Writing Through Emotional Upheaval by Pamela Mytroen

     Our family took a hit in March and yet I was required to continue writing blogs, articles, and to edit pieces. At first I told my husband that I would never write again. (Picture the Drama Queen). Anxiety made it impossible for me to sleep or focus. But after a few days I was able to sit down and concentrate on a piece that needed editing. I found that if I compartmentalized, I could carry on. Now, when I write, I set a timer and I block out those relentless questions of what the future holds. "If I want to dwell on it later, I can," I tell myself. While this may not be the best approach to dealing with stress, it is working for me.

     There are still times when the situation flares up and pulls me down, and I must confess that I just can't get my focus to write. This is not something that is going to go away; I will likely be wading through it for years. Somehow I need to learn perseverance and push through. There are deadlines to meet and people waiting for my words. I can't just give up.

     I recently read the autobiography of Marina NeMat, "Prisoner of Tehran" (Penguin Canada, 2007). It was a difficult season of writing for her as it meant re-opening memories that she had wanted to seal off forever. But she wrote it so that the world might see what goes on at Evin Prison in Iran. She wanted the truth to be told.

"Prisoner of Tehran". A memoir by Marina Nemat. 

     Shortly after she and her husband immigrated to Canada, she met an Iranian friend at a dinner party in Toronto and by coincidence discovered that they had been imprisoned together in Evin. After a few phone calls back and forth, and talks about their time as political prisoners, Marina's new friend said she didn't want to talk to her anymore. "I can't do it. It's too hard. It's too painful," she said, her voice choked by tears. Marina understood and didn't argue, but it was this type of silence that had held her captive. "She had made her choice--and I had made mine" (page 4).  Marina felt that her own story needed to be told. She continued to write about the atrocities she endured and survived. Some of the emotions she experienced were shame, guilt, fear, and deep sorrow as she unlocked the carefully guarded memories, yet she carried on and finished writing her story so that the world might know the truth.

     How do you persevere through life's interruptions? What techniques do you use to write under the heavy cloak of emotional turmoil?

Pamela Mytroen

My sweet grand-daughter born in April with Mama watching closely in the background!

   

     

Inventing the Truth by Rose McCormick Brandon

 

 

Recently, I wrote about a hospital stay. I was ten. Left in a big city facility by my parents. I begged my mother not to leave. Of course, she had to and I was forced to find my way among strangers for the first time in my life. That’s if I don’t count beginning school, an event that was more catastrophic for me than for most children.

In the children’s ward, I made friends. Most were mobile and reasonably healthy, except for the boy in the iron lung. This contraption appeared as harmless as a knocked-over garbage can but it wheezed like a dragon. By ten, I knew a lot about polio, the disease that had forced a boy my age inside the dragon.

 I told the story of my hospital stay and the boy stuck inside the dragon as I remembered it, all the while, conscious that if I were to visit that children’s ward, and even if it hadn’t been remodeled since my stay, I likely wouldn’t recognize it. Its windows, walls, its cheery nursing staff, the pajama-clad children I scurried with after evening visiting hours are vivid in my mind Yet, I know if I connected with one of the other children, whose names are all forgotten, they would say, “That’s not how I remember it.”

            Our memories are uniquely ours. We can tell our stories however we choose to because they are our memories. Another family member may say they remember it otherwise and tell the same story from their perspective. Both are valid.

            Five people can attend the same event. Each one will leave with a different story. One has a conversation with a stranger that colors their entire experience. Another meets an old friend. One eavesdrops. One is aware of color, innuendo and drama. Another takes away facts only.

            In writing our stories, we should be aware that someone else’s experience of the same event may differ. That doesn’t invalidate our take-away. And we must write it, not to please another person, but to let the reader know how our memory of a certain event has shaped us.

            William Zinsser says, “Memoir is how we validate ourselves.” Therefore, our experiences must always remain our story. We have to get over the idea that someone else will read them and disagree with our take on how events unfolded.

