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.

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.

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.