Memoir, The Art of (The living of)

Well hey there, stranger. Nine months into 2015 and here I am, out of nowhere. I had not been missing the blog at all most of this year, but in the last few weeks, I've had the urge again. The urge to both journal, and share, and I'm not on Twitter, and Instagram doesn't favor those long comments, and then, hey, forehead slap, what about MY BLOG?

Duh.

These posts, whenever they come, will likely be short little microbursts rather than Big Deep Posts.

And so:

I'm reading The Art of Memoir, by one of my literary heroes, Mary Karr. (I wrote a big gushy post about Karr awhile back in this post.)  Suffice it to say that though she's from East Texas and I'm from Southern California, her people are my people in fundamental ways.

The book is a fast read, but I'm purposely reading it in short ten or fifteen minute bursts. My current morning ritual is to get the kids off to school, make coffee & breakfast, read a writing/craft book while eating, then write until I have to go to work -- which only gives me about half an hour of writing time, most days. But routine is a topic for another time.

Last Tuesday wasn't a great day, or evening. I pissed off a friend by bailing out on a reading I'd said I'd attend in OC. I attended another reading, in much closer Fallbrook. Sometimes stepping out my insular bubble is a good thing, but that night I felt raw, pointless, and very alone in my weird writer-head.

And I had this thought, ringing through me, that sometimes the writing is not about charging my laptop, the daily word count, the submissions, the rejections, the research, the reaching out for community.

Some days, the writing is all about the hard things, the brokenness, the sadness, the isolation, the swirl of shit that makes me feel I need to write a memoir in the first place.

That was Tuesday.

Love and Eydie Gorme

Last Friday, a chill went through me when I learned that Eydie Gorme had passed away at 84.  Celebrities die all the time, and sometimes it gives us pause, and more often we say, "who? Oh....right. Her/Him."

But sometimes we get a little misty and take a longer pause, like the last time I was inspired to write about music.  If George Jones was the artist who most reminds me of my dad (for so many reasons), than it's probably the sound of Eydie Gorme who most makes me think of my mother. Well, her and Johnny Mathis.

Eydie Gorme reminds me of so, so many things. Of being a child in both my parent's and grandparent's homes, sitting and listening to their stacks of albums.  Of late Sunday brunches that my dad worked over all morning, eggs benedict with creamy cheese sauce and Bloody Mary's (for them) and Sunny Delite for me, both served in tall glasses that he'd chilled first in the freezer. And Eydie Gorme and her Amor album on the hi-fi. 

It's the Amor album that we all loved best, and by "we all" I mean most of the members on my mom's side of the family.  As I have (or haven't?) mentioned here before, I'm half-Mexican American, on my mom's side. If I mention this, people who aren't familiar with the cultural makeup of Southern California will ask, Ohhh. So where's your family from?" implying that my mother was born in Mexico or a Latin American country. But no, my mother's family are from here, from this native ground of Santa Ana winds and palm trees and balmy Christmas mornings.

(If you are from SoCal, or have at least lived here long enough, you know that half-breeds like me, who don't look or sound at all Mexican, are a dime a dozen. Turn over any Mission tortilla, and there we are.)

What this all has to do with Eydie Gorme is that I find it funny and ironic, how a white girl from New York City produced an album that’s so beloved in so many families like my own.  What this all has to do with me is that, in a way, Eydie Gorme is the reason I'm writing a memoir, rather than sticking to my first love, fiction. 

Also: a fiction (mostly) piece that I did get published is titled "Don't Go to Strangers." Which is the name of the title track from this album, another fixture in my household:

That album, and my story, which is also thinly-veiled memoir, are another story altogether. Which is why I'm finally writing that memoir. So many stories to tell.

For now, here's "Piel Canela", that first song on the Amor album that starts playing when the record needle drops into the grooves.  I know all the songs by heart and sing along --- phonetically.  I still have no idea of most of what she's singing about.  Except, you know, love. What else is there to sing about?

R.I.P., Eydie. 

Writing News

Remember back in late April & May, when I talked a lot about my writing, how I was working on a particular piece and feeling all braggy about sitting at my kitchen table and writing almost every morning?

I talked more about it back in this post, how I was working on an essay about shopping, and the department stores of my youth.

Well, last week I received word that my  essay "I Dream of Department Stores" has been accepted for inclusion in a book of personal essays, all themed around different takes on shopping. The anthology will be published by Seal Press, a small yet well-established publishing house out of Portland that specializes in women's interests.

Actually, I knew that I was potentially in as a "yes" awhile back, through e-mail correspondence with the editors, and I felt especially writerly when I received the (minimal) edits for the piece last month, which meant I was working with an editor. Heady stuff!

