On With Your Story

While Superbowl XLIV (44 for the Roman numerally challenged) grabbed most of yesterday’s media attention, Stanford University students made news by updating a Depression era phenomenon—the Dance Marathon.

In yesterday’s event, Stanford students danced for 24 hours to raise money for Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides healthcare to AIDS sufferers in the poorest parts of world. (You can read more about it at “Stanford students dance around the clock for a good cause” and see a video.)  Reconceived, exploitive dance marathons of the past are being transformed into fundraisers for good causes.

As difficult and painful as it is to stay on your feet for 24 hours, the Stanford dance-athon was a tame affair compared to the cruel endurance contests of the 1920s and 1930s. These dance marathons were staged and rigged events where people paid 10 cents for admission to watch couples compete for prize money. Dancers had to keep moving for 45 minutes out of every hour, for weeks on end. Nobody benefited but the promoters.

A dance marathon held in my hometown of Spokane, Washington, closed October 12, 1935, after 1,638 hours. That’s about two months. At that time, my mother’s parents hadn’t yet settled in Spokane. In 1935, Grandpa was working in Topeka, Kansas, for Phillips Petroleum, a job he got as a result of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. I don’t know if my grandparents ever saw a dance marathon during their travels from place to place in search of work, but most likely not. They wouldn’t have wasted the dime.  While my mother was a 7-year-old child in Topeka, my father was a 10-year old boy on a small dairy farm near Gold Bar, Washington.

The marathons finally came to an end as cities and towns passed ordinances banning them and as World War II gave people something more important to do. HistoryLink.org has an interesting article on Dance Marathons.

Tip: If you are researching what life was like in Washington state for a family history, HistoryLink.org is a great resource. It’s a large and evolving online encyclopedia of state and local history in Washington state.

Photograph:  Digital ID: npcc 08260. Source: digital file from original Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-npcc-08260 (digital file from original). Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Tip #2: Tactics for getting and keeping your writing moving.

It’s a truth: the longer things take, the longer they take. One lesson I learned while writing for companies is that delays beget more delays. If you want to get something done, keep moving at all times.  I’ll give one example. Once I worked on a short brochure that took such a long and slow route through the multiple levels of approval (department, management, marketing, and legal) that by the time it was ready to print, the company had a new logo and a new location. So it was back to the drawing board for the brochure.

In writing a personal or family history or a memoir, the same thing can happen. The longer it takes, the greater the risk of never finishing. As life continues to happen, the project can be never-ending. Here are some practical ways you can keep the work from bogging down.

Tip #1 for getting your writing going

If you want to write your life story or memoir but are having trouble getting started, remember this:

Your life started at the beginning but your telling of it doesn’t have to.

Starting at the beginning–“I was born on October 11, 1949 in Spokane Washington”– is fine if that is your choice. However, starting at birth can pose some problems for writers:

• The beginning may not be very interesting to us. After all, we don’t actually remember any of it personally.
• We may not know much about the events of our birth, so lack of knowledge can block progress.
• Starting on the first day of our life can make the project look long and overwhelming
• Starting at the beginning can make us feel locked in to a rigid chronological order.

Free yourself from the tyranny of the chronological. The order in which you write about events, does not have to be the order in which they occurred or the order in which they will ultimately appear in your memoir. It’s your life, start anywhere your want. The day your daughter was born, your first day of school, the day met your spouse. The day the bee sting sent you to the hospital. Or what your bedroom looked like when you were a kid. Or start with today.

Next: So I’m free, now what

It is a particularly somber Veterans Day. The losses mourned at Fort Hood and the seven fallen soldiers honored at Fort Lewis add to the gravity of this day. I’m thinking today  of all the veterans of the U.S. armed forces who have touched my life. My husband, US Army, Vietnam. Our dear friend, US Army, Vietnam. My brother, US Army and US Navy. My father, US Air Force, WWII.  My uncle, US Navy, WWII. My grandfather, US Army, WWI.  And indirectly through diaries, my great great grandfather, a civilian chaplain during the American Civil War. More distantly, I even have a relative who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Note: My uncle, Kenneth Ramsey, was lost at sea in 1944. He  is listed in the National World War II Memorial registry as “Missing in Action or Buried at Sea.”  You can search this registry or enter an honoree on line.