            About telling our stories, Annie Dilliard writes, “The act of writing about an experience takes so much longer and is so much more intense than the experience itself that you’re left only with what you have written, just as the snapshots of your vacation become more real than your vacation.”

I find that as Christians we can be so dedicated to a facts only view of life that we miss out on serendipitous experiences. We can write our personal stories freely only if we refuse to care who reads them.

            My hospital story ended up being about the first time I realized that good writing hums. In the tiny children’s ward library, I discovered The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain’s words hummed in my chest – it was a marvelous discovery that lasted beyond my short hospital stay and remains with me today. I’m guessing that no other child in that hospital left with the same experience as I did.

******

Rose McCormick Brandon's latest book, Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children, was published in July, 2014. She has written many magazine articles for publications in Canada, U.S. and Australia.

 

Digging For Answers in the Past - Rose McCormick Brandon

In January I started writing Sandra Nunn's life/love story. And . . . a thousand cheers . . . by Labour Day the final word was tweaked .

I've written a few magazine stories for others but this is only the second time I've written a client's book length memoir. The greatest difficulty? Finding the person's voice, letting their personality, and not mine, shine through the words. Sandra is funny and direct with a dollop of quirky. And her story is unusual. She stayed in a loveless marriage far longer than anyone would expect. She and husband Ernie fell in love in their fifties. (They married at eighteen.)

Sandra couldn't tell me why she stayed with Ernie. She didn't know. As her writer, it was my job to find out - I've always loved detective work - so with lots of prodding questions, I made her talk . . . fortunately, talking is one of her favourite activities.

I dug through Sandra's life until I found out why she stayed with a man who didn't love or want her. I dug all the way to Germany, the land of Sandra's birth. There, the answer became as obvious as a coffee stain on a white blouse. Sandra's parents were part of a child immigration program. Both were forcibly removed from their Ukrainian families - Walter at 14, Martha 12 - and sent to Germany to become farm workers.
Sandra developed, or inherited, probably a little of both, a steely determination to cope with adverse circumstances..
Giving up isn't in Sandra's genes. (Until I met Sandra, I'd never heard of the thousands of abducted Polish and Ukrainian teenagers that were sent to Germany. I know a lot about the British Child Immigration plan and write about it at: http:littleimmigrants.wordpress.com)

As much as I tried to maintain Sandra's voice, I couldn't resist channeling some of my thoughts through her. I saw the hardships of Sandra's parents, and they were many, through a different lens than she did. Their trust in God and determination to overcome  gave them an indomitable spirit, which they passed on to Sandra.
Sandra and I had many sessions in my living room. For hours, she talked while I tapped on my laptop. The result? Sandra's story of late love is a message of hope to all couples, even those with semi well-functioning marriages.

The book is on target for publication in late Fall. Stay tuned for more details . . . .

Rose McCormick Brandon’s articles and essays are published in magazines, books, newspapers and devotionals in Canada and the U.S. She is an award-winning writer who specializes in personal experience, faith, life stories and the British Home Child Immigration period of Canadian history. Rose is a regular contributor to several national publications, including The Testimony, The Evangel and Daily Boost. Her work appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul and other compilations of personal stories. Rose is married to Doug and lives in Caledonia, Ontario. She has three adult children. Visit her blogs: The Promise of Home (http:littleimmigrants.wordpress.com) and Listening to My Hair Grow (http:rosemccormickbrandon.wordpress.com). Contact address: rosembrandon@yahoo.ca. 

Once Upon a Sandbox— Carolyn Wilker

After attending my first writer’s conference in 2001, and joining the Word Guild in 2002, I decided to try different kinds of writing to find what I most enjoyed.

My first publication credits had been informational articles. I wrote book reviews, children’s stories, opinion editorials, family stories and poetry. While I found markets for my reviews and poetry, locating a market for family stories seemed elusive, and so the stories remained stowed away in my computer, and backed up on discs, until the day I would bring them to light.