But I knew it was Officially Official when I received my contributors contract last week, which outlines the details of my publishing rights and payment (again, minimal) and all that. Also, I knew it was official when in another e-mail, the editor told the contributors, "Yes! Feel free to tell everyone!"

This is not the first time my writing has been published. I've had a few short stories appear in small literary journals (including this one), and had some journalism published way, way long ago in the OC Weekly. But this was certainly the first contract I've ever received, and it will easily be the most I've been paid so far for putting pen to paper. It also goes without saying that this is the first book that I've been in, which is the most exciting part of it all.

The best and worst part is that this is my first piece of memoir that I've had accepted. Best, because this is the genre that I'm working in now, and it feels great to have this finished piece accepted so easily (easily, after the accumulation of rejection slips for my short stories that were eventually published).  Worst, because its memoir. It's all true, all just out there. I was driving around last week, and the sudden realization that the names of some of my family members would be out there in the world made me want to pass out. Or take it all back: "wait, can I change some names here??"  But I'm not going to change names, or take anything back.

The book, titled The Dressing Room, won't be published until the fall of 2014. That feels like a long time, maybe even long enough to  work up to telling my extended family. (Ha!) In the meantime, this news is a great, great boost to my motivation to keep going with memoir, and telling my family's particular story.  (Although I've been incapable so far this summer at figuring out how to write with the kids at home.)

Onward!
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All photos from my Instagram account. Also, it's July 1 and I'm in total denial about the demise of Google Reader. (As of this morning, it was still working.) Follow me on Instagram at "readingnest1," my Facebook page (where I always link to my new blog posts), or at Feedly, though I haven't actually figured out how to properly navigate around there yet.

New Mornings

Hola, peeps.  This isn't even a real post, just a fly-by.  The kids went back to school yesterday, finally, after their 2-week spring break. I commemorated this event by switching up my morning schedule -- instead of plopping my bum here at my desk chair and communing with my interwebs, I'm now plopping my bum at the kitchen table and trying to write.

I've been revving up my writing brain, post kid-morning-chaos, by first reading a couple essays in the new anthology Why We Write, by Meredith Maran.  It's good.

Actually, I'm not trying to write. That's too self-effacing. I am writing.  Writing is being done. It's all first-draft stuff, long-hand, and will undergo much revision and cringing when I type it into my laptop. I ran out of my preferred yellow legal pads, but I didn't get bound up with silly writer-superstitious stuff and let that stop me.  (But I do need to go buy more legal pads --- as a lefty, it's a drag trying to write with a spiral notebook.)

I have a lot of topics I want to share on the blog -- spring break fun, like our hike and our trip to Disneyland/California Adventure.  And other things: what I've been reading, and that stack of old, favorite memoirs & non-fiction that I pulled out of my garage, and even some parenting struggles as Tucker has entered another new and challenging phase of crazy kid hoarding (except now it seems he's trying to hoard time itself).

But since I'm not 8 years old and realize that one cannot, in fact, save time in a bottle, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to tackle it all right now.  In my new post-writing retreat mode, I realize that the writing has to come first. Not that the blog isn't "writing," but it's not the kind I need, or want to focus on.

I'm certainly not going anywhere -- I just need a little space to work out my new routines and fit it all in -- the writing, the blogging, the laundry, the spring-cleaning of crammed closets, and the trips to Target -- for cereal and dinner ideas and new yellow legal pads.

In the meantime, I joined the 21st century and finally created an account on Instagram. You can follow me @ ReadingNest1  (Because plain old ReadingNest was taken, what?)  And I guess if I'm going to be sharing my pics, I should probably try to clean my camera lens, too. That is not the new fancy "Vaseline" filter on the photos here. 

Back soon.

Open Any Vein...

Another book post.  (I had one of my William Morris/Thursday posts lined up, but Jules isn't hosting her usual link-up this week.)

So instead, I'll tell you what I ordered on Amazon Prime last night.  (Amazon Prime is an awfully cool and addictive thing, and as a result, we get deliveries nearly every day. 98% are for my husband, who always wants needs some small electronic component or geegaw, either for work or the house.)  (And for sure, nobody paid me a dime to say that.)