What was your worst job? That was the question going around the dinner table at the end of the day at the Association of Personal Historians conference. How typical of a bunch of story tellers to tell stories.  Who won?  It’s not my place to say, but I can say it wasn’t I.  I told about my dismal days as a paralegal intern at a large, national intellectual property law firm.  All the partners and associates were pleasant to work with except for one. She was a brilliant attorney—and a bully. The environment became so toxic that I would sit in my parked car for many minutes, steeling myself to enter the building each day. I would make a quick turn to avoid meeting her in the hallways. I was filled with dread everytime she approached my desk. I had breezed through paralegal training and thought the job would be a snap for me. Instead, there I was feeling totally inept and a failure. After six months of daily misery, I quit, but only when another job opportunity came to me like a miracle.

Earlier in the day at the APH conference, Charles Hardy, III, PhD, president of the Oral History Association, shared with us some wisdom about interviewing people for their stories.  He always gives his narrators opportunities to reflect on the meaning of their experiences, to make some sense of them.  For example, he may ask “How would you compare your life then to your life now.” He calls these retreat questions, because they enable people to retreat from the past back into the present.

An example of this reflection in action occurred in the workshop about the Veterans History Project, as we observed a Vietnam War veteran being interviewed. After speaking about his experience, he summed up by reflecting that for all the difficulties he faced, he would not change them because without them he would not have met his wife and had their life together all these years.

How would I make sense now of my worst job?  I once assume that I could do anything I put my mind to. That was a lesson from my father. We would sit on the cement front steps on hot summer nights in 1957 and 1958. I in my baby doll pajamas ready for bed, and he in a T-shirt. The glowing end of his cigarette would bob in the dark, as he talked, and he would say, “You can be anything you want to be.”  But at the law firm, I met my limits face to face.  I learned that I can’t in fact do any thing, but more importantly  I learned  I can be brought low by my own fears. The bullying attorney didn’t do this to me alone; I let her. That ‘s why it was my worst job.

What was your worst job? How do you feel about it today?

In this CNN column today, the writer advises men to give women flowers. It isn’t the specific advice that grabs me. It is the way the writer learned the lesson. From his father.

While the same lesson can be extrapolated from scientific research, it’s so much more real and interesting and meaningful to see and listen to dad.

“Most of what I know about women I learned from how my dad treated my mother. I’d be a better man if I followed his example more fastidiously, but I haven’t . . . But some lessons stick out, ”  says John DeVore, the writer , “It’s never too late to relearn passed-down life lessons,” he adds.

There is more, but I won’t spoil the whole story for you. Read it for the glimpse of a long and loving marriage.

The Sound of Music is a much loved movie. Other people like it, but I don’t.

Christopher Plummer who played the von Trapp patriarch, derided the film as the Sound of Mucus, for maudlin sentimentality. That’s not my objection to the movie. I don’t like it because it was the occasion of the disaster that was my first date. The unlucky boy was my lab partner in sophomore biology class. Biology wasn’t his strong suit; he relied on me to pull him through. In spite of that, he asked me out to the movies. I wasn’t attracted to him, but a girl has to have a first date some time and I felt at 15, going on 16, I wasn’t getting any younger so I said yes. This proved to be no favor to him and no fun for me. As I look back, I am more generous about him now than I was then.

I don’t even remember his name. The nameless, hapless boy drove to my house but didn’t want to drive to the theatre in downtown Spokane, Washington. He wanted us to take the bus. He wasn’t comfortable driving in traffic at night. This was strike one my scorecard. I probably would have overlooked this timidity if he had otherwise been my idea of a dreamboat. He wanted to see The Sound of Music–for the fifth time, as it turned out. He told me all about the movie before the overture even started. I have to confess, in my cruel teenage heart, I thought it weird for a guy to see a musical so many times.

