You’ll leave with three original “story starters” and a plan for turning them into the start of your memoir.

The course meets from 6:00-9:00 next Wednesday at 4314 Social Science Building on the U.W. campus.

To register for a Wisconsin Union Mini Course Program you must be:

• UW-Madison Student
• Wisconsin Union Member
• UW-Madison Faculty/Staff (pay an additional $10/course)
• OR registering for and attending a course with one of the above as a “Guest”
• (but trust me, nobody’s checking too closely.)

Interested? Follow this link to register!

p.s. You could also sign up for “Put a Little Life in Your Obituary” April 25.

Union Terrace chairs in snow,
photo by Michael Forster Rothbart

Life Story + “Backstory” = Very Powerful Personal History

Sue’s client, a holocaust survivor, clearly remembered her feelings from that experience, but did not recall the exact details. In such situations, personal historians like Sue do research to fill in the blanks. “With a little research on the backstory, we were able to not only confirm Dora’s story but add details and depth to make it all the more powerful,” Sue wrote in her post.

What research do you need to do to fill in the backstory on the events you remember?

Nice, relevant storytelling quote from author Bronwen Dickey from a short essay titled “Bring Back Old-Fashioned Storytelling” published in “Southern Living” Magazine (Sept, 2010):

“Why, really, do any of us tell our stories? Because of this: When you communicate to another person — even to a complete stranger — something meaningful that has happened to you, not only do you understand it better yourself, but you are also, in some small way, understood. You establish a bond that is strong and instantaneous; you cut six degrees of separation down to zero. Stories keep us open and alive. They’re the ramparts we build against isolation, against loneliness.”

My take: if storytelling is this powerful when the audience is “strangers,” think of how that power multiplies when we write for our own family circle, or help others do so.

Thanks, Jill, couldn’t have said it better myself.

This workshop starts Wednesday, February 22. For 8 weeks we’ll discuss and practice techniques for writing about our life experiences. Each class includes time to share what you’ve written in a supportive environment. You may write on suggested topics or choose your own themes.

We’ll meet from 11:00-12:50 (Brown bag lunches welcome) at the Westside Senior Center, 602 Sawyer Terrace. The cost for the workshop is $40. Attendance is limited to 16. Beginning and continuing writers are welcome.

To save your place in the class,  contact Kari Riley at the Westside Senior Center, kari@westmadisonseniorcoalition.org or 238-0196.

-Sarah White

This is one of those books that fully realizes memoir’s potential to illuminate the stage, to borrow Jill Ker Conway’s phrase. Auslander’s memoir explores his childhood “raised like a veal” in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community.  Ker Conway used the life of a Catholic priest as an example of the way memoir allows us to try on the experience of another, but she might as well have been writing about poor Shalom stuck between the believers and his own evolving relationship with the Big Guy who excels at fucking him up with His complicated and contradictory laws. The book follows his path to an uneasy adult cease-fire.

Auslander writes with the kind of humor that can only come from studying both Talmud and National Lampoon. The book is worth reading for its delight in language alone. If you have also had a narrow escape with Religion with a Capital R, that’s even more reason to dive in.

Here are a few quotations that I loved so much I want to roll them around in my brain a long while. Maybe doing so will teach me to write like that.

I wonder sometimes if I suffer from a metaphysical form of Stockholm syndrome. Held captive by this Man for thousands of years, we now praise Him, defend Him, excuse Him, sometimes kill for Him, an army of Squeaky Frommes swearing allegiance to their Charlie in the sky.

. . .

It was Sabbath afternoon–bride afternoon, covenant afternoon, gift afternoon–and I was slumped facedown on the kitchen table, staring past an Entenmann’s coffee cake box at the yellowing flip clock on the stovetop across the room. It had been reading 1:59 p.m. for what seemed like hours. At last the top half of the 9 began its infuriatingly laggard fall forward, a slow-motion suicide from the top of the tallest building in Clockland, landing, sometime later, face-first at its final resting place below.

(Have you ever read a more evocative description of boredom?)

. . .

I told Becky it was okay. I told her I lied about some things too. We sat together for a while, talking about friends and school, and then I walked her to her front door and kissed her good night, and we hugged, two lonely liars in the harsh, accusing spotlight of the moon.

. . .

[about a final meeting with the psychiatrist who has been helping him deal with his veal-like upbringing] My session with Ike felt like a victorious team meeting in the locker room after a long, difficult game.

. . .

[spoiler alert: the premise of the book's title comes from the following passage] I’ve been thinking about the people in my life now, and here’s what I think: I think they’re all foreskins. Jack’s a foreskin; his mother brutalized him, cast him off, cut him repeatedly. Alish is a foreskin, and her husband, Will is, too. So am I. So is Orli. A little foreskin nation, trying their best to start over, build up, move on.

Are you your memories? Your beliefs and desires?

Your molecules and how they’re arranged?

Why are you more than a collection of your parts?

How does the brain make possible a sense of self?

Do you find it, or create it yourself?

Good stuff to chew on…. check it out!

Is there a real you? Julian Baggini on TED.com

She said, “The real question for me as a writer was not so much how to remember but what to leave out. I once heard writing fiction described as planting a garden in the desert, and memoir as weeding in the jungle.”

Great article. Lacking time to summarize more for you, I urge you to follow the link, read, and think about how your experience in writing memoir compares to Haag’s.

Patricia Cohen revealed this factoid in an opinion column in Sunday’s New York Times titled “Get a Midlife.” In it she asks–and answers–the question “What’s so bad about middle age?”

Cohen mused about the cultural fiction that is middle age–a story that tells us what we are losing, but little about what we gain. We have “defined wellness and happiness in terms of what was missing: health was an absence of illness; a well-adjusted psyche meant an absence of depression and dysfunction. The most recent research on middle age, by contrast, has looked at gains as well as deficits,” Cohen writes.

Cohen goes on to describe research conducted by Carol Ryff, director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Who knew this was going on in my own front yard?)

Ryff developed a list of questions that measure well-being, dividing them into categories of personal growth, autonomy, supportive social relationships, self-regard, control of one’s life, and a sense of purpose.  Ryff’s survey was designed to gauge whether an individual was flourishing.

The results showed that a narrow focus on dysfunction skewed perception of midlife (just as it has perceptions of wellness and happiness). In fact, researchers discovered that our middle years are often our happiest–a time when we feel in control, have a sense of purpose, experience the supportive network of our friends, and overcome the anxiety-producing pressures of youth. We reach a “decision-making sweet spot” in which we are good at both sizing up our options and at choosing well.

A good deal of my early years were spent misunderstanding my options and choosing, how shall we say, not so well. I’ve frankly delighted with the perks of middle age so far.

Cohen concludes, “Middle-aged baby boomers and Gen Xers have something else their forebears did not: more time. With longer life spans, those in midlife have decades to recoup losses and change direction.”

At more-or-less the peak of my well-being, with decades to tweak the fine points? Oh frabjous day! Thanks, Patricia Cohen, for lifting my spirits.