I ordered Julia Cameron's Vein of Gold, another of her books on creative exercises and mind tricks to get yourself writing (or painting, or dancing, whatever your creative itch may be). I never buy diet books, or self-help books, or any of the sort of non-fiction, commercial "life changing" twaddle that's always stacked up in the front of my local Barnes & Noble.  (Okay, so a long time ago, I bought a Depak Chopra book.  For years afterward, my husband teased me about the status of my "vata.")   But Julia Cameron has been very helpful to me in getting motivated and tackling my fears in the creative realm.  I've about wrung all the inspiration I can get out of The Artist's Way, so it's time for a new infusion of butt-kicking.  And the reviews I've read on Vein of Gold make it sound like it's very good for "taking it to the next level."

Since the beginning of the year, and my renewed dedication to the blog, I've been so immersed in the blog and the internet and trying to find my online groove that I've sorely ignored what I consider my true writing self.  After I lost my handwritten essay back in September, something soured in me and I stopped writing. It's stupid. I wish I wasn't such a timid, twitchy little forest creature when it comes to writing, but I am: I come out into the sun-filled meadow of writing, and then some small event (or thought process) scares me, and back I dive into the underbrush.

So I ordered the Vein of Gold to whip me into shape, to force some self-discipline into my days. I'll post an update on my progress sometime & let you know how that goes.

Second, I ordered Planting Dandelions, by Kyran Pittman. Pittman's writing trajectory from poet, to mom, to blogger, to writing some articles for Good Housekeeping and then getting a book deal, is one that I can certainly relate to, and certainly admire. I'd been a fan of her old blog for a long time, and it was exciting to see it all unfolding in real time, the hard times, the doubts, and then the opportunities that have since come her way.  It's time that I finally read her memoir, now that's it been out for over a year.

Image from kyranpittman.com

I'm still working through my library haul, so it'll be a couple of weeks before I get to Pittman's book. But I hope to crack open and start tackling Vein of Gold right away.  Crap, you know what that means: morning pages, here I come.

What I Didn't Write (For Weeks and Weeks)

Like the book title says: I could tell you stories, man.  I could fill your head with my busy busy tales of  end-of-school class parties and field days, and planning a summer vacation and then going on said vacation.  How four weeks (already!) into summer break, we are lazy-lazy most mornings, the daughter and I both waking and reaching for our eyeglasses and books on respective night-stands, long legs in shortie pj's tangled in the sheets.  And also: swimming at the neighborhood pool, blueberry picking, a lemonade stand. Etc., etc. 

Excuses, excuses, all.  I have so many for not writing.  Remember a few months back, I very ambitiously announced a weekly post featuring a snippet of what I'd written that week? Yeah, that. 

Well, here is the truth of why I stopped writing. It has nothing, nothing to do with my busy busy days.  It has everything to do with a thought. One thought.  Or two.

First thought:  I pictured a family member reading my memoir.  No matter that my nascent memoir is literally years from ever reaching publication stage.  The family member wasn't my mom or sister (although that thought is scary, too).  No, it was the image of another family member reading my someday-memoir, their lips pressed tight into a thin white line of anger and disapproval, that scared me silent.

Second thought: the second thought was more of an issue than a lone thought -- but the issue is that I wrote far enough into one section, that I ran smack up against one of the "Big Events" that affected my childhood.  Big event, big repercussions for my and my family's life...and reader, I was sore afraid. 

So, in a word: Fear.  I became afraid to write any more, any further, any deeper into the story of my childhood and my family. Fear of family reaction, and my own fear of writing it all down, even for myself.   I'm working through it: I have my trusty The Artist's Way on hand, and I'm trying to stay grounded in the present, and not fill my head with (too many) dark imaginings.

I Could Tell You Stories, by Patricia Hampl, has been illuminating in ways both helpful and cautionary.   I think that Hampl is just terrific, one of the best memoirists around. A couple years back, I wrote about her book, The Florist's Daughter, here.  I Could Tell You Stories is a collection of essays about the memoir form, and I immediately connected with how she describes the compulsion toward memoir for the writer, as opposed to fiction:

"Memorists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to "tell a story."  They want to tell it all -- the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself.  That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought that flows beyond the confines of narrative and proves every life to be not only an isolated story line but a bit of the cosmos, spinning and streaming into the great, ungraspable pattern of existence.  Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story."

Yes! Precisely! This was the illuminating part, putting words to why I feel the compulsion toward memoir right now: to tell it all, not just the story, the "this is what happened" part.  But then, in the last essay, "Other People's Secrets," Hampl writes of the people she has lost from her life over the years, because of her career devoted to "telling it all."  So here is the cautionary word about memoir: people will get angry. People will be hurt, surprised, betrayed even.  And usually, it is the people you least expect.  In a sort of plea to the jury, to those who have left her, Hampl writes:

"I never understood the fury my desire to commemorate brought down upon me. The sense of betrayal --- when I thought I was just saying what I saw, drawn into utterance, I truly believed, by the buoyancy of loving life, all its strange particles.  I didn't have a dark story of abuse to purvey or even a horde of delicious gossip.  I was just taking pictures, I thought.  But then, doesn't the "primitive" instinct know that the camera steals the soul?

