Memoir matters because we matter. Our stories matter. Memoir is an art form no less than any other literary form. One aspect of its artistry is that it is bound by the truth — subjective truth perhaps, but still the truth. Art forms that have boundaries — sonnets, plays, Swiss watches, and Haiku  – create special problems. Solving those problems is a matter of artistry.

The first piece of writing that I ever had published was a slice of my life — a memoir sliver. I was a first-year student at the University of Miami, majoring in communications. A boy befriended me, and we went to the cafeteria to eat. He offered to buy me lunch, and being an impecunious college student, I accepted. I had only taken a few bites of my sandwich when campus police showed up and hauled the boy away. It seems he had bought our lunches with a stolen meal card. I never saw him again, but it gave me the impetus to write a short personal essay that the editor of the campus newspaper loved and promptly printed with a memorable illustration of a hapless student being yanked out of the cafeteria by enormous police officers.

I should have seen that first publication as a sign, but I didn’t. I went on to write everything but memoir for many years. I wrote scripts for commercials, scripts for sales and government films, short stories, interviews, journalism, book reviews, poetry, and anything that anyone would pay me to write. Writing short stories challenged me the most at first because I didn’t realize how my own life was a gold mine of material. But eventually my stories became more and more autobiographical. Not all of them, of course, but enough that I began to spend more time digging around in that rich vein. After I gave birth to my daughter, I returned to the  personal essay form — writing snapshots of the parenting life for the local newspaper or to read aloud on the local NPR station.

My first novel, like many first novels, has a strong strain of autobiography. I wrote three more novels after that. I borrowed pieces from my life for those books, but I also developed my fiction-writing techniques and played with plotting. Ten years after my first novel came out, the memoir I wrote about taking care of my mother was published. In a way I’d come full circle. I have often said my memoir is the sequel to Sweet Fire, my first novel.

It took me a while to realize that the years I spent taking care of my mother had the potential to be the material for a book. Why would anyone care, I wondered? But as I began to talk about my experiences with other people and noticed how many of them were also immersed in the aging parent adventure, I realized we need to tell these stories. I needed to hear the stories of other caregivers, and I knew they would want to hear mine. What surprised me later was how many people who were not caregivers were also interested in the story.

In writing the memoir, I summoned those skills I’d learned in those years of writing fiction, poetry, journalism, and personal essays. So often the same rules apply: choosing the right word, selecting the telling image, finding the voice. But memoir has an added task: selection. Why this day and not that? Why this image and not another? Do I need to include this anecdote? Will it hurt someone if I do? Do I do it anyway? How can I structure my material so it has an arc? So many decisions to make. So many puzzle pieces to put together.

A memoir is not real life just as a photograph is not real life. It is, rather, an artistic rendering of real life.  Memoir matters because life matters. And art matters. Memoirists, sometimes joyfully and sometimes in utter despair, commit themselves to the service of both.

My daughter went to North Carolina School of the Arts for her senior year of high school, and that’s where she met her soul-sister — a young woman named Kerri Lowe. Their passion for acting had drawn both of them to the drama program.

After high school Kerri went to NYU. She studied acting at first but outside of classes a new passion blossomed — a love for making music. And soon she found herself playing guitar and singing songs in Washington Square instead of going to auditions. Her first official gig was at a book party I had when my novel Picara came out in 2009.

Fast-forward three years and Kerri is starting to make a name for herself on the singer-songwriter circuit. Now she plays house parties and opens for other acts in small clubs from North Carolina to New York.

Kerri has a wild enthusiasm for story-telling through song. I recently saw her mesmerize a noisy bar in Carrboro, NC, as people slowly set down their beers and turned to listen to this voice — full of heart and pain and love and laugher. Hers is a voice that demands you listen. And as you listen, your heart wakens and stretches it wings.

One of my favorite songs of Kerri’s is one that she likes to sing in the subways of New York. It’s called The Weight of the World. The last two lines of the chorus are “Most talk is cheap. It’s my blessing to sing.”