In my early days as writer and member of The Word Guild, co-founder N. J. Lindquist, reminded members that eventually writers need to get up in front of an audience and speak. Early in 2004, knees knocking and with much trepidation, I joined Toastmasters and embarked on the journey of stage time, so that I would be ready whenever the opportunity presented itself.

It took me awhile to call myself Writer, but on the journey, I found I liked to tell stories, which led me to the Story Barn in Baden, Ontario, and then the Storyteller’s Guild. I attended Open Story Night and told regularly. I was hooked on storytelling and listening to stories.

One evening at the Barn, we celebrated the launch of Latitudes of Home, written by fellow storyteller, Sally Russell, about her years of growing up in Georgia. I always enjoyed hearing her tell stories and so I bought her book. I was not disappointed.

The more I read, the more I pondered what if. What if I assembled some of the stories I had written? What if I wrote some of the stories I told so that readers could pick up a collection anytime they wanted to? Who would be interested? Judging by the growing movement in storytelling, and how eagerly listeners at the Barn received the stories, I thought there’d be a sufficient audience.

And so I gathered what I had written, wrote others and put them together in a manuscript—stories about rural living and what it meant to me as a child, recollections of chores and learning to cook, whitewashing the barn, taking care of my 4-H garden, and pet and children antics. I discovered that I needed more material to fill a book and so I wrote more.

While working on a family history the same year, we talked about how things were in my grandparents and my parents’ earlier years. I asked questions and made lists of possible stories, rewrote and revised stories with the help of The Word Guild online critique group. Thus began the manuscript for Once Upon a Sandbox that was released in June.

While my manuscript was under consideration and afterwards, I made a greater effort to get up and speak at my Toastmasters club, entering contests in the club last winter and representing the Energetics at the area International speech contest. I worked on new stories for telling and shared them. I also wrote out a tentative plan of where I could speak and promote my book.

With my first launch behind me and information from our latest Write! Canada conference still whirling around in my head, I add to my promotion and marketing plan, limited only by my imagination and resources. As in any project, it takes one purposeful step at a time, and even a marketing plan gets done. One step, two, and three— I’m on my way. Here’s to Once Upon a Sandbox, a memoir.

For more information on Once Upon a Sandbox or to follow my events, go here.

The Bargain (In Memory of Lawrie Jonat) - Arends

My dad, Lawrie Jonat, passed away July 12, 2010.  In honour of his memory, I thought I'd use my TWG blogpost this month to tell you a story about him.  (This story is excerpted and adapted from my book WRESTING WITH ANGELS.)  Thanks.

The Bargain

Sometime in the early 1980s, my father announced at dinner that he would selling our blue four-door Impala.  It was a momentous decision, and the entire family was very excited by the news.  The most spectacular part was my father's promise that, provided he got a good price for the old car, he was going to go out and buy another vehicle--brand-new, right off the lot.  He placed an ad in the local paper and we all started hoping and praying for a cooperative buyer.

The ad had only been out a few days when a man called to say he'd be very interested in having a look at the car.  My dad invited him to come over early that evening.  The Impala was parked in the street in front of the house, so my brothers and I determined there would be a pretty good view of the proceedings from the bay window in the living room.  The three of us were lined up as inconspicuously as possible on the living room couch when the man arrived.

He seemed decent enough, open-faced and unassuming, and he brought his family--a jumbly brood of giddy kids and an only slightly harried-looking wife.  They came spilling up the front walk to our house, but my father headed outside before they reached the front door.  The grown-ups shook hands while the kids bounced around them in anticipation.

My brothers and I tried to assess the prospective buyers from our lookout on the couch.  The entire family was dressed in clean but threadbare clothing.  One of the boys was in a pair of shorts that were obviously too big for him, cinced up at the waist with a belt that was tied in front like a rope.  Two of the other children had clearly outgrown their jackets; their skinny arms extended like pipe cleaners past the cuffs of their sleeves.  One could only assume that the family's hand-me-down system had fallen a little out of sync with each child's rate of growth.  It seemed that maybe they weren't rich.

