-familiar story keeps getting more interesting. 

Some people make lemonade out of lemons. Mary Karr makes Lemon Marscapone Layer Cake. The layers include motherhood, daughterhood, education, addiction, recovery, poverty, sexuality, spirituality and God. In addition to plot, Karr carefully layers musings on memory, submerged literary theory, and theology. For my taste, she worries aloud too much about how a secular audience will respond to her conversion to Catholicism. However, after reading the hostile comments to Terry Gross’s interview of Karr on NPR, I understand the worry. Wow.

I love Mary Karr for caring about how friends and family remember the same stories and for her decision to share relevant sections of the manuscript to them before publication. She sometimes changed things in response to these vettings and sometimes just noted  in the text itself the fact that her sister remembers something differently. This is another part of the layering of the story. Karr cares about other people out of sensitivity to their feelings, but she also demonstrates in doing so that a memoir that questions the accuracy of the memory that created it will be trusted more than one that does not. I quoted Karr at the end of my review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress saying that if the antagonist of your story is not you, you haven’t gone deep enough. Karr threw out several versions of this latest memoir before turning it over to her editors. My guess that she did so, in part, because she kept peeling back new layers of her what she calls her sinful soul.

Mary Karr was a poet before she became a memoir writer. In a podcast interview with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, she admits that she wrote memoir for money, but she also turned down a juicy book contract when she did not feel ready to write. This book took seven years to write. Each word seems to flow effortlessly, and Mary Karr and her editors worked very hard to make it look so easy. Part way through the writing, Karr lost confidence in her writing, like many great writers do. Poet laureate Robert Hass told her, after she confessed to him that she was afraid that she had written a bad book, that she should focus on writing some good sentences. She surely succeeded. Here are just a few poetic passages that left me in awe:

“The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me–actual branches in my body.”

“For the first time in days, inside a rank plastic shower curtain flowering with mildew, water poured over me. And it was in the shower that the acid kicked in — not full bore, just enough to keep me holding myself very still. The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke.”

“Those of you who’ve never prayed before will cackle like crows and scoff at the change I claim has overtaken me. But the focus of my attention has been yanked from the pinballing in my head to south of my neck, where some solidity holds me together.”

And the conclusion: “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back which can galvanize you like steel and make resilient what had heretofore only been soft flesh. (Dev, you gave me that.) It can start you singing as the lion pads over to you, its jaws hinging open, its hot breath on you. Even unto death.”

What one falls in love with, after listening to this voice, may not be the person Mary Karr at all. What we love is the force itself and the song it evokes even unto death, driving Mary, her mother, her father, her ex-husband, her sister, her saintly professor from the midwest college, her fellow recovering addicts–the whole cast of characters–to the lion with the hot breath. C.S. Lewis depicted God as a lion and Francis Thompson imagined God as the hound of heaven. That former cynic and skeptic Mary Karr can bring this force to our attention in the twenty-first century, and do so without schmaltz or irony, makes me too want to shout and sing.

Ben Yagoda on NPR: Great Overview of Memoir History

Two days ago I posted an NPR story summary with my own slant on it. It got picked up on www.expectingrain.com and reached hundreds of viewers, instantly becoming my most viewed post. That was exciting. Thanks, Expectingrain.com!

Come to think of it, NPR stories on the arts almost always fascinate me, and I can tell I am not alone. I am one of those people who sit in the garage in the cold after turning off the engine but not the radio–I want to hear the story to the very end.

So, of course, I loved it when Ben Yagoda’s new book got 29 minutes of NPR Talk of the Nation airtime on Dec. 24. Even though I was not listening at the time, I found the story in my Google Reader, and now share it with you.  I am reading the book on my Kindle and will review it in a few days or weeks. Have a more scholarly review to write now that is taking some time. In the meantime, enjoy this segment on your own by clicking on this link!