Writing Is My Drink and My 26-Minute Memoir

This summer I had a few precious weeks of more open-ended time that I could spend writing. It was quite terrifying and I felt the pressure to produce after long stretches of go-go-go work and home life. I knew I had to find a way to avoid the self-sabotage of frittering away that all-too-rare time.

In moments like these I cling to my collection of "writer's self-help" resources. One of my go-to books has been Writing Is My Drink by Theo Pauline Nestor. I was particularly inspired (once again) by her description of breaking through a terrible block writing her graduate thesis after reading Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to Work” from Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work. I discovered this long out-of-print book in FIT's library while developing my Creative Imagination honors course over a decade ago. I am so happy that Theo has provided a PDF of Valian's piece on her site.

At the end of one of the chapters Theo gives a prompt for a "26-Minute Memoir" and directs readers to her website for more information. I did the exercise and decided to email Theo my piece, even though she hadn't published any new ones since 2015.

Lo and behold, a few weeks later, Theo wrote back and said she had been thinking of posting them again, and wanted to start with mine!

This morning, on the brink of the Fall 2017 semester, as I prepare to lead my department and teach my students (and support my son, who is now taking classes there), I got an email from Theo with a link to my piece on her website. I am even more terrified--of what it reveals about me as a person, and of what it means to me as a writer. Now I really have no excuse not to do the work. I am learning, thanks to Theo, Virginia, and many others who have done it before me, and to my students who will just be starting this adventure next week.

little star

The little angel in this photo is much bigger now than she was on Halloween 2003. But it remains one of my favorite images of Stella, so I can't resist putting it up here.

I'm writing again. It sound simple, but it is a Very Big Deal. Right now I'm at the Antioch Writers' Workshop, getting feedback on excerpts from my memoir in progress, Little Star. It's been an amazing week, and I feel encouraged and scared and excited and all the things you're supposed to feel when you're really in the midst of something.

I'll post more about the workshop, and what I'm working on, soon.

parerez-vous....?

birth story, big brother's version

Still in the process of unpacking some of the detritus left in the wake of the move. I came across this draft in Bobby's inimitable handwriting--which in another century might have been called "crabbed." It's undated but I suspect it's from last fall, when his teacher had them work on a "personal narrative."

When my mom told me that she was going to have a baby I was so exited. I hoped that I had a Brother Because we could play legos together. Every day I would ask Mom if the baby was here but she would always answer no. A couple of months later my mom told me that I was going to have a sister. It was ok but I still would love to have a brother.

The 7 to 9 months past really quikly and before you knew it I was a home waiting for Mom to come back from the hospital. I was watching TV eating crackers. Then the phone rang. Dad said we had to drive to the hospital right away. Dad told me that the baby was here and we drove to the hospital in about 100 minhits. When we got there dad went to a room while I waited on a bench. A couple minuits later Dad came out. He said that my sister was going to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks.

A couple of weeks later dad said that my sister needed surgery because there was a problem with her heart. When she came home I was so happy even if she was a little different. She had somthing called down syndrome that is a problem with her brain. She can still walk and talk but sometimes she just acts weird but to me she's just the same as all of us and she's my sister.

This is, of course, a work of fiction, with the concomitant inaccuracies and reworkings of time. Bobby was all of 22 months when Stella was born nearly 8 years ago. Yet somehow he chose to write about this event that he couldn't possibly remember in any sort of chronology or detail. I do recall his coming to the hospital, but he wasn't left sitting on a bench unattended. He was in a small "family room" watching a Schoolhouse Rock video, his latest obsession, while parents and grandparents took turns donning the pale yellow gowns and scrubbing up with acrid-smelling soap to enter the NICU.

Now that I'm starting a new season of Creative Nonfiction, my students and I are once again talking about the unreliability of memory, about truth vs. fact, about our version vs. someone else's. Somehow, I think, despite getting the "facts" mixed up, my son has captured a certain truth about his sister's birth and its impact on his life.

my friend, superwoman

I mentioned briefly last month that Vicki Forman's stunning memoir, This Lovely Life, has been released by Houghton Mifflin/Mariner. She has a fabulous website for the book here that mentions all the reviews, public appearances, and other attention it has garnered.

And as if that weren't enough, Ms. Forman has just completed a very strenuous certification program and exam, and is now a certified phlebotomy technician! Go over to her blog and congratulate her!

Vicki's wonderful book is finally out, and here she is talking about the experience of premature motherhood on "A View from the Bay."

confirmation

I was eleven, a very fragile age. I didn't feel well-liked in school. I ended up being home-schooled the second half of my sixth grade year because I didn't want to deal with the other kids. My family was going to a Missouri Synod Lutheran church in Fairborn, a 25-minute drive away. Those mornings, slightly carsick--little breakfast, curving roads, smoke from Dad's Lucky Strikes.