From the way the family approached the car, you might have thought it was the Holy Grail.  They circled around it reverently--from our vantage point it appeared they might actually be oohing and aahing--and even when the boy in the gunnysack shorts kicked a front tire he did it with respectful restraint.  We saw the man ask our dad something--our father nodded and handed him the keys.  The entire family jumped into the Impala while the man started the engine and then the car began to slowly roll down the street for a test drive.

My father came back up to the house rather nonchalantly, but when we stepped inside the front door his excitement was visible.  "They're really interested.  I'm pretty sure they're going to buy it."  My brothers and I started to gleefully debate the make of our brand-new car.  After only a few minutes, the Impala came creeping back up to the front of the house.  We scrambled back to the couch as our father headed outside.

The kids poured out of the car and stood vibrating together in a nervous huddle.  The man and my father began to talk.  They kept turning to face the car, so we couldn't read their lips.  The conversation seemed to be taking a long time--our tension was mounting.  My dad was shaking his head, and then he walked back towards the house.  No money had changed hands.  Our hearts began to sink.

"Joy!" my father hollered, summoning my mother from the kitchen.  "We have a problem."  My mom met him in the front hall.  "Don't they want it?" she asked, sounding as dejected as we felt.  "No, they want it," my dad replied tensely, and he started shaking his head again.  "They want to pay what I asked for it in the newspaper.  That's way too much!"

My brothers and I were incredulous.  Our father was upset because his buyer wanted to give him too much money?  It didn't seem possible.  This was the same man we had seen haggle relentlessly for better deals with everyone he'd ever done business with.  We'd watched him bring Tijuana leather and pottery vendors to their knees.  He was a banker.  He liked to save and earn money.  It was his sport.  What was going on?

"They're supposed to negotiate," my father said petulantly.  My mother thought for a minute.  "Tell them the AM radio doesn't work, so you're taking off 200 dollars," she suggested.  My father looked relieved.  He went back outside.

My mother returned to the kitchen.  My brothers and I sank back onto the couch and watched, stunned, as our dad went on a mission to talk his buyer into a lower price.  He conversed with the man and woman for a couple of minutes.  Then he turned on his heel and strode purposefully back up to the house.  We still hadn't seen any cash.

"Joy," called my dad as he came through the door.  She reemerged from the kitchen.  "Did you reduce the price?' she asked, the beginnings of a smile tugging at her lips.  "Yes," he said with a sigh of exasperation, "but it's still too much.  I really don't think they can afford it.  And I've just found out they're missionaries up north, for crying out loud.  They're so excited because they'll be able to use the car to drive families back and forth to Sunday school."  By this point in his monologue, my father had begun to appear a little desperate.  He was pacing across the tiles in the entrance way, and there was sweat on his forehead.  "Joy," he said, an edge of panic in his voice, "they think the Impala is the most amazing car they've ever seen because it has electric windows."

My mom was laughing, just a little, very gently.  She kissed my father on the cheek.  "Tell them one of the air vents is blocked.  And we don't know where the passenger-side floor mat is.  Take off as much as you want, honey."  My father nodded, raising his head and straightening his back a little, happy to have the weight off his shoulders.  He headed back outside.

There was a mild argument--the man no doubt trying to talk my father into a higher price.  After a few minutes of discussion, the man pulled out his wallet (finally!) and handed my father some cash.  My father did not even count it.  The man grabbed my father's hand and shook it enthusiastically.  The kids began arguing about who was going to go home in the wreck they had come in, and who would get to ride in their "new" Impala.  My father strolled back up the porch steps, looking just as delighted as he had the time he got three huge Mexican flowerpots for 70 percent off.  "They love the car," he said, beaming his way into the house.  "To them it's a Cadillac.  Better than a Cadillac.  It's like the Bond car or something." 

We turned back to the window as the family floated away in a two-car parade.  And even as watched our brand-new, right-off-the-lot vehicle drive away with them, my dad was grinning from ear to ear, and I'm pretty sure we were too.

