My surfer riding a wave at dawn with a full moon on the horizon picture below doesn't really capture the excitement conveyed in Deep Adventure, for either God or surfing, but it has a certain awe about it that can lead you there. The awe is part of the emotional connection the writer shares with the reader about life and experience

I received a copy of "Deep Adventure" one night while I was working at the Holy Name of Jesus gift store after mass. Bear Woznick walked in, offered a few books free to readers and chatted with the manager and walked out. I don't usually make a practice of reading religious books, despite being Catholic, but I couldn't quite resist reading when the opening page had a woman about to crash into rocks while riding a surfboard in Hawaii. 

I never ever considered getting on a surfboard especially in the huge waves I saw near Waimea Falls Park, before we entered on the island of Honolulu. I saw people surfing there that day and was frightened for them. Bear Woznick's book talks about fear, self sacrifice, and the seven virtues of faith, love, hope, prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. His personal memoir sharing his experiences while surfing help illustrate what these virtues mean in life. 

Bear Woznick's Ministry helps to connect people to a life that is rich with experience and offers counseling about what it can mean to a person's life. It speaks of the call to heroic virtue which most people never aspire to but those that work in life saving or medicine or as police officers or firemen, that call may come daily or show up unexpectedly.

The video above is one of the examples he raises in the book, a tale about how partners train together in tandem surfing. When I started reading "The Way of Heroic Virtue", the first chapter, I felt it had a Buddhist or zen quality. I found the book to be an easy read because the next chapters pass a tale along, fleshing it out, while also sharing other tales. It was a tale of saving beginners and was tense and exciting because the potential for them to all die was close at hand. This tension made the book a real page turner.

For memoir writers, this book offers a good example of how to organize your book and how to scope it. The organization of the book is by topic, with the seven virtue providing the section structure and an opening an closing sections. The scope of the book is one fateful story with an exciting plot of a disaster about to happen, beginning when he recognized the problem and ending when the problem was resolved. The sections offer many smaller stories in addition, full of rich description in the chapter headings like collapsed parachute and wrestling with God. 

Overall, I found the book to be wise in explaining Christian virtues. Bear Woznick has other books he's written, along with a series of videos of his ministry. He's an unusual person that offers a role model that Christians can find compelling.

The news from the two editors, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman, concerning my manuscript post graduation workshop was that I still needed to do work. My classmates agreed. I had narrowed down the manuscript to events in my brother's life but had followed previous advice to remove my own story.

Memoir is intended to be the view the narrator, myself looking back, has about events in life. I had argued vehemently that I needed to have my story told as part of the memoir; my mentors insisted that I not do so. I was pretty upset to have been given one set of advice then had it revoked with my own advice restated in their terms. It didn't matter much, I graduated and everyone agreed I wrote my thesis. The final product though has required quiet contemplation, rewrite of the story about me I wanted included (so it was just as well to step out of the way for awhile), and extensive cutting, the old cut a third, then cut once again. My husband helped provide the final proof check edit so it's pretty much in positively improved shape now.

One of the biggest sources of rewrites came down to finding places where I spent too much time telling the story and rewriting them to show the story. A secondary source of improvement was melding the story jumps from time to time and place to place as seamlessly as possible. I also made the table of contents much more complicated then simplified it.

So now I have been attending conferences while seeking publication of my work, this year I went to four:

• Association of Writing Programs in Los Angeles, CA for the first time
• Palm Beach Poetry Festival, in Delray Beach, FL for the first time
  
• Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference, in Seattle, WA maybe my fifth time or more
  
• Williamette Writer's Conference, in Portland, OR I think for the third time
  

What I look for at a conference is:

• to connect with others and reconnect with people, especially my family
• new information that can help my writing career
• chances to learn about writing I might like and buy books
• chances to meet agents and editors.

​I feel like a turtle, just slowly coming out of my shell.