I was in confirmation class. I remember the booklet--an illustration of Martin Luther on the cover. I don't remember what I learned, or how far I got. All I know is our family left the church before I could finish. I'm sure Dad had his reasons--I have only a vague sense of a difference of opinion with the pastor. But the result was, I was never confirmed. I could not take communion, according to our tradition.

The first time I went to Saint Bart's, I knew from reading their website that I would be welcome at the Eucharist--they only ask that you be baptized in a Christian church--but I was nervous. Luckily, a friend was with me, a lifelong Canadian Anglican who showed me how to hold my hands for the wafer and took a sip of wine before me, kissed my cheek when we exchanged the peace. It was New Year's Eve and a very small group congregated in the chapel while the main sanctuary was being set up for a festive concert. The priest spoke with a southern accent about his memories of Christmas, and his associations with the passage that tells us "Mary kept these things and pondered them in her heart." It was my first communion.

Today, I will be officially confirmed--go up front, speak the words, receive a blessing from the Bishop. I'm nervous, excited, probably no less so than I would have been at twelve. It feels strange to be doing this at my age, although I will be in the company of many other adults, all of us settling on this particular spiritual home. But it feels very good, finishing what I started over three decades ago, becoming an adult in the faith, belonging somewhere at last.

welcoming the godfather

It's been years in the making. Lee Gutkind, dubbed "the Godfather behind Creative Nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, is our writer-in-residence this week at FIT. I've had the pleasure to welcome Lee to two of my classes and introduce a lecture he gave yesterday on the public and private voices in creative nonfiction.

Tomorrow, he's reading from his own new work:

Room D211
Fashion Institute of Technology
7th Ave @ 27th Street
1-2pm

Books for sale. New subscribers to Creative Nonfiction magazine will get free back issues. A fantastic time will be had by all.

random access memory: september song

Princeton, New Jersey, was like a town from a storybook. The campus with its stone buildings, literally ivy-covered. The fountain in front of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The libraries and laboratories, the famous architects, the English-style garden and the art museum with its eclectic collection and its one spectacular Van Gogh. The chapel--more like a cathedral, really--with brilliant stained glass, vast vaulted ceilings, a sense of reverence and stillness yet full of life. The Richard Serra sculpture, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," two tremendous panels between which you could hide, no one would see you while you walked through it, you could take someone in there and kiss them and no one would notice.

The shops and restaurants on Nassau Street--Labyrinth Books, Small World Coffee, the old hoagie shop and pizza place, the newer Thai and sushi and Mexican restaurants, the Blue Water Grill with its comfortable booths, casual elegance, and four stools at a counter in the back. You bring your own wine because licenses are few and far-between, the two of you just have to drink the whole bottle. The movie theater a real old-fashioned cinema with no commercials or trailers, just popcorn and soda and swingy padded seats, and the film that had a scene where one of the main characters attends a boozy, cigar-filled Princeton alumni dinner, bellowing with his classmates:
In praise of Old Nassau we sing,
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Our hearts will give while we shall live,
Three cheers for Old Nassau.

The residential streets quiet in the soft dark, stars showing through carefully pruned trees, spacious houses presiding over tidy but comfortable lawns. The cars in their driveways, a green Beetle proclaiming Free Tibet and Obama '08.

The funny little train that goes back and forth to the Princeton Junction station, just two passenger cars, like a toy train, called "the Dinky" by the locals. The schedule and the time for departure, the return to the city, the lingering goodbye and yes, the tears, the embarrassing tears, the whistle and the steady turn of the wheels, the distance, the hopes, the blurred landscape turning from green and brown to gray, the beginning of autumn, the end of a beginning.

this lovely book

Vicki is sharing with us the cover for her beautiful book, This Lovely Life. From all appearances, it will be almost as beautiful outside as inside. Almost.

She has also, miraculously, been blogging in the wake of her unthinkable loss. Some of the entries chronicle the painstaking process of revising her manuscript for publication. Six passes, she says! Brava, brave Vicki!

and the winner is...the amazing VICKI FORMAN!

I'm so excited I can hardly stand it--one of my bestest mama blogger friends, Vicki, has won the 2008 Bakeless Literary Prize for creative nonfiction! Her powerful, beautifully written memoir, This Lovely Life, will be published by Houghton Mifflin.

Please stop by her blog to congratulate her, and to read about her lovely and amazing family. Then go to Literary Mama and read up on her Special Needs Mama columns.

CONGRATULATIONS, VICKI! GO GIRL!!!

The Personal Narrative: The Art and the Health of It

Here are some random notes that will probably mean nothing to anyone but me and the one billion other people who were at the AWP panel with Kyoko Mori, Michael Steinberg, Molly Peacock, Phillip Lopate, and Mindy Lewis. I've got to get them down somewhere besides this crumpled piece of notebook paper on my desk!

Molly Peacock: Fact and metaphor are a way of "buttressing the personal voice" to prevent "dull midvoice lyricism" (and navel-gazing). They anchor voice in the conscious world. "Fact creates a neutral shared reality with the reader."