- Carolyn Arends

In memory of Lawrence Dwight Wildfred Jonat, August 5, 1941 - July 12, 2010

Story excerpted from WRESTING WITH ANGELS, by Carolyn Arends (2009 Winner for Book - Life Stories at The Word Guild Awards).  The book is available HERE. 

The lost art of letter writing

Recently I read a wonderful memoir by an elderly friend of my mother's: Russia and Beyond: One Family's Journey 1908-1935 by Margaret Zarudny Freeman. It tells an amazing story of her family's survival during the Russian revolution. She was the oldest of six children and wrote with amazing detail how they coped in western Siberia, helped by a couple of loyal servants after their father fled the country to work first in China, then in Japan. While he was away their mother was arrested by the Bolsheviks and later shot.

Here's a description of the book from Amazon:

Russia and Beyond is a young woman's account of herself and her family in
the chaotic years surrounding the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917-20,
followed by a long self-exile in Russo-Chinese Manchuria, and the beginnings of
a new life in America in the 1930s. A child's-eye view of violent military
events, and of unflinchingly practical responses to personal emergency and loss
- with five siblings in tow after the death of their politically victimized
mother - matures to an understanding of homeland loyalty, displacement, and
expatriation, in a more international arena. The author, now aged 97, has left
us an inspiring, sometimes chilling, but forever positive narrative of this
harsh intellectual coming of age, and of the mutual love and perseverance that
sustained her, and her young fellow survivors. A comment from Nadine Gordimer
(Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1991): "Dear Margaret, I've read your book with
growing interest and fascination, page after page. It's a remarkable evocation,
a double one: a revelation of the profound meaning of emigration not written
before, and a picture of family relationships enduring the disruptions of
historico-political disasters in what must be no less than a unique survival by
trust and love." Johannesburg, South Africa 10 August 2005

Mrs. Freeman does not spare herself in her portrayal of childhood selfishness, sibling rivalry, and conflict with adults. Her portrait of her father and mother and the servants is the stuff of great literature. One thing that struck me in reading the book was how many letters this family wrote each other. The father wrote as often as he could, even when strife, famine and dislocation made the mails unreliable. He encouraged his children to write him often, and saved the letters. First of all, it amazed me how much family togetherness was stressed no matter what distances separated people. Today, we may live in the same house, but so often everyone's in their own room with their own computer or TV set, often not even having meals together.

Secondly, those letters, saved through periods of unemployment, uncertainty, travel and danger, provided a treasure trove for Mrs. Freeman when she wrote this wonderful memoir.

What's happened to letter writing today? We send emails now, but mostly emails are short, a paragraph or two. And how can we depend on saving them? I have lost my saved email when hard drives have crashed. I have other saved email on hard disks that are soon going to be obsolete on new computers. Many of us have the little portable hard drives that look like squat pens, but who knows how long that electronic format will last.

We are in a period of such rapid technological change that even trying to write a memoir or a novel that specifically mentions a certain kind of technology can either date you pretty fast, or confuse readers. How many teenagers today would know what a floppy disk is? Or an eight-track tape?

I find it hard and cumbersome to write letters. I send the occasional hand written card, but even that is difficult. I am addicted to convenience and have trouble slowing down to write a long, thoughtful, observant letter. What I used to devote to letter writing, I now devote to blogging.

Maybe I have a wider audience in the blogs, but who knows whether 25 years from now, any of what I've written here will be accessible.

We're paying a price for convenience and today I confess my addiction to it. And, this Lenten season, my feeling of contrition makes me aware this addiction is not a good thing. The book also made me realize is that too often I don't take the time to get to know the people I meet. For example, I had met Mrs. Freeman several times over the years and had no idea of her remarkable story.

As we live in our virtual worlds, are we taking time to connect with the real people in our midst?
How alive will our writing be if our main contact is through computers, monitors and appliances? Do you miss the days of letter writing?