What I noticed about Leila Philip's A Family Place at first was how appealing the start of the book was, with the narrative voice speaking with love and concern about her father. She was able to establish an immediate connection with me because while she worried about her father and his emphysema from the years he spend smoking cigarettes and the chemicals used in farming, I too had worried about my father, his years of spraying paint and smoking and how it lead to congenital heart disease. When she conveyed her emotions I also connected via my own.

Next, her concern about the apples in the family orchard's returned me to our many family trips to pick cherries in Yakima. The picture below is a flowering cherry, much easier to take care of and very beautiful and more suited to urban Northwest life.

Leila Philip has a picture of a family mansion on the front of her memoir, and throughout her memoir she proceeds to convey how much it costs to maintain such a home and the lands that support her family, while barely keeping ahead of the bills. When I moved to Florida, I had told Bob, oh, you only bought me a two pillar mansion. A mansion isn't a real mansion unless it has ten or more pillars, so I proceeded to add them in metaphorical means (four lovely palm trees) rather than adding to the space I would have to clean.

I guess, in some sense, we all feel defensive about our lives, wanting to prove to others that what they laugh and ridicule us about isn't true and that shows up in memoir in a variety of ways. Leila Philip's turns her mouldering old family history into family connection and into pride in her family's accomplishments, especially her mother's as she moves her farmlands into using more natural means for protecting the crops.

Another feature that shows up in her memoir is the search through family history and a connection to someone else who shares her interest in who the founders of the property and orchards are. I have an interest in history but I find the scenes where she is working in the fields much more compelling, perhaps because I like to escape my chair.

We just finished reading the Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway as part of my MFA Program at Ashland University in Creative Nonfiction. I didn't really know what to expect when reading this book, the title is quite unusual. With a copyright of 1942, I would have thought Hathaway's writing would be more well known. Despite having completed my reading list of 50 memoirs, (I'm still working on writing up reviews and analyzing the books), I feel that I have a very light understanding of the genre compared to reading fiction or more classic resources in history or science nonfiction or text books. Feminist Press, which republished the Little Locksmith, was founded in 1970 and the Little Locksmith was one of their first publications, probably due to the less traditional lifestyle the author embraced in her later life. When she was five years old, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis spondalitis, a disease that affects the bones and prevents growth and also causes curvature of the spine. So for ten years, the doctors kept her strapped to a board in bed.

First to note about this book is despite the affliction that affected her body, her books is full of light and joy and uncommon wisdom. One example of uncommon wisdom found in The Little Locksmith by Katherine Butler Hathaway that I liked is “When they first came there the Goodwins’ love of the place had expressed itself in certain spontaneous, happy adventures which later grew into a ritual, which became increasingly important with the passage of time, because, by linking each new summer with all that were gone, it brought the past, happy years back again [1, p.96].”

It’s rather a long term view observed over two summers but it holds the essence of how family traditions are composed rather than the standard holidays one normally thinks as being about family tradition. When I first dealt with divorced marriage within my family, both from my sisters and my new husband’s family, everyone desire tradition but the one day was seldom lengthy enough to eat all the meals and be in all the places. New traditions are what you put into them in the form of love, enjoyment, special places.

I connect some of her uncommon wisdom’s with my own writing, for example, “I decided that I would be a writer, and I determined to be the kind of writer, like Flaubert, … I would never risk again any sort of disappointment. Personal obscurity and infinite patience and infinite devotion were to be my program. [p. 5]”

With regard to patience,  I early on bought into the idea that it would take enough years to produce enough product to be publishable, especially after I researched popular authors and found that their fourth or fifth or sometimes their ninth book was the first published. My patience wanes however, if my personal space is infringed upon, because that is all I have.

With regard to personal devotion, I learned early that it took many revisions and as such I created ways to save time, like never editing first drafts since I often threw 2/3’s away. Why edit what needed to be written in order to get to the heart of the message, a mere sentence or two?