"Operation Gomorrah" [Marione Ingram] Best American Essays 2007 [not sure who recommended this: M. Steinberg?]

Elizabeth Gilbert [Yes, and....? Who mentioned her?]

Phillip Lopate: shame about personal narrative--there are good and bad reasons to be defensive about it. "The reader is not your mother." The reader wants to be stimulated--turn yourself into a character. [where I have heard that before?] "I've always regarded myself as slightly obnoxious...[my character] became a curmudgeon."

Mindy Lewis: "Facing Shame in Personal Narrative." Memoir
Life Inside "Era is important in writing memoir."

My own notes for Little Star:
era of aggressively [ostentatiously] responsible parenting
era of post-9/11 insecurity (esp. in NYC)

the reading

It went well. Lots of good friends were there--including a number of FIT colleagues, and even some current and former students. A very warming experience!

reading from Little Star next Friday (biting nails now)

Please join me if you can for my first nonfiction reading!

Amy Lemmon and Marissa Miley
Friday, January 25, 7:00 pm
KGB Bar
85 E. 4th Street (Between 3rd and 2nd Aves)
NYC

Amy Lemmon is the author of the forthcoming poetry collections Fine Motor and Saint Nobody. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Verse, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, as well as other magazines. She is Poetry Editor of the online literary magazine DUCTS.ORG and an associate professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Amy will read from Little Star, the prose memoir she is working on at Paragraph.

Marissa Miley is a 27-year old writer living in Manhattan. She is co-author of Restless Virgins: Love Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School (William Morrow 2007), and has been featured on NBC¹s Today Show, NPR, Oprah Radio, Fox News, Star Jones, and other television and radio shows across the country. Marissa is currently working on a second book of nonfiction and, to stave off lethargic writing during the cold winter months, training for the New Jersey marathon.

for more information:
http://www.paragraphny.com/events/2008/01/25/

or

http://www.kgbbar.com/calendar/event/2008-01-25_paragraph_maris.html

remembering 2001

This hard date is hitting harder this year, perhaps because this is the first time since 2001 that it has fallen again on a Tuesday. I thought I would post an excerpt from my essay "Elements" that deals with that terrible time.

Fire

Four weeks before Stella is born, I am on the sixth floor of the B Building at the Fashion Institute of Technology on 27th Street in New York City. My nine a.m. composition students point out the south-facing windows: the World Trade Center, one of the towers billowing smoke. In the hallway, a colleague says a plane crashed into the building—we picture a small craft. We go to our classroom, convinced it’s nothing, a crazy accident, easily taken care of. We feel something like relief—numbness?—and are almost laughing. It isn’t until hours later, after the towers have dropped from the sky, that I see the flames on seemingly endless TV footage at a Manhattan friend’s apartment. When I finally make it home to Queens, it is nearly sunset and the smoke and haze color the southwestern sky.
When Stella arrives on a brilliant Columbus Day, a more private disaster is revealed: she has Down syndrome, which was suspected but not confirmed by prenatal testing. Worse, she has a congenital heart defect—a hole in the membrane between the chambers—a common result of the genetic abnormality Trisomy 21. For months we wait and watch, take her to the Dr. Friedman, the pediatric cardiologist, give Stella medication, hold our breath. Finally, in late spring, the doctor gives us the news: the time is now. To avoid damage to her lungs from pulmonary hypertension, our daughter must undergo open heart surgery to repair the defect.
The heart is a braid of membranes, veins and tissue—a muscle and an organ. My heart has a hole it in, as surely as hers does. Hers can heal. Can mine?

i wrote something

Thanks to my friends for the support!
The Difference
My daughter is adorable. She is sweet. She is smart. She has a very strong will of her own. She is capable of a great deal of things. She is growing. She always amazes us. She sometimes disappoints us, but that’s more about our expectations than anything.
She makes us feel overwhelmed. She presents a serious challenge, which we often do not think we are up to. She needs a lot, lot, lot of attention, time, patience.

Hmm. Which of these things could not also be said of our son? None, of course. But there is a world of difference. Bobby is bright, sensitive, highly aware of all sensory input, a spongelike entity who spurts out sound bites of our own voices when squeezed too hard. Stella, on the other hand, is “special.” She is “developmentally disabled.” Stella has Down syndrome.
The main difference is in our expectations. Bobby will excel, learn, grow, go to college, maybe even graduate school (both of his parents and most of his grandparents have advanced degrees), move out on his own, perhaps get married, perhaps have children. If all goes well, of course, which one never knows, but there is a great likelihood that at least some of the above will come to pass.
Stella’s future is a big question mark. She had early intervention, but she is still struggling with oral communication. She is nearly six years old and so limited in verbal expression that I am purchasing a sign language DVD for her today online. Her limitations produce a great deal of frustration for all of us—she ends up letting us know what she wants and needs in other ways, usually by tantrum or other protest, often physical. She is a lot like a child of two or three, “mine,” “me do it,” still not able to express herself in words and reason with us.