literary commentary & stories for remembrance

Don’t let anyone tell you where your heart is.

It’s in your story, and you alone know it.

In my writing circles, I meet people  who want to write a memoir. They’ve been told this and that, and sometimes it seems to be a drag on their productivity and  creativity.

Recently I came across this, attributed to Ella Fitzgerald:  “It isn’t where you came from; it’s where you are going that counts.”

I beg to differ.

“The life which is unexamined is not worth living,”wrote Plato.

And fully to  examine my own, I had to go back…back to where I came from.

So when folks ask me how I started  the memoir process that I’m in now, I tell them I started by writing little things in a notebook.

That started about 25 years ago. And now I have several dozen spiral bound, college-ruled notebooks full of observations, feelings, fears — times of elation and the lows of sorrow — and simple statements of what happened to me or what I did day-by-day.

And I read. Reading was encouraged when I was a kid. There was no TV…and even when it did come along, the only thing worth watching was Howdy-Doody.

I read everything from comic books – during the Golden Age of that genre, the 50s – to classics. And the Bible.

I read the original Mad Magazine, Archie and Jughead, Tales from the Crypt and Superman. Man, was it fun. And I listened to stuff like The Shadow, Sky King, Flash Gordon and The Lone Ranger on the radio. I learned to imagine.

I read Twain, Scott, Milne, and later greater classics. I even read Pilgrim’s Progress in the original Middle English, and Madame Bovary in French. ( I had to, to pass the class – but it was worth it. It’s sexier in the original.)

So I read as much as I could and today believe that good writing stems from reading – a lot.

And I write something every day – even if it’s just a word I need to look up. That’s what I tell folks who ask me how I go about writing memoir.

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Here’s another take on the importance of where we came from – a guest column in my morning paper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch. A great story.