With regard to obscurity and solitude, the quote above both fits me and doesn’t fit me. I have always been a sort of obscure person, so much of what Hathaway says about herself and her desire to work alone fits my personality well. Many days go by when I speak but four or five sentences to my husband and never see anyone else. However, I also recognized early on that we live in a different world, a social media world, and I have found that being a hermit entirely often brings upon you the sort of mental illness documented in a book on homelessness, how lack of conversation makes you funny and that constant worry makes one paranoid [2, p.104-106]. So I know that taking the time to make contact, in person and on the network is important, and do so regularly and it usually improves my mood to do so.

Also, early on, I looked at the technology needed by popular writers and since I had the skills and the time, I decided to put them together right away. One poet I met felt that claiming to be a poet was bad policy and lacked humbleness, however, he spoke of famous poets, poets who would be acclaimed a poet laureates, while I used the term merely as a activity I performed. This differing view of the older generation humility clashing with a younger, more network savvy population is one that must be ignored because there is no fix, other than the reviews, connections, publications and prizes one receives as a mature writer is easily spotted on a search, which most network savvy people do on a regular basis.

Katharine Butler Hathaway’s style of dialogue is very sparse, probably due to her imposed lifestyle of solitude. Writing alone in a room by herself, protected her, and led to a strong personal voice that comes out as interior dialogue, such as “And it really was an island. The things that happened there made a period that was complete in itself, and so separate from the rest of my life that it was almost unrecognizable as mine. It was a period that seemed unreal and half enchanted, because it was so foreign to me and to everything that I had thought and been before. It floated like an island in the rest of my life [1, p.2].” Her other use of dialogue is very sparse consisting of only a few lines here and there and they amount, quite poignantly, to the things she most wanted to hear, such as the line, “I heard my brother say, “Sometimes I wish you were not my sister[1, p.52].”

Her use of senses in writing her experience is always good, such as “Being young, we had just discovered the wonderful charm of night, night away from houses, night moving along country roads, noiseless silken wood roads, black bumpy roads of pastures and farms, and the soft, misty, sweet-smelling roads with old wooden bridges where we stopped to listen to the gentle Ipswich River[1, 51]. However, this is just a fraction of what she writes when she obtains her first passion, a home in Maine, which she describes painstakingly, but with rich enticing language, in Chapter 18 as well as many that lead up and follow that chapter. Her love comes out strongly in every detail even years later recalling the pattern of the flooring, a spider consuming a moth, her writing room, the neighbors’ homes and the general scenery, including a beautifully suggestive memory, “that brilliant coast and its luscious warm winter sun shining on snow-covered harbors and deep-blue rivers and on little purple wooded islands with rims of crumpled silver [1, p.74].”

Her first relationship is with her brother and she finds acceptance, love and what she values mental thought and creativity including “THUS the natural craving to love and to be loved turned itself into something else and found its miracle of satisfaction in my poetry and his praise, and it seemed to me that we were everything to each other [1, 60-61]" And through the eyes of her brother’s friends, both women and men, she also near heartbreaks as she comes to realize how she differs but also spins it positively, “They might have their secret knowledge of the art of silliness that was beyond my understanding, but I felt in myself the secret knowledge or instinct that makes life a wonder and a miracle [1, 66-7].”

But while she discusses some of her relationships, the focus of her writing is deeply inward looking, examining her choices, her beliefs and the events in her life.

Katherine Butler Hathaway uses a wonderful image of an island in the palm of her hand, “But it looks to me, and that is enough for me, as if it meant that a quiet respectable fate were suddenly going to explode in the middle of life into something entirely new and strange, and then be folded together again and go on as quietly as it began [1, p. 1]”. She plays with the meaning of an island in the first chapter as a time and a place and a state of magical passion and as a change in her overall direction and I feel that initial wordplay initiates the reader into her thought processes.

