Voice and Place: A Resonant Connection

These mountains in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia are teaching me about voice. The picture on the left  represents a small slice of the panoramic view we first saw from the window of our new house when we were seeking a place to call home. The mountains and farmland called us and we came.

Just like the African tradition of call-and-response in music, places call to writers, and writers respond in many ways. They can paint places in words through descriptive word choice and rhythmic phrasing, for example, evoking passionate feeling or quiet wonder, naming the uniqueness of one particular place.

Resonance is usually thought of as a scientific term, but it serves as a beautiful metaphor for how place can connect writers and readers to special physical spaces, making them sacred, and enlarging the little world of the individual. Some places resonate more with some bodies and spirits than other places. Water, woods, sky, desert, flora, fauna–all can be beautiful or overwhelming; they mean different things to different people.

Places can be both familiar and exotic, and both experiences hold sacred potential. “There is no Frigate like a Book,” said Emily Dickinson, “to take us Lands away.” If you love to go “Lands away” through reading books and surfing the internet, I recommend the Powers of Place Initiative which celebrates the sacredness of spaces all around the world. Their newsletter, Perspectives, contains a wonderful essay called “Ordinary Places, Sacred Spaces” by Tom Callanan. Sheryl Erickson directs the project with the help of the Fetzer Institute. I asked Sheryl the following question, and she responded below.

Shirley: I’m interested in how voice and place resonate with each other. Do you have any thoughts?

Sheryl: “This really is a good question … not to be taken superficially or answered without listening for an inner guidance and response.

I have not thought about the question before, but in sitting with it the past few days, what keeps coming to mind is a concept I am trying to understand that comes from Maggie Moore Alexander, the wife of Christopher [Alexander, noted architect]. She has spoken of reaching a state of “correspondence” in which the inner authentic Self is resonant with the external situation, the physical tangible energetic surround. By the way I have described it, you can probably see that I am just learning what Maggie’s concept means intellectually, but I feel I know it in my body and below consciousness.  Perhaps what could be described as resonance is a coming-into-oneness or communion of inner true voice and Place. They BELONG together, BELONG being the key word.”

The Powers of Place Initiative offers a wonderful opportunity to memoir writers–a place on the website to publish short essays about the role of place in your life. Check it out! It’s easy to sign up and then offer your work to an active community–a good place to belong!

When you read a memoir, do you think about the place (otherwise known as the setting) of the story? Have you ever felt that the place was like a character in shaping your own life or the lives you read about in memoir? Stories would be a wonderful way to comment!

Connecting Voice to Touch: What I Learned About Writing from Max DePree

“Find your own voice,” say the writing experts.

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 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?

Finding Voice: Part One

Once, when I was a young professor asked to speak in the Goshen College Afternoon Sabbatical lecture series, I was helped by an unexpected source–my five-year-old son Anthony. We had just returned from nine months in Haiti, where our family had led two groups of college students in a wonderful deep learning experience–an international service-learning program called the Study Service Term.

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.

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:

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?

Top 100 Memoirs: Which Ones are Essential?

Embarrassing story:  When I was a newbie grad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I turned in a review of a book that my professor did not recognize.  He asked me why I chose this book to review.  I responded, “Because it was on my shelf.” He looked horrified.

As Paul Newman might say, “This was a failure to communicate.” I thought I was bringing the value of simplicity and economy to the process.  My professor saw only shoddy thinking or academic sloth.

I named this blog 100 memoirs because of the advice given by Heather Sellers in Chapter by Chapter to read 100 books in the genre you aspire to. I have several thousand books in my basement library, collected over many years of being an English professor and avid reader.  I knew I had read 50-100 autobiographies and biographies. But I began buying new ones.  My future daughter-in-law works in the publishing industry, so new memoir began pouring in. Thanks, Chelsea!

So the question now is.  Which ones are best?  If reading forms the mind, and if reading takes precious time, then surely one wants to read the best 100 memoirs and not just 100 memoirs!?

When a form becomes popular enough long enough, a canon emerges. That may be happening in the memoir genre right now.  Perhaps you and I can contribute to that process by defining what we admire most and selecting memoirs that fit those criteria.  Or, we could flip the process by naming the books and then describing what makes them great. More and more courses are being taught about autobiography and memoir. Professors are creating reading lists and these eventually become the canon.

The beautiful sentences contest taught me that asking for the best without describing the criteria can produce frustration.  So let’s start with criteria.

