Post by Vicki Mayk on Mar 10, 2019 22:10:59 GMT
Hi Everyone,
Here we are at Week 4. This week focusing on using the voice of innocence versus the voice of experience in memoir. This can be challenging to "get," so please email me or post a question here if you aren't sure about this idea. This is one time I wish we were all in a room together.
Here's this weeks class materials and prompts. I've also attached it as a Word document that you can download.
Best,
Vicki
Week 4 The Voice of Innocence and the Voice of Experience in Memoir
In memoir workshops like this one, writers most often write scenes that capture important or special memories. Those memories might be the birth of a child, the circumstances around a suicide attempt, a decision to drop out of school, the day you moved across the country. But to move to the next level of writing memoir, you need to answer the question: Who is the narrator who is telling the story?
At this point, you are probably saying, “Well, duh, I am the narrator.”
OK: But which you is the one telling this story? If you talk to writers who have written more than one memoir – who are often called “serial memoirists” – they will tell you that each one of their memoirs had a different voice, a different “them,” telling the story.
This week, I want to talk about the narrator in memoir and how that narrator’s voice may be the voice of innocence or the voice of experience.
Beverly Donofrio, who wrote “Riding In Cars With Boys,” says that she struggled to find the voice for that first memoir, until she decided to adopt the voice of a wise-cracking friend. She realized that using that voice reflected who she had been when the memoir took place: the rebellious teenager who had gotten pregnant. That is a different person that the older, wiser woman who tells the story in Donofrio’s second memoir, “Looking For Mary.” That woman, having gained wisdom, is able to see mistakes she has made as a single mother. And she is a woman who is beginning a spiritual quest that involves looking for Mary – Jesus’s mother who is venerated in Catholicism.
The Voice of Innocence and the Voice of Experience
Let’s look at this another way: If you write a memory from childhood, as some people in this class have done, you may be speaking as the child you were when the memory took place. But there is another way to write the memory: You write that memory as your adult self looking back on that memory. How would that be different?
Consider this brief description from my point of view as a child:
I loved dinner at Grandma’s on Wednesdays. Wednesday is spaghetti day. The kitchen is filled with the aroma of basil and tomatoes, the flavors that married each other in her rich spaghetti sauce. The scent would draw me down from the third-floor apartment in Gram’s house where I lived with my parents. Gram and I wait until my grandfather ate his dinner at 5. He dines alone at the dining room table. Gram and I eat later, usually in the kitchen. I love having Gram all to myself. My place is set with my special glass, a wine glass which Gram filled with milk. I also have a blue plate at Gram’s that is reserved for my use and my own fork and spoon, all smaller versions that are more my size.
Now consider that scene same remembered with my adult self telling the story:
I loved dinner at Grandma’s on Wednesdays. Wednesday was spaghetti day. The kitchen was filled with the aroma of basil and tomatoes, the flavors that married each other in her rich spaghetti sauce. The scent would draw me down the steep stairs from the third-floor apartment in Gram’s house where I lived with my parents. We had moved there when I was a toddler, allowing my parents to begin saving to buy a house. Gram and I would wait until my grandfather ate his dinner at 5. He dined alone at the dining room table. Gram and I would eat later, usually in the kitchen. Except for big family dinners on holidays, my grandmother never sat at the dinner table with my grandfather. She refused to share a meal with the man who had abused her earlier in their marriage. Reflecting on the bitterness she felt about their union, she once told me, “I wish they’d broken both my legs on the way to the church.” Those revelations would come years later. As a child, I only knew I had Gram all to myself. My place would be set with my special glass, a wine glass which Gram filled with milk. I also had a plate at Gram’s that was reserved for my use and my own fork and spoon, all smaller versions that were more my size.
How is the second version different? I hope you can see that it contains different details – and those details are knowledge that I have gained over time. I didn’t know when I was a child about the abuse in my grandmother’s marriage and her bitterness toward my grandfather. Those are insights I gained over time. Those details inform the scene and give it a different depth.
I want to say something important here: I have used the child’s point of view versus the adult point of view as an example because it easily illustrates my point. It is easy to see that \ a different “I” tells the first story and another “I” narrating the second scene. BUT the difference isn’t just based in age. It also has to do with the insights we gain since something happened to us. Those insights and the way we write about them are what give depth to memoir.