And a few paragraphs later:

"I've lost quite a few people along the way.  And not to death.  I lose them to writing. The one who accused me of appropriating her life, the one who said he was appalled, the poet miffed by my description of his shoes, the dear elderly priest who said he thought I understood the meaning of private conversation, this one, that one. Gone, gone.  Their fading faces haven't faded at all, just receded, turned abruptly away from me, as is their right."

 Oh, crap. So yes: fear. For me, who shuns conflict and dreads confrontations, I have reached a rather thorny bridge. I'm determined to cross it, but perhaps I won't be displaying the process as publicly as I'd planned. No more "What I Wrote," with accompanying photos.  The kids have five more weeks left of their "summer break" (how I hate that they return to school on August 10th, right when the heat really starts to bear down the worst here) and I admit, I won't be working on any "real" memoir writing during these lazy weeks.  But by the end of August, I intend to get back on that horse and cross that thorny bridge and extend my awful metaphors for all they're worth.

What I Wrote (Week of 2/20)

In an attempt to keep myself honest and motivated, I've started posting at the end of each week a snippet -- usually a paragraph, maybe longer, maybe just one long convoluted sentence (I'm fond of those) -- from the writing I accomplish each week.  Also, I'm currently writing long-handed on yellow legal pads, so seeing the words typed up onto the white screen is sort of an interesting process, too.  

The new beard would prove to be the missing element needed to complete his [my dad's] image of arch raconteur.  It divided his round face, camouflaged his full cheeks, and gave a more pointed finish to a somewhat weak chin.  He'd also ceased wearing his graying curly hair in the cropped, tight afro popular in the mid-seventies, and now brushed it straight, where it fell slightly below his ears.  In what seemed a matter of months, he'd  transformed from resembling the post-Brady Bunch Robert Reed, to the gruff romantic charm of Kenny Rogers. It seemed that everyone who met my father, from this point throughout the next half-decade, would at some point make the comparison to Kenny Rogers.

Before

After. Dad's beard in the early '80s was nearly identical to Kenny's.

New Feature: What I Wrote

In an attempt to keep myself honest and motivated, I'm going to start posting each Friday a snippet -- usually a paragraph, maybe longer, maybe just one long convoluted sentence (I'm fond of those) from the writing I accomplish each week.

Also, I'm currently writing long-handed on yellow legal pads, so seeing the words typed up onto the white screen is sort of an interesting process, too.  

As I've mentioned in passing here, I'm working on a memoir -- which is sort of a cringe-inducing statement to make. Isn't everyone working on a memoir? Isn't the blog self-confessional enough?   Well, long story short: for years I worked exclusively in the short-story form.  I do love me a well-written, elegant short story.  But after completing my MFA from here, where I delivered a book-length collection of short stories in fulfillment of my degree, I felt sort of tired of the form. And after I had my daughter, and stopped writing for literally years, I found it harder to get engaged and excited by the often dense prose and clever structures of short stories that I read.   Also (and this is the heart of the matter): I grew quite weary of fictionalizing and creating different characters and plots for things out of my own past.  Especially events from my family and childhood. 

Well, enough throat-clearing (as we used to call belabored introductions, back in workshop).  Here's what I wrote this week.

They [my parents] trailed me down the carpeted hallway, watched as I stood in the doorway of my bedroom.  It was transformed.  Gone were the the head and footboard of my bed, gone the long white dresser with its thick coat of glossy white enamel paint.  In their place was a set, a suite, a symbol, I  understood almost immediately, of their acknowledgement.  Yes, they were saying: we've made you say good-bye to hard-won friendships and near-normalcy in Whittier, moved us all to sun blasted Bakersfield, and so here, here is a set of matching, creamy yellow furniture.  There was a curved headboard with an inset of woven wicker lattice, a long dresser with ornate white handles and a tall  mirror hanging above. A low bureau of three drawers, and upon it a hutch with two shelves.  The top shelf displayed my collection of ceramic Josef birthday dolls, the other a stack of yellow Nancy Drew spines, my growing number of Dell Young Adult paperbacks, and all of my Judy Blumes (had mom flipped through and read any pages of Forever? I worried). 

This isn't my dresser, but an image from the web of a dresser a lot like mine, and the same exact color.

Ditto the Josef doll.  I still have them. Somewhere.