When she reaches her island, which she views as the time when she first purchased a home, until then, she has wanted love, wanted to be as needed and wanted as any other young woman, but believed that due to her physical attributes no one would ever consider it. She has wanted to write well, but had a loss that conveyed that it wouldn’t happen. She had tried independence but ended up back at home but not the home of her happy youth.

The metaphor worked at first and when we get to the town of Castine and her new home, that metaphor is very much distant, almost forgotten. The reality of Castine’s location is an island. Much later we learn, she is only there for a short time, that she discovers passion through a relationship, and her whole point of view about herself, “I changed from being a trifling, detached summer boarder in that town into being one of its citizens with a house and land belonging to me” has become much larger and much different from a wallflower untouched by passion. Her writing also has changed, from hurried and of the moment to being a statement about life. I think the metaphor of waiting for the island to arrive provides her the invitation to write about her life, specifically to this moment, but the metaphor has died, in a sense, because life does not go on as before, it has permanently changed her and I don’t think she fully realized this at the start.

In my own life, I also had many of the circumstances that led to her island and also have found an island of my own but it comes more in the form of my relationship with my husband. After the initial burst of energy following my first book, where I tried to meet every deadline that I could but often failed, I have found it much easier to slow down and focus on my project of the moment and Florida is conducive to that slower pace. I want to still meet those other deadlines, but I still find, as then, that I want to write a piece and have it fit the market because the time necessary to develop it the way I want to is longer than given by a call for content. I like the calls for content because they still nag at me about the possibility for ways I can use my skills to effect, opening my mind to other ideas.

There are specific places that make me feel comfortable enough to write. I found my new office doesn’t work because it is too cold and too dark and I wish to see out the windows a beautiful tropic garden of peace lilies, ferns, blue onions, maybe a chain tree, full of color, sound and animals that make it restful to unwind my speeding thoughts.

Florida is harder for me that Seattle because I loved the beauty there—I could look up anytime and see the blue line of Cascade mountains in their peaceful glory, framed by doug firs and sometimes haloed by golden maple leaves. I have to look small in Florida because so much of the frame is palms and so must notice what goes on beneath every leaf or crawling down the sand in the silence.

I have found some of my passions in life, and like Hathaway, go from one to the next. I do find myself finding fulfillment in the world of ideas, too, I always have but unlike Hathaway, I don’t like boundaries very much, their presence tends to want to trap me where I like the wide open spaces, which perhaps I picked up from all those long trips to North and South Dakota my family took and the drive’s wide far reaching spaces and uncluttered sky and the sun seems to go on forever. I have the Westerner’s view of freedom associated with space constraints.

Her method of writing took a look at the words in her life, including her name and took it’s meaning to find a way to create a self-image as her inner joy as she puts it, “I had been told that my name, Katharine, meant crystal, clear— from a Greek word, katharsis. And I felt inside myself, as part of me, a crystal quality, a sort of happiness that was like a spring always bubbling fresh and new[1, p.24].” But then she took her self-image from other people’s reactions, never questioning what their reactions really meant.  Sounds and creative art projects had more power than words, “we might enjoy to the full our queer annual rapture of hearing over and over the slow rise and fall of the Salem crickets’ trill [1, p.30]” rather than conversation, but later, she had learned to snip and cut and listen which is from my experience valuable for a poet.

She describes her family as being thoughtful in challenging ideas but not in communicating emotions, for example, “I grew up in a family where a certain kind of intimate personal emotion was all so carefully hidden that it sounded to me when I heard it like a foreign language, while at the same time that it shocked and frightened me it sounded more familiar and more real than anything I had ever heard before [1, p. 52-3]”. From her mother, she valued fiery passion but learned to hide whatever she meant to feel and to feel inarticulate. I think she ended up feeling like all of her desires were much like her mother’s and then assumed many things about her body that weren’t true and didn’t really know how to communicate what she felt.

