Why Write Memoir?
I have been working with people's life stories for most of my professional career. I began working with children and their families who were challenged by various developmental and neurological impairments, helping them find the path to improved communication skills. In time, I began writing about my experiences and found how language also helped me contextualize and heal my own wounds. I also began paying attention to my dream life and in my dreams found a new kind of language. I found the keys to interpreting my dreams in the works of Carl Jung, founder of Depth Psychology. Jung emphasized the psyche's thirst for images and archetypes, ways of presenting us wordless pictures and recurring patterns. I realized he had much to teach me in the realm of healing with words and stories.
Stories hold a strong attraction for us human beings. Perhaps beginning with stories we were read as children or the family stories which were repeated as we grew. Such stories both nourish the imagination and provide maps of the world in which we find ourselves. We make stories of our first loves, our workplaces, our wins and losses, our travels, our "a-ha" moments. Writing memoir has become an increasingly popular pastime because it offers an opportunity to capture a particular story by finding the words and getting them on paper.
When we read another's memoir, we are reassured because we find we are not alone in our experiences. When we write our own stories, we have a chance to both reflect and make meaning of the events of our lives. Memoir offers both the possibility of mirroring a life and the possibility of companioning a reader. It is a tool which offers the potential of powerful healing, personally and collectively.
I undertook the challenge of setting personal memory to paper in my late thirties. My writing was initially for my daughters; I wanted to give them the story of their motherline, stories about the women from whom they had emerged. I had felt the lack of these women's voices all my life, and I wanted to give them something to fill this silence. In the process of retrieving memories, I realized that I would have to begin with myself. I couldn't tell the stories of the women of my lineage with their voices; I would have to use my own words, tell my own stories, knowing the stories of the motherline would be in the background. I would have to hope they would emerge in the composition of my writing, that they would be the form from which my own stories emerged. I had a strong sense of wanting to break the cycle of forgetting. When stories are forgotten, they become ghostlike, unnameable. The act of forgetting tells a difficult story, leaving one to read those that are available like negative exposures from a photograph, not only for the reverse of the images but for what is simply not there. It requires us to read what the stories did not say, to piece together the context which created the silence. It is painstaking work, trying to locate the stories behind the no-stories. I have spent much of my life trying to get a glimpse of them to better understand myself. Through the vehicle of memoir I imagine making a gift, a visible portrait, to the ancestors, one that extends back to my mother and grandmothers and forward to my daughters and their daughters.
If you are interested in learning more about writing memoir, reading some selected portions of my recent work, Mnemosyne and the Muses as mythic templates, possible workshop dates, please view the buttons on the left of the screen.
