In Betsy Howell’s book Acoustic Shadows: Men at War and a Daughter Who Remembers Them, the author searches for an understanding of her family’s emotional legacy. After her parents’ deaths, she realizes that there is no one to tell her what she never learned about their pasts. Somehow, she must find what she needs to resolve the anger that is driving her to drink. Holding her father’s cherished heirloom, the Civil War journal his great-grandfather kept, Betsy decides to retrace that ancestor’s footsteps during the war. In trips to Civil War battle sites and by becoming a Civil War re-enactor, she learns about the pain and violence he withstood, and when she researches her father’s missions in WWII, she learns the same about him. Ultimately, she is able to let go of the anger she carries from being the child of an alcoholic who is nursing deep pain.

Betsy narrates her search of the places her father lived and reconstructs stories he told her about his grandfather and great-grandfather. Entries written by her great-great-grandfather in his Civil War journal are interspersed in the narrative as Betsy considers the places he fought.  As we learn what young Private James Darsie Heath wrote in his journal, we also read about the actions Betsy is taking to understand war, traveling to places battles took place and fighting in Civil War re-enactments. Her activities, travels and research allow the reflection and emotional boost she needs to let go of anger and pain she inherited.

 The book’s title names the central metaphor in Betsy’s search. An acoustic shadow is the term for an interruption of sound by a topographical impediment. During the Civil War, many battles went unheard by generals because topological obstructions interrupted the sound waves. The reality of an acoustic shadow in her ancestor’s experience in the Civil War is also a symbol for the way a lack of knowledge about those who came before us keeps us from having the information we need to make correct decisions in our own lives.  Like General Grant, who could not send troops in the right direction at the Battle of Iuka, where Betsy’s great-great-grandfather fought, because geography muffled the sounds of battle, if we don’t have required information, we sometimes don’t know what to do in our own lives. In one sense, each of our births is a topographical barrier to knowing our parents–i.e. our births cause an acoustical shadow as people change when they became parents and leave behind parts of their former identities. Who they were fails to fully propagate in our minds and imaginations.

As memoirists, when we are blocked from knowing important others and information from the past, we can use our imagination, our activities and our writing to find our way toward insight. Betsy became a Civil War re-enactor to find the experiences she could share with her father and great-great-grandfather. In finding out all that she could and visiting as many of the places that she knew her father and great-great-grandfather lived and fought and entering into the action of their lives through re-enacting battle, Betsy came to the perception she needed to retrace her own emotional life and heal from addiction.

When Betsy was researching in Iuka, Mississippi, she wrote:

…I visited the Shady Grove Cemetery on Iuka’s southeastern limits. Crispy, curling maple and sweet gum leaves crackled under my bike tires as I toured the cemetery and a warm breeze swirled the smell of pine trees around me. Near one edge, I found a barely discernible trench–the final resting spot for the 263 unknown Confederate soldiers. Killed during the Battle of Iuka in 1862, their names now are lost to the winds of time that eventually erode everything. Again, I was confronted with the fact that so much of the past is unknown, and what is not written down is often lost forever. I wonder who these men had been, these soldiers whose bones now lay beneath my feet and I wondered what they had felt while dying on the battlefield. I thought of my father and Darsie coping with death and killing and the fear of the unknown and of being captured. It was fear that came through from the journals and it was fear that I often encountered when remembering my own past, and now as I considered three people’s histories, I knew that looking straight at what made me most afraid was what some of my journey was about. …if I looked hard enough at my own past, I could see how my greatest fears, for better and worse, had shaped the person I had become.

We often don’t know what it is we have to let go of or what we have to hold onto until we write about those who are connected to us and what their lives were like. These are the acoustic shadows in our lives.

Like Betsy, by retracing the geography of particular times, you might hear what you might not have been able to otherwise.

This week’s writing exercise, whether you can actually travel to a particular location or need to rely wholly on memory and researched facts, will help you get started writing memoir. Whether you produce a satisfying stand-alone essay or begin a book or a collection of essays, you will be removing the topological impediment to hearing your past.

Step One: Find a letter you wrote in the past (one written as far back as possible the better) or that someone you are descended from wrote a while ago to you or to someone else in your family. A letter to or from a teacher or neighbor or friend from the past will work well, too. Perhaps you have a letter a grade school teacher wrote to you or one your parents wrote to you when you were at camp or college. Maybe you have a letter from a high school boyfriend or a favorite aunt or perhaps you have a letter written to one of your ancestors or co-workers. Maybe you have a copy of a letter you wrote to a pen pal.

Step Two: Think about a place you could take this letter, whether you can do that physically or in your imagination.  That might be the place where it was written, the place you first read it, a place where it has resided for a long time, or the place you might send that letter if you could part with it.

If you can’t easily get to the location you are imagining, research it on the Internet until you can describe its history, social context, flora and fauna, whatever is unique about it. Iuka has those springs that are today flowing through pipes extended from cisterns in a city park. What is your place noted for –a battle, a product, a court case, a strike or natural disaster, a fruit or vegetable, a bird or prominent citizen, for instance.

Step Three: Write about that location, making sure you describe it using the information you have about what is there. Let the reader notice what you would notice and let the reader know where in that town you are–the cisterns of Iuka or the Shady Grove Cemetery with its barely discernable indentation for a trench. Tell why you have “brought” the letter there. Whatever occurs to you as a reason now that you are writing will most likely provide an interesting platform for more introspection.

Make sure you explain your reason thoroughly, including information about what has happened to you in the years between the letter’s penning and this day of your answering.

Step Four: Write until you find your epiphany, something you might not have said if you weren’t answering this particular letter from this particular spot.

At Shady Grove Cemetery in Iuka among the “crispy, curling maple and sweet gum leaves,” Betsy thinks, “…if I looked hard enough at my own past, I could see how my greatest fears, for better and worse, had shaped the person I’d become.” What insight will arise from the intersection of the letter you received, the one you are writing and the place you are imagining you are writing from? Get started now. Find that letter, research that place. In your mind, if not in actuality, go and sit there and write….