Kerri looks at the world through the lens of metaphor. When we walked to my daughter’s graduation a couple of weeks ago, she was wearing new shoes. They rubbed her toes and when she looked down she saw that her toes had bled and there was blood on her shoes. She laughed and immediately saw it as a symbol — something she’d write about either in a song or a blog

I was listening to Kerri’s debut CD called The Truth on my way to Atlanta yesterday. I was feeling cranky and sour and not at all like someone who espouses transformation. I’d been sick for days. I was not impressed with my life. And then “The Weight of the World” came on, and I heard Kerri reminding me of this blessing we all have. A blessing to sing. By the time I got to Atlanta I was feeling better.

That night I went to a talk given by the Indian mystic, Sadhguru Jaggi Vesudev. Sadhguru reminds us that we must get to know ourselves. It is the only way we can know the Divine. I believe one way to do that is through writing. Or singing — which are really the same thing. Whatever our art is, it’s the path that will take us there. I’ve been sitting on a bench along my path. It’s time to get up, pick up my backpack, and continue down the trail. There are, after all, miles to go before I sleep.

Some warm ups:

1. Just after mother’s day, I asked my poetry students to write about their moms. They wrote lovely tributes and bitter admonishments but no one had “nothing to say.” So if you’re needing some inspiration, write a scene with your mother or a poem about her or a story from her point of view.
2. What was your favorite song when you were 17 or 27? Where did you listen to it? How did it make you feel? What is your favorite song (or just one you like a lot) now? How does it make you feel? Where does your imagination go when you listen to it?
3. Who is your soul sibling? Write about the first time you met.

One of the great gifts I received as an apprentice writer was the opportunity to study for several years under a man named Jerry Stern. Among other things Jerry gave his students a language with which to talk about writing. One question that he would ask was always particularly helpful: What’s at stake?

This was a question I posed to a writer recently. She’d written a beautiful beginning to her book that was full of tension and atmosphere, and yet I couldn’t find the thread that would take me through her book.

Now, let me back up and say that we often don’t have the thread at first. It takes a while for the writer to find it. But when you do find it, you need to go back to the beginning and plant it there for the reader to grab hold of and follow.

I used an analogy in the memoir workshop I gave this past weekend. I said that transformative writing is like cave diving. You dive down into the dark shadowy places of your psyche; and writing is the life line that leads you back out. I suppose that analogy can extend to readers as well. They need something to hold on to while they follow you through the depths of your imagination.

I often frame the idea this way: you begin your book with a question that doesn’t get answered until the end of the book.

My dear friend Gil Ballance did this to great effect in his book, Leah’s Journey Home. He starts his book with a young woman in 1904 watching a ship wreck off the coast of North Carolina.

Fascinated, or perhaps horrified is a better word, Aunt Mary and I stood on the beach and watched. It was late March, and a three-masted, coal-burning freighter, which I later learned was the Elmira, was thrashing about, helpless, in a surging, wallowing sea off Currituck Beach. Virginia lay behind. And the ship was headed south toward the Graveyard of the Atlantic off the North Carolina coast. From the looks of her, I didn’t believe she’d escape. She was in the clutches of a violent, surging sea gone mad. 

And I? Unmarried and in the family way at twenty, I silently prayed for the ship and its crew. Passengers, too, if there were any.

There are two implicit questions in this short passage. The first question is, what will happen to the people on the boat. This question provides the immediate tension for the story. But it is not the question that will keep us reading the book. That question is, what will happen to this unmarried, pregnant woman and her child? How will she survive without money or means in a time when women have so few rights, and an unmarried mother will not even have the support of her family and community?

This is a principle that mystery writers know. If you have a dead body in your first chapter, readers will keep reading to find out “whodunit” or why or how the killer is going to get away with it. So I like to think of the question you plant at the beginning of your story as the dead body.

Some readers may feel that they have a quieter story than that — no dead bodies, no car bombs about to explode. That metaphoric “dead body” can be anything as long as it matters a great deal to someone. In my memoir, the “dead body” was a performance of my mother’s requiem. The question I posed in the beginning of the book was, would my elderly mother live long enough to hear her requiem performed? I didn’t figure out that this was the thread of the book until I was nearly 2/3’s of the way through. Then I went back and planted it in chapter one.

