Evening Class by Rose McCormick Brandon

I stood at the library counter to check out a book by one of my favorite fiction authors.

“Did you know Maeve Binchy died?” the woman at the desk asked.

I hadn’t heard. As happens when favourite authors die, I felt a twinge of personal loss. No more quirky Irish characters tripping through Dublin’s streets with the threads of Maeve’s stories unwinding behind them. I expressed my regret to the librarian who was pleased to find someone to share her grief.

“I went to Dublin to visit my brother,” she said. “When I was there someone pointed out Maeve’s house to me. I saw her sitting in her study at a window that looked out on the Irish Sea.” 

A writer engaged in the business of writing – a treasured sight.

Our private memorial ended and I left the library with Binchy’s book, “Evening Class,” tucked under my arm. In the story, several unlikely Irish people enroll in a night class to learn Italian.

My reading of the book coincided with the beginning of my own evening class.

At the first class, I asked my students, “What is it that you want to write?”

Each person had a story to tell. I had expected that. What surprised me was the intense tragedy of their stories. Three of them had faced life-altering traumas. For them, the time had come to put those experiences in publishable form.

After that first evening class, sorrow for their sufferings kept me awake.

At our second meeting, students read early drafts aloud. In worshipful voices, they told of transforming experiences. Each had been to a corner of hell and found God there. They had poured their pain onto the page.

Now, they struggled to transition to the miracle phase of their stories.

Unlike Maeve Binchy’s humorous class my little gathering’s atmosphere hummed with holiness because the Writer of Redemption Stories sat at our work table.

A twenty-something wrote about a bleak night in the city’s downtown core that became a turning point. She wrote of God healing her from addictions. Her sufferings as a child would make most people turn to drink and drugs. Today, she’s sober and at peace. She wept as she read her story. The rest of us wept with her.

The intersection where our stories collide with God’s story is called Grace. Grace overlooks our dependencies, takes pity on our sufferings, reaches into the darkness that shrouds and rescues us. Grace hugs the unhuggable. Grace sees the crying child within and doesn't judge by outward behaviour. People need the grace stories my evening class is producing. Readers' hearts will ache and rejoice when they see God’s byline embedded in these stories.

If you met them, the darlings in my evening class, you wouldn't believe where they've been. You might gape as I almost did when one by one they read their stories.

Maeve Binchy's Evening Class is made up of off-beat characters who entertain me. I love the lilt of their language, their odd approach to life. But they are fictional. My evening class consists of real people who have waded through darkness, endured pain to get to the place where their God stories shine. They’re willing to relive the suffering, which is what they must do to write their stories.

Why would they willingly wade back into the sorrow? So the world will know that Jesus is still writing grace stories.

Nothing surpasses the power of the personal story to impact lives. Our testimonies begin long before we become aware of them and they will continue long after we’ve left earth . . . if we write them.

 

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Rose McCormick Brandon is the author of four books: Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children, One Good Word Makes all the Difference, He Loves Me Not He Loves Me (with Sandra Nunn), Vanished (with Shirley Brown). Her articles, personal experiences, short stories and devotionals are published in many periodicals in Canada, U.S. and Australia. Visit her blogs: Listening to my Hair Grow and Promises of Home (Stories of Canada's British Home Children). Purchase her books at her website, Writing from he Heart.

Contact Rose McCormick Brandon at rosembrandon@yahoo.ca

 

 

What Story is God Writing in Your Life? by Rose McCormick Brandon

 A few weeks ago, I began teaching an evening class called, Write Your God Story.
At the first class, we sat at a round table and introduced ourselves to one another. Then I asked, "What stories do you want to tell?" I nodded to the woman on my left to begin. She told of leading a double life; nursing by day, drinking by night, sitting in the pew like a holy person on Sundays. She continued this hypocritical existence until one night she was stopped by police and her car impounded. Fearful of losing her job, the following Sunday she knelt alone in the church sanctuary and begged God to free her from alcohol. In one holy moment, the need for alcohol left her and she hasn't had a drink since. That's only part of her story. The bulk is about what drove her to alcohol in the first place. Her story made us all teary.
Tears continued as my students told of childhood sufferings, sexual abuse, addictions and abandonment. Profound sadness for them kept me awake that night.
I instructed them to choose one experience and begin writing about it. The following week, they took turns reading. That's when I learned that each had had a transforming experience, a moment in time when God had swooped into their lives and rescued them.
This transforming moment is the nugget of their God stories.
My students are writing their stories and I hope to move them all to the publishing stage. With God's grace this will happen. People need to read their stories. Readers' hearts will be moved as mine is being moved. If you saw them, you wouldn't believe where they've come from. You might gape as I almost did when one by one they read their work.
The Bible tells a story of Jesus healing a man of mental illness. Afterwards, the man wanted to travel with Jesus but Jesus told him to go home and tell his family and everyone he knew about the miracle he'd experienced. (Read this story in Mark 5)
That's what my evening class is doing through writing their stories - telling about the new life Jesus has given them.
What story is God writing in your life? Is it a story of finding daily strength to face difficult circumstances? Whatever it is, don't let anything diminish the power of your personal story.
God is writing a story in each life. A story of Grace. Grace overlooks our faults, takes pity on our sufferings, reaches into the darkness and rescues us. Grace hugs the unhuggable. Grace sees the inside and doesn't judge the outside. Each of our small stories has a special place in His big story. Each one is important.
Even if you consider yourself a poor writer, take the time to sit down and write out what God has done for you.
Then pass your story on . . .
One of my students has been published already. Here's a link to Shari James's story.

http://writingfromtheheart.webs.com

Rose McCormick Brandon 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 married to Doug, an investment consultant, with whom she also co-authors articles on finances. Visit her blogs: The Promise of Home and Listening to My Hair Grow. Contact address: rosembrandon

Inventing the Truth - Rose McCormick Brandon

Recently, I wrote about a hospital stay. I was ten. Left in s 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, healthy for the most part. One boy was in an iron lung. This contraption appeared as harmless as a fallen garbage can but it wheezed like a dragon. And by ten, I knew a lot about polio, the disease that forced a boy my age inside the dragon.

I told my story as I remembered it, all the while, conscious that if I were to visit that children’s ward, and if it hadn’t been remodeled since my stay, that I likely wouldn’t recognize it. It’s vivid in my mind, its windows, walls, its cheery nursing staff, the pajama-clad children I scurried with after evening visiting hours. 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. Much of what I write is personal experience. I can tell my story however I choose because it’s my story, my memory. The tough part of telling our stories is when our memories also belong to someone else, another family member, for instance. They may say, “The event didn’t happen like that at all.”

Five family members 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 memory of the same event may differ. That doesn’t invalidate our take-away. It’s our story, after all. And we must write it, not to please another person, but to let the reader know how the memory 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.” We can write our personal stories freely 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 one else in that hospital left with the same experience as I did.