Her early expression of independence came in the form of rebellions of various kinds. When Hathaway is finally allowed out of her bed and comes to realize she can share conversations with her brother, she says, “I seemed to feel a fierce revenge against my bed and my invalid life, and especially against the bright little girl who had accepted it all so sweetly and submissively. I suddenly hated my adorable microscopic world[1, p.43].” Her physical restraint, tying a weight to her bed while her back was held still, meant her world was really small, confined to her bed and what little she could learn from there and with it, she learned fear of larger concepts. But freed of those physical constraints, her intellectual and emotional rebellion still held inside, allowed her to grasp onto more subject matters and challenge was she believed her beliefs, feelings and ideas should be.

She contrasts with her friend Mary Goodwin, whose rebellion is outward, against societal forces, appearing to Hathaway, as “an uneasy child who does not understand his own uneasiness; and she expressed it like a child by willfully annoying and shocking the conventional people around her [1, p. 90-91].” Mrs. Goodwin, in contrast, runs her household to put everyone at ease by ensuring that everything was prepared, made special or directed toward some purpose. It’s the restraint of good management and of tradition.

I think surprisingly, her earlier physical restraint taught her the purpose of boundaries and fed her creativity because she learned to value making something out of nothing, and the way that “asceticism is to free creative energy, and its function, like that of pruning, is to make for a great flowering[ 1, p. 218].

I think her views of beauty led to her selection of Castine, in fact, what she remembers most are the beautiful moments, and also to her admiration of Catherine Huntington, “one of those rare persons, a gardener among human beings[1, p/ 179],” who disregarded what others saw in her, instead finding beauty. Also, her love of children as the most beautiful because of their ability to rouse her feelings. She also found herself “deeply thankful for all I lacked. I exulted because the lack in my life of any personal meaning or possession heightened the awareness of my mind, just as the bareness of a nun’s cell makes for visions [1, p.220].”

I think in saying this, that her small island in her hand, her eventual children,  her friends, everything in life pointed to a regulated life, full of appreciation and love, that she could capture in her creative works, “by flinging myself down into my writing, in recompense and adoration, in order that it might become reality’s mystical counterpart[1, 220].”

I think her belief in God helped reinforced her view of the world, in a way she calls magic.  Magic seems to equate to her a sense of awe at a moment or time or the intercession of fate as when she picked her house. She says, ”Now we were grown up, and by the magic of transformation the great welcoming night had become our partner and our friend, the only element that was really congenial to our new selves and our new emotions[51].”

I can relate to it, since I have had similar circumstances where the unbelievable seemed real and such a gift. That she relates the experience to God acting in her life seems only definitional; she is so defensive about it though, so it surprises me in that way.

I believe this also helped her avoid use of negative terms about herself. I think that labels tend to limit you to a selected definition of behavior, style, intelligence, etc. and by avoiding the label it gave her a freedom to think of herself in any fashion she chose. “Little locksmith” is almost as disparaging as whatever name she might have heard, it speaks throughout the book that one should never be so small, so limited, so deformed, so boxed in and locked up. At least, for me, that was how I read it, the name little locksmith seems to be a title she has taken on herself then rejected.

Her story provides detailed views of her close connections as well as people she observes and it shows skillful craft but also it shows memory. I often save up quirky items where someone showed up in my life and they made enough of an impression that when I write about times it shows up. I have a very good memory so I suppose that hers is similar.

Hathaway finds a strong connection with Flaubert and uses that connection in her writing. I think it alludes to how she set herself free of what she felt were the limitations of her body and of her society, acting sensually with a pair of lovers (from the history) and so, due to Flaubert’s reputation as an experimental lover, she connects on this plane but also via her text. She talks about working heavily on her writing and I think it shows in her imagery, her intense look at certain people, and her attempts to show her emotional stance in fresh ways. At one point, she says, it was not for nothing she had chosen Flaubert to be her master.