I will throw out one criterion and give an example. Then I hope you will follow with your own examples or another criterion.

Criterion:  Authentic voice.  Agents and publishers love this word. And I do too. Voice on the surface looks like personality.  For example, Julia Childs’ memoir of her years in Paris and America as she built her career sounds just like her distinctive voice on the air–a little breathless and patrician without sounding pedantic.

Haven Kimmel’s voice in her breakthrough memoir Zippy is down home and mystical and amused (therefore amusing).

Classic memoirs earn their status in part because of the unique voice of the author. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, for example, takes you far, fast. You move with him through the quotidian details of the day with energy.  When he is hungry, his readers are also. He gets you to the destination rapidly, but your senses are more alive than if you had lingered for hours on the path.

Natalie Goldberg’s newest book on memoir contains a list of her favorite memoirs at the end.  Some Amazon reviewers have made lists of their best ones.  I would like to create my own here. But I need your help. I may also need Anthony’s help with the technology.  I think I need a list on the home page of this website. That way, readers can see it emerge.  There are books I reviewed in the blog that I would not put on the list of 100 best. And there are many on other people’s lists that I have not yet read.  There are also lots of books I have read but not reviewed.

Are such lists helpful to you? Would you like to see a list on the home page?

Is authentic voice a useful criterion for selecting high quality memoir?

What one memoir (or other book)  stands out for you because of the voice of the author?

You Can Go Home Again–A Mini-Memoir

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, likes to call itself the Garden Spot of the World.  If you travel to Lancaster in the springtime, you understand.  The greens penetrate deeper than the human eye can see, and the earth, well, it’s as soft and receptive as any coquette and more fertile than a hutch full of rabbits.

I love going back to the land, walking along the creek where I used to play as a child, and thinking about all the ancestors who are buried on the hill behind my mother’s house.

Last Tuesday Stuart and I went home to celebrate Easter with my mother and three of my siblings, and two of my neices and nephews who live there.  If you have been reading this blog, you know that I planned to read the essay I wrote called “My Mother’s Pulpit” to my mother.  I hoped that she would be honored, but I wasn’t sure how she would react.

Would she be upset, offended that I had not consulted with her before sending in the essay?

Or would she be delighted to find my story about her voice in print?

It wasn’t easy to read about my embarrassment when Mother prayed at my inauguration in 1997 or about how I distanced myself as a teenager and young adult from my mother’s powerful example as a woman leader.  But it was the truth as I lived it, and truth is strong medicine for fear.

Mother interrupted the beginning several times to deny that she had ever said those things in her prayer.  I just smiled and nodded and my sister affirmed my memory, and we plunged on, laughing. I relaxed after that, hoping that Mother would be able to hear the love in the essay even when it was mixed up with my insecurities and judgments.

I have always trusted my mother’s love, and, one more time, she came through with love rather than resentment or pique.

The first hearing of an essay is never enough–especially when it is about you!  So the next day, Mother and I talked about it again.  She wondered what it was about the writing that won the contest.  I loved that question because it shows how eager my mother is to learn, even at age 82.  We talked about phrases and metaphors, and she picked out lines she thought were strong.  I read the essay again into a recorder at the request of my niece Joy, who wants to make a CD.  Mother clapped.

She also wore her Goshen College Mom sweatshirt and Stuart took our pictures.

I’m so glad that Mother forgave me for sharing my impious thoughts.  And I rejoice that she welcomed me home as always–and that she wants me to return.

What makes Lancaster County soil so extraordinarily fertile, my father once told me, is limestone.  My mother’s house is made from stones taken from the barn on our farm, built in the 1720′s, and built to last. The picture above taken of Mother and me on her front porch illustrates how limestone combines beauty and strength in construction.  The front yard contains another great and uncut lime stone salvaged from the ancestral land.

Limestones, flowers, oaks, sycamores, willows, creek–these were forces that forged my imagination as a child.  The wind that blew strongest through me, from the beginning to this very moment, is my mother’s voice.  She would want you to know that the voice that blows through both of us is a Voice without beginning and without end, the voice beyond language that we nevertheless call Holy Spirit.

Max DePree, Leader, Mentor, Memoirist

A few weeks ago, my husband Stuart and I traveled to the “west coast” of Michigan, first to Saugatuck, where we had a lovely visit on a rainy day to the Wickwood Inn, and then to Holland, where Stuart explored the downtown and I visited Max DePree, the man who has been my mentor for more than a decade.

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!