Part One

To get a feel for short memoir, you might enjoy reading from Writers’ Digest magazine’s column called “5-Minute Memoir.”  Here are links to a few of the columns:

Writing from the Mat

Hidden in Plain Sight

The Beauty of Bones

Here is a column I wrote for the October 2012 issue:

Writing Grief

What do you do if you are a writer who held memorial services for your 25-year-old engaged son, dead from crashing into a tree while snowboarding? What do you do if you are a writer and the world you knew seems too far way not, too insignificant?

Perhaps you rise early each morning and watch the sun travel up the sky, go out each evening to follow its sure fire into the horizon. Perhaps you look up the meanings of your son’s name and one that matches a story you tell yourself about his essential spirit: the Egyptian god Seth was a protector of Ra’s sun boat. His role every day was to battle the great serpent Apophis, who tried to devour the sun boat and cast the world into darkness.

Maybe you hear the weatherman talk about storms that come from warm air lying over cooler air and you think about how grief is cold, and memory is warm. Maybe you start to read the writing of others who have lost a beloved child, spouse, parent. In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living by Nancy Cobb, Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Slowly you start to see that weaving something beautiful about your boy and your love for him is what may quiet the storms or at least allow you to survive them. And you want to survive them for your daughter, your husband, your parents. For your son, too. “Chill, Mom,” you can still hear him say, as he did whenever you got in the way of your own clear thinking.

You know you would have given up writing—your best thing—even your life, in a heartbeat if the trade meant your son could be alive. But that was not the opportunity you were given. Using your best thing is the only way to resurrect your son.

And so you begin re-teaching yourself, as you’ve taught your writing students in the past, to write the poems you have to write. You turn to your desk copy of Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry and work on forms he examines. Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” open at your side, you experience a circling to retrieve loss. You emulate French poet Robert Desnos’ “The Voice of Robert Desnos,” calling in your own voice to the trees, to the ice hanging in their branches, to the moon, not to let your son go air-borne. Moved by repetitions to conjure and explore sensations of mortality and immortality, you start your own poem:

Out of daily steps and out of drives on highways, out of hours’ rocky patches and moments made of weeds, memories come. The work requires tears, stillness, hope. As you write, you understand what William Blake knew:

Man was made for joy and woe;
And, when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine. …
Every tear from every eye …
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.

You can live for two now, breathe with your son’s breath in yours. You will not give up your best thing. You will need it to weave and reweave brilliant Clothing for the Soul.

****

It occurred to me that when we write memoir, we have a question that we begin to answer in real or daily time and a question in lyric, or all at once, eternal time, a question that is central to our being and is being discovered if not resolved in the memoir we are writing using the events of our lives. I wondered how I would go on living without my son, what my life could be like beyond missing him. I found I was writing to resurrect him so I didn’t have to live without him and to understand what I could of mortality and immortality.

Re-read the 5-minute memoirs and think about what questions, both outer (in real time and daily living) and inner (soul time) the writer seems to be writing to answer. Then think about how the work of answering the “real time” question helps the author evoke and explore the inner question. Describe what you realize each author’s process is in using the questions you think they have.

Next, list what inside questions you think you are working on in memoir writing and what real-time questions you might have, which in writing to answer you might find deeper questions.

At this point, you’ll be working on a hunch, of course, but you can trust that your writing will lead you further into answers if you stay with the images and events that arise as you write.

Part Two

Another approach to short memoir is to create via an accumulation of short pieces. As you know, I admire Abigail Thomas as an author who is adept at doing this, especially in her book What Comes Next and How to Like It.

You can read about Abigail Thomas’ book in an article that appears on line from NPR.

This review from the LA Times focuses on the inner and outer questions, as explores the true subject of the memoir.

This Chicago Tribune review also examines the book’s approach and style.

You might want to visit Abigail Thomas’ blog. Although she hasn’t posted recently, the short chunks of writing she posted previously will encourage you.

Now, read through the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon for Two Pages by Abigail Thomas. After you read the excerpt, try writing three short memoir pieces–using any of the prompts Thomas suggests. Two pages are 500 words. Three short pieces would be 1500 words if you do a full two pages, but shorter is fine, too — revisit her blog posts and excerpts from What Comes Next and How to Like It for the impact of using a variety of page lengths. Varying the lengths of short pieces in the accumulation adds texture and depth.

Part Three

And here’s a third idea for writing short memoir:  The epistolary (letter) form is effective in helping us tell life stories. To read a preview from Kit Bakke’s memoir in letters, Miss Alcott’s Email: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds, visit Google Books. Here you can read the opening of the book — the introduction is there once you scroll down to it and then some of the letters the author wrote and received from Louisa May Alcott. Yes, you read that right — the author’s premise is that at a turning point in her life, she should write an email to Ms. Alcott, who somehow received it on the same day in the same month but quite a bunch of years earlier. They continue a correspondence. The author feels a kinship to Alcott because they are /were both very political and both nurses and both writers. It isn’t long before Kit Bakke begins to write Louise May Alcott about her understanding of Transcendentalism and Alcott answers her questions allowing us to learn quite a lot.

It’s your turn now: what historical figure would you like to write to and have write back to you with wisdom based on their life and experience? Write your letter to them explaining what you want to know and why you have written and their letter back to you or choose just to write their letter back to you without yours to them. That can prove moving and revealing.