I wish I lived in her time when books were scarce and that a style like this could be one that I consistently emulated. But I’ve read too much to allow that to be the case and I’ve never found that sense of symbiosis with another writer’s work, although I’ve enjoyed many styles.

I very much enjoyed her tale and would have loved hearing more about her love life that follows and is briefly touched upon at the end. Her style is very chatty, but also summary about her discoveries about life. Most of her discoveries are deeply heartfelt and personal. She early on claims that she learned this style and the acceptance of it via her letter writing to her brother. That’s very helpful advice, to write letters. I tend to have to go at it separately, intently looking at the given circumstances. I gather from the success of understanding this, that summary for the moment, what the impact was at the time, is helpful in passing over times changes. She doesn’t lack the quality of the moment, nor does she skip over immediacy in the details, nevertheless it comes out as summary, also, as shown in the quotes above.


[1] Hathaway, Katharine Butler (2000-07-01). The Little Locksmith: A Memoir (pp. 66-67). The Feminist Press at CUNY. Kindle Edition.
 [2] Hopper, Kim (2014-06-13). Reckoning with Homelessness (The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues) (p. 106). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

My first stab at what I should read to support my learning process in my creative nonfiction program at Ashland University was to find out the difference between the various styles and so I read Fourth Genre last semester. Then I used various memoirs suggested by others in my program for what to read. Some of those suggested and read include:

1. Ready for Air by Kate Hopper
2. The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk by Stephen Haven
3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The difference in style between these three writer's is quite distinct. Kate's tale is full of worry and compassion for her child. Stephen Haven's tale is almost colloquial--he writes like a teenager (which he is in many of the passages) and full of energy but blunt. Joan Didion is lyrical and full of grief, her theme for her memoir and quite a useful guide for any spouse. Since he translates Chinese poetry and writes poetry, I've read some of his poetry, too, and the difference between his memoir voice and his poetry voice is quite distinct. In the memoir, he tends to be quite gritty, while in his poetry, he is more thoughtful and expansive and poetic.

I've also looked thematically for memoirs that match my main theme of drug and alcohol addiction, families, and mental health. But that is all about content, not necessarily about quality and style.  I won't say much about these since I address them at other times.

So then I thought I should read memoirs about writers and writing and poets on writing. This proved a good bet. Selections I found include:

1. Pablo Neruda "Memoirs"
2. Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry Phillips
3. Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes
4. (I previously read Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of Craft" and found his tale of fanaticism and drug use in order to produce quite poignant and a good warning for all writers).

I especially liked the travel portions and descriptions of Pablo Neruda's experiences as a poet and his strong belief his poetry made a difference. Pablo Neruda's prose also becomes quite beautiful and poetic. He also tends to be a name dropper explaining key points of contact in his life and how it related to the world. From him, I picked up quite a list of South and Central American poets and authors which will add to my knowledge of the regional issues.

I liked Ernest Hemingway's blunt answers to questions shown in his letters. The book quotes from his personal writing to friends and other contacts. His reminders that one must work without applause and stay on your goals is important to remember. 

Tom Grimes tale about how a mentor pulled him through his writing with his praise and then the way his books were purchased and then didn't do as well as he had hoped is a potent reminder that writing is always an expensive gamble for the writer and the publisher.

After these three writer's tales, I need to question my own memoir writing to identify what I think has most value, my travel experience, my writing experience, my poetic need for beauty and meaning, or simply my initial plan of a family tale. I feel a great need to say, I'm not dead yet, I don't want to be summarizing my life, yet.