Sue William Silverman, whose book Fearless Confessions I have quoted in this class, calls those different perspectives “the voice of innocence and the voice of experience.” When we write a memory, capturing what happened, we often write from the voice of innocence when we are telling the basics of what happened. Our memoir writing goes to the next level when we use the voice of experience – which is the voice that begins to make sense out of what happened in our lives.
Another way to think about it is to talk about introducing reflection in our memoir writing. In addition to telling our story, we share with the reader what we can only know later: how the experience changed our life or the lessons it taught us. This takes memoir to a new level.
One of the best examples of the voice of innocence and voice of experience is found in Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild.” If you aren’t familiar with it, it is Strayed’s memoir of how she hiked California’s Pacific Crest Tale (PCT for short) after the death of her mother. Strayed’s life had disintegrated after the death. As she tells the story of the death and her hike, it is the voice of innocence that tells the story. At 22, Cheryl Strayed was looking for answers. When she wrote the memoir years later, she didn’t just tell the story from that 22-year-old voice of innocence. She shared what she learned from the experience – injecting the voice of experience into the memoir.
In this excerpt, she remembers a breakdown she had on the trail over her mother’s death. But it also includes her realization of the meaning and impact of her mom’s death – which came later. Here's the excerpt
It was too late now, I knew, and there was only my dead, insular, overly optimistic, non-college-preparing, occasionally-child-abandoning, pot-smoking, wooden-spoon-wielding, feel-free-to-call-me-by-my-name mom to blame. She had failed. She had failed. She had so profoundly failed me.
Fuck her, I thought, so mad I stopped walking.
And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over keening while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat.
It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful my mother had been taken from me. I couldn’t even hate her properly. I didn’t get to grow up and grow away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things that I wished she’d done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best that she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. Her death had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in the premature place we’d left off. She was my mother but I was motherless. I was trapped by her but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could fill. I’d have to fill it myself again and again and again.
Did Cheryl Strayed stand there and articulate all these feelings when she had the meltdown on the trail? No. What we are reading is the voice of experience – the memoirist writing about what she learned since that moment during the hike on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Although everything we write doesn’t have to include such a major realization about life and death, we do have many stories that we can reflect upon. For instance, you might write about an experience that you realized later was the day you decided you wanted to become a nurse or a teacher. Or you might write about how you destroyed your brother’s toys when you were 8 when you really wanted to destroy him because you knew he was your mother’s favorite. Our lives are filled with those stories.
So this week’s prompts are about writing a scene and trying to include the voice of experience
Prompt #1:
Using a photograph from childhood or teen years, you are going to write three, one-paragraph descriptions about what happened in the photo. (Examples might be photos from a birthday party, family vacation or a holiday.) Write the first paragraph describing what happened from your perspective when you were a child or teen in the photo or present at the event in the photo. This will be the voice of innocence. Tell only what you knew. Then write another paragraph about what happened in the photo from your point of view now as an adult. This second one will probably contain one or two insights you didn’t have then and is the voice of experience. (For instance, you might write, “The picture doesn’t show my cousin who was drunk but isn’t in the photo. His drunkenness ruined every family gathering.”) Then write a third version that combines the two. This third version can be two paragraphs.
Prompt #2:
Write a scene from your life that is about an important moment. Don’t write more than two to three pages double-spaced. Maybe it’s the day your spouse proposed. Maybe it’s the day you left home or got fired from a job. Or the day someone close to you died. Try to write it capturing as many true details as you remember, such as something significant that someone said or the color of a dress you were wearing. Pay attention to what stands out in your memory and try to include those details. Now take a step back and note the details you have chosen. Why do you always remember the scene that way? Why is it a scene you will never forget? List some reasons why this memory is important to you. By examining the importance of details and the reasons why this is an important memory, you’ll begin to realize more of the reasons why it’s significant in your life. Go back to the scene and try to add a few sentences – the voice of experience – commenting on why it was significant or how it impacted your life. NOTE: If you would like to revise a piece you have already written for this workshop for this prompt, you can do that.