Jerry told us in a novel-writing workshop that readers need to be motivated to keep reading a book. That is true now more than ever when we have so much competing for our time. Give your readers a reason to keep reading. Make sure something is at stake.

Some journal exercises:

1. What would you (or your character) go to jail for? Write about it.
2. What would you (or your character) die for? Write about that.
3. What is your heart’s deepest desire? Write about a time when you really wanted something and either did or did not get it.
4. Read the first chapter of your favorite book. Can you find the implicit question?

I am sitting on a tree stump about 7  inches off the ground. Far in the distance I hear electronic church bells. Closer in I hear the steady beep beep of an industrial truck backing up. Closer still, birds — robins and mockingbirds — invisible in the thick camouflage of trees.

I am in a cemetery with my poetry students. Before they dispersed to fulfill their assignments, I read a poem by the great Persian poet Rumi to them. Now they’ll play with persona a la Edgar Lee Masters and the Spoon River Anthology. I remember the first time I heard the Spoon River Anthology. My brother was an actor in FSU’s theater department and they put on a reading of the poems, voices telling the stories of the people under the headstones. It was one more nail in my coffin — a love of poetry to die for.

The sunlight is diffused this morning by a thin scrim of cloud vapor. Cemeteries are sacred places to me. The ultimate transformation — dust to dust.

Being in this cemetery reminds me of scenes from a documentary film I recently saw. The filmmaker was my friend Therese Bartholomew, who had transformed the murder of her beloved brother into a testament of love and forgiveness. Her grief at his death was torrential. It was a monstrous thing that grabbed her by the throat and tried to drown her.

Writing was the oxygen line that kept her alive. One time she asked me in despair, “What do I do with it all? How do I put it together?”

“Just keep going,” I answered. “You can worry about putting it together later.”

Then one night she woke up about 2 a.m. and told her husband she was going to make a movie. She began to keep a video diary. Shortly after that at one of our biweekly writing workshops she met some filmmakers at the coffee shop. They were in our space, but we were willing to share. Serendipity. Within a few years she had a book and a movie. Now she’s a spokesperson for restorative justice.

Both of her works are incredibly transformative for one simple reason: the raw stripped to the bone honesty of her telling of the story. When Therese looks into the camera, debilitated by depression, puffy eyed and red-nosed, you know that it’s taken all of her willpower to articulate the pain, and you cannot help but be opened up to explore your own humanity. She transforms that pain into love, into art literally before your eyes.

So now my students are wandering back. Two of the young women were resistant to coming here. They hate cemeteries they told me. Cemeteries are creepy, they said. And there’s too much nature out here. At first I wonder if this visit has changed their attitudes, but then I have to laugh at myself: as if everyone has to love what I love, as if a teacher dragging them out at 7:45 in the morning to wander among headstones is going to suddenly break through that iron shell and transform them.

And also I know you don’t have to love a situation to write about it. In fact, sometimes getting uncomfortable is the most inspiring thing of all.

Here is Merritt’s poem (By Merritt C. Ryan-Jones):

Outdoors again,
Starting to think
My teacher is torturing me.
Birds are chirping,
The bugs are biting,
And I am uncomfortably
Centered in the Midst
Of a thousand spirits.
Not my personal place of
Peace and relaxation,
unaware of the spirits
I’m encountering,
Praying none of them
Leave here with me!
Ideas to write by:

1. Go to a cemetery. I’ve been inspired to write a story about dead people for a couple of years. One of these days I might even get around to it. At least steal some character names from the headstones.

2. Be honest about something that maybe you haven’t been able to be honest about  before. You don’t have to share the writing with anyone else. Just dredge it up, write it, maybe it will turn into a piece of fiction or a poem.

3. Try keeping a video diary. See how that influences your writing voice.

4. Go to Therese’s website. Support a fellow writer. Buy a book, buy a CD. You won’t regret it. http://www.thefinalgiftfilm.com/