Since I'm traveling to Nicaragua and to France this year, I've found some good selections of books to enhance my experience in these countries.
1. The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli
2. Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea by Sergio Ramirez using Michael Miller's translation

and as usual I look for folk tales, contemporary literature, contemporary poetry, and histories such as:

1. Sandino's Nation by Stephen Henighan
2. France Since 1870 by Charles Sowerwine

These latter two are some 700 and 400 words so they will be work to get through. I feel I am reading more Communist oriented literature for which I have little leaning since I tend to be more independent-minded and like freedom and the dream of an open economy if it ever exists. I was in the IAM, airplane mechanics union, a member of the AFL-CIO during my years of work at Boeing in the factory and as a Boeing employee in the professional computing ranks, we received similar terms in our contracts. So while I understand the need for worker solidarity, I prefer a more democratic society implementation of government.

I had a huge list of planned work to do over the holidays and I spent more time reading, collating my references, and revising my working outline than I did writing. I felt empty. I had no desire to pick up a pen at all. It's pretty much a symptom of my mind at work subconsciously.

What am I working through subconsciously?

The big issue in memoir is how to frame your story. One thing I found very helpful was a close hard look at a character in many of the books I've read. From writing fiction, I know just how careful a writer must be while introducing the people in a story. WIthout the people, a story reads flat unless of course the story searches for the people in the story.

I have lots of conflict isolated in the story I will tell and it naturally escalates over the time frame I'm discussing.

So the question becomes, how do I isolate a person in the tale, prior to when they appear in a scene of conflict. And how do I explain the different ways we addressed the problems or avoided them or changed our pattern of thoughts?  By we, I mean my family and I as shared by them in discussions with me and vice-versa. 
A major diversion from that lessons learned sort of shuffling via time and the outcomes of events is the need to be present locally and to somehow represent the eras I'm discussing. Plus it needs to have an underlying urgency leading it forward that relates to where I am in life and that part somehow feels the least true to form.

It's almost like I'm dancing a beginners box dance with a shadowy being and while we're taking these stilted steps forward and back, a waltz is dancing around us, only, the music keeps changing and sometimes there's a foxtrot and sometimes a jitterbug (that is not why I'm not writing, it is not jitters so much as clarity in my head about where I am going), and worse, the music keeps changing from the blues, to rock and roll and so I wonder how is this mirror of reality I'm seeing in my eyes, have anything to do with anything?

The first thing I noticed about Patricia Hampl’s Essay “Memory and Imagination” from her collection titled “I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory” was her use of the words “tortured flair” paired with “artistry”. Strong word such as these often act as metaphors or symbols for what you will find throughout a piece of prose. In this case, they aptly capture the essence of working toward a finished piece of work as well as the task of clarifying one’s thoughts, the major theme of the essay.

In terms of imagery, Patricia Hampl takes the reader by the hand and leads them like the young girl narrator who is being taken for her first music lesson. She uses a variety of techniques in providing her images such as:

• Emotional overtones of the repeated sweet ice melted, music melted, we all melted
  
• Analogy in the white plate of her broad, spotless wimple and the cat as reader, dog as writer
  
• Change of light quality—the pianos gleamed, white keys gleamed to offer up the epiphany that the middle C was the center of the world
  
• Physicality—as my eager eyes probably did “gleamed” again 
  
• Bolding of text QUESTION AUTHORITY
  

Imagery is the entry point for the essay and then is used to enrich the essay examples throughout.  The subtext captures the gleaming light, the music, and that “QUESTION AUTHORITY” statement to both ask why writers should write essays and why a writer’s authority is questioned. 

Tortured artistic flair seemed to be the metaphor for the theme behind Patricia Hampl’s essay on Memory and Imagination because on one hand, she could pick wonderful words and images, but on the other hand she had to question if this was what she meant to say, and then get focused back on the topic of writing a memoir. Imagination came into being in the white spaces where her memory deserted her, but also came about from an unconscious desire to write about certain topics.

