The primary metaphor in the book comes from the grinding mill, an archaic piece of machinery that for hundreds of years was essential in the transformation of grain into flour.  The longer the life, the more grist for the poet’s mill.  The fact that grinding produces a useful, even beautiful, product means that the poet employing this metaphor might be tempted into sentimentality.

But Helen takes a remarkably unsentimental, almost stoic, atttitude toward tragedy.  Understatement becomes her.  Her father’s death when she was a teenager could have been the subject of saccharine moralizing.  Instead, Helen uses the image of a new brown suit hanging in the closet to express all the pathos of that terrible moment.  Later, another poem about a dream she has in old age about her young father, closes when he says, “Come, I want you to meet some friends.”

Helen is not afraid to reveal her own feelings that would have been labeled selfishness or pride by many Mennonites.  Sometimes these admissions produce a smile on the reader’s face, and a reader who knows the poet can see the twinkle in her eye.  Take, for example, this ending to a poem about the old horse that the children sometimes hated because they wanted a young pony instead:

One November morning Aunt Lena called us for school

“Hurry,” she said, “there is a surprise downstairs.”

Please God, I begged, let it be a pony.

Dashing downstairs we found Grandmother

sitting in her low chair at the kitchen stove

holding a new baby–our brother.

At that moment we knew we would never get a pony.

Helen’s poems speak clearly about universal themes with very particular imagery.  They are memoirs–small particulars–pieces of grist, that the poet grinds in her mill.  I loved the tribute to Rayma Rawson, who taught English at Sterling (IL) High School and who “combed her dark hair almost over one eye./She wore red, red lipstick and a ring watch./I could have swooned when she gracefully/flung her hand into the air to check the time.”

Helen is a tall, graceful, even elegant woman.  This poem explains the mystery of how she became what she admired in that teacher–not only elegant, but literate, willing to take risks to live deeply.

Memoir teaches us that all lives are connected.  A woman like Helen who read, and taught, and edited, and traveled, and voiced her opinion, and wore long, flowing garments was essential to a younger woman like me who longed to do those very things–and more–yet still maintain the connection to roots and the land of ancestors.  I never knew Rayma Rawson, but she influenced me by influencing Helen.

As Helen reveals the spiritual and literary mentors who shaped her–Merton, Blake, Dickinson and many others I also love–I feel spacious and timeless.  But I feel this most when I also see and feel, through the power of imagery, the hard shell around a single grain of wheat–Helen’s answer to Whitman’s blade of grass.

A New Earth is not a memoir, although the author drops personal fragments into the narrative from time to time.  Hence, I will not review the book, but I want to reflect on the implications of some of Tolle’s theories about the ego for the telling of personal stories.

The memoir is all about “me, myself, and I, ” a fact that can only be avoided by adopting the third person, something Henry Adams did in The Education of Henry Adams, a classic memoir, and one of my favorites.  A few other writers have followed his example, describing themselves as though they are outside watching a life unfold instead of inside experiencing it.  In the hands of writers less graceful than Adams, this device can easily seem contrived, and while it avoids the arrogance of the “I,” it may also evade the intimacy of the deepest self-revelation.

Eckhart Tolle, like many other spiritual writers, talks about the ego as a false self.  Applying his ideas to the process of writing memoir, one might decide not to write a memoir at all for fear of retarding the process of spiritual growth from the nonessential into the essential self.  For Tolle, the ego is an illusion:  “What you usually refer to when you say ‘I’ is not who you are” (45).  The ego identifies itself through what Tolle calls form–external roles, titles, things.

Celebrity memoirs, almost by definition, focus on the external world and the rise from humble origins to fame.  They may be full of obstacles overcome and may reveal weaknesses such as addictions, but unless they are unusually reflective, they remain focused on the self that disappears when the footlights fade.

The book that taught me most about the essential self was not a memoir but a novel, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark.  This story, published in 1918, chronicles the rare narrative of the artist as a young woman.  The first half of the book is all about the dim beginnings of the birth of the essential self–the hints from childhood, the passion for life itself, the strong pulsing rhythm in the veins.  As her desire to be an artist emerges, the young protagonist, Thea Kronberg, knows she needs to leave her home, find a teacher, and test her talent in the great wide world.

She eventually becomes a famous opera singer through this route, but she only becomes a great one after travelling to the cliff dwellings of the Anazazi, the Ancient Ones of the Southwest.  There, amid another culture’s ruins, she senses her connection to all other artists and to the essence of her own self.  Cather tells us, “Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older.  She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much.  Nothing had ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the cliff.  Moonstone and Chicago had become vague.  Here everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood.  Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab.  And here she must throw this lumber away.  The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest.  Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer.  She felt united and strong.”

This passage, these words of epiphany among the cliff dwellings, have lived in my heart for over thirty years since I first read them.  Eckhart Tolle may explain what the ego is and why it needs to die.  But Willa Cather made me feel it.  Her words, almost a century old now, echo with the ring of truth.  This is the kind of truth I seek in memoir.  This is the kind of wisdom I crave for my life and writing.

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.

1. Begin with meditation.

2. Using examples from this book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs, we will break the ice by trying to describe our lives in six words.

3. We will then do three timed-writing life story exercises:

a. My life as a story of empowerment

b. My life as a story of tragedy, failure, victimhood

c. My life as a story of grace

4. We will conclude with gratitude for the pied beauty of our lives and for the opportunity to learn together.

The basic structure of this one-afternoon event came from Marilyn Chandler McEntyre who wrote an essay called “Growing in Grace” in Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life. Marilyn has taught courses on spiritual autobiography to both undergraduates and adults for many years. “I have nothing to give that was not a gift to me,” she says.

When we recognize our endebtedness to others and to God, we fill up with abundant wisdom and grace to give, keeping the cycle of growth alive.