In the process of examining a childhood memory, Patricia Hampl also wrote about four topics related to memoir writing:

• The importance of memoir to society
  
• The importance of memoir to politics
  
• The importance of emotion in evoking memory
  
• The importance of metaphor in memoir

For her, it seems that memoir is a way to examine what the writer finds of importance and by examining what is written, to explore its ability to find what the writer has learned in life.  Emotion played a powerful role in this analysis. Where the heart of the piece resided was in where this memory from childhood connected her—the answer being her father. Importance lay not in the images, or the details, or the accuracy of what she wrote, but in her desire to play music with her father and her desire to burst out of her dependent role as a child into someone who actively pursued an interest.

In terms of structure, I felt that the initial image was offered up somewhat like a coda in a musical piece, every time it repeated, every time she went back to her source, the reader learns something new in the art of writing memoir. I thought this was rather effective, sort of like bolding a paragraph title and saying, where do we go from here. It didn’t necessary lay out her topics in a “I’m going to talk about A, B, and C” manner but it did reassure the reader that we would find out her thoughts in good time. Finally, it made a statement to me that when women have the authority of their work questioned, one of the tactics men use to intimidate women writers, that they can use the authenticity of their experience in the form of memoir to say so.

How did this essay help me?

Well, it provided a concrete example of how “creative” nonfiction can veer slightly away from truth in memoir due to lack of remembered details into a more readable experience. It also showed how a writer can use personal anecdote to talk about another topic entirely.  Three, it showed an alternate way of using an organizing principle, especially one tied into the musical metaphor of the piece that created a sense of completeness. Four, it acted as a spur to my own memories.

What I noticed most about Chang-Rae Lee’s essay “Coming Home Again” was that he rooted it in the memory of his mother that is most essential for her role in his life. She was at the center of the family and their diet and through her cooking helped ease their way into American society and into his own entrance into independence. In a way, it shows that losing his mother also meant losing the most potent remainder of his Korean heritage.

The theme itself isn’t about cultural tastes, food, or even family. It’s more about how a person contributes to your idea of who you are. Here, mom has nurtured the family with taste treats and when she has passed away, nothing tastes good anymore. It’s not the home, but the person who made home a place to connect with others in the family. The theme is how sometimes you have to lose something to realize it’s importance to you.

One of the questions I’ve had about memoir writing is how much I should include about others. Situations are important in understanding who I am and contribute to an overall growth of who I’ve become, but others all play their roles. In a family of seven plus two, others can over complicate our stories so that they become almost unreadable with some many. In fiction, we introduce characters slowly, but in writing bits of first draft memoir, I’ve mentioned people and let them slide away. I think this essay shows the power of showing someone where you imagine them, that acts as a metaphor for their meaning in your life, and at a time when they aided you the most.

Chang-Rae’s use of food helps create someone who is mom, into someone with a wonderful talent and who exists beyond her death into someone who will always flavor his life and support it. So I thought that this was surely a good way to include someone in a memoir, by writing about them doing the thing that meant most to you as you grew up.

What do I know about his mother? She had an ability to make good tasting food. She knew the recipes by memory. She kept the family fed. She helped the family to connect to others by learning the new recipes her son demanded. Someone who would push her son out into a better, independent life via school. She held many duties, acted independently except on a few occasions and played good basketball. That she had given up her son in order to make him succeed.

What do I know about the son? He hid his feelings from his parents. He had an instinctive disregard for women. He assumed he could cook well without ever learning the recipes. He didn’t want to accept his mother might have difficulties. He would give his mother anything she wanted except the same gift she had given him, the help to merge into American society. That he learned how much she mattered to him after she had died. That he learned how painful it was to watch someone die.

What do I know about the father? He and the son share talks about school. He is a great success and mom admires him. That he could cry when his son leaves to go to school. 

The story is told in anecdotes about cooking and eating or cooking and not eating. The plot is phased by the son’s desire to avoid his mother’s illness by cooking but hearing it anyway, by being challenged about his cooking and told he didn’t know how to do it right, to the preparation of a great meal, only to have mom not eat, to the reality of her death, to his leaving for school and how she served food to help him adjust and the bad food that followed.