After the movie, we waited for the bus, and waited, and waited. So I called the bus company only to find out that the last bus on that route had departed while we were still watching the movie credits. So I called my father, who drove down at 11:00 PM to pick us up. This poor boy and I rode in embarrassed, humiliated silence in the back seat while Dad chauffeured us home. The boy reached once for my hand, but I withdrew it quickly. I didn’t want my father to see. Needless to say, we never went out again. I’m not sure we ever spoke to each other.

In the movie, Maria sings a song about her favorite things; but the movie doesn’t make my list. Mostly because it reminds me of my own superficial nature and mean spirit. I hope this boy has been a happy man—with someone nicer than I.

I wrote this memory, triggered by a suggestion in a book by Hella Buchheim, a fellow member of the Association of Personal Historians. Her book, Remembering. . . Life Story Triggers & Memory Essays, is an anthology of her newsletters and essays over the years on life-story writing. For people who want to write their memoirs or life stories, Hella’s book is chock full of ways to revive and refresh memories that may have been forgotten. The one that prompted my memory of my first date came from the chapter titled, “The Sounds and Sights of Triggers.” In this essay, she suggests thinking about favorite movies. The Sound of Music wasn’t on her list of movies to start the memory engine, but the list made me think of other evocative movies. Memories associated with Fantasia, Roy Rogers serials, My Fair Lady, Doctor Zhivago (now there’s a story), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are also cuing up for their turn to be told. Thank you, Hella. I know one could put together an interesting, rich life story by opening to any page of your book.

Note: Hella Buchheim is a colleague who sent me a copy of her book.

She must NOT be writing a memoir! The baby would be crying and the counter would be full of dishes, don't you think?

I can hear you. You want to write a memoir. You know the material well-after all you lived it. You’ve thought about it for years, even started writing-several times. What’s holding you back?

Paul Graham puts his finger on a big part of the problem in a July 2009 essay he calls “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” Of course, he is writing mostly about computer programming, not memoir writing. But programmers have something in common with writers. Their tasks are difficult and take time. Graham knows all about this because he is both a writer and a programmer.

Manager-type schedules break the day up into one-hour increments. Makers, such as memoir writers, can’t even get started in one hour, let along make any progress. They need much bigger hunks of time. “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in,” says Graham. Hasn’t this happened to you? You work a manager’s schedule all day and in the evenings you have other things that need tending. You can’t find four uninterrupted hours together, what with school activities, committee meetings, picking up the dry cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, washing, etc, etc, etc.

To get his “making” done, Graham goes so far devise this solution:

“I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.” I would guess that Graham was single at the time.

As for me, I write from 5 to 9 AM, and I try to schedule meetings after 2 PM.

Some writer’s seem to be able to work in smaller blocks of time. I recall Jim Lehrer saying in an interview that he writes on airplane flights, but maybe he meant 7-hour flights to Europe.

If you are working on a memoir or family history, when do you write? How do you manage the demands of the “manager’s schedule” and the “maker’s schedule?”

Listening, really listening, is the best gift we can give to others. But it is remarkably difficult to do. If you are contemplating interviewing someone for a personal or family history project, a brush up on listening skills can help make the experience rewarding for both of you. The guidance about active listening provided in this “Care Pages” post, while intended for people in crisis, applies as well to all interviewing situations.  “Tell me more” is the magic interview question.

One picture may be worth a thousand words, but some photos are almost worthless without a few words to identify them.  

I found this mystery photo after my grandmother Elizabeth died. Born in 1903 in Oklahoma, she lived an interesting and paripetetic life until settling down in Spokane, Washington in 1943. She moved from place to place with her children during the Great Depression, as my grandfather went from job to job. Before that, her father, a Presbyterian minister, moved his family from church to church in Oklahoma, Kansas, and California. Somewhere along the way, this photo may have been taken. She may be one of the children pictured. From the flat landscape, they may be somewhere in Oklahoma. The point is, I don’t know.

My grandmother left no information to indicate why she possessed this photograph and had kept it for the nearly 100 years that she lived. The questions I have about this mysterious photo are ones we should answer about all the significant photographs we leave for others to find:

• Who are the people in the picture?
• What is their relationship to the photo owner?
• Who took the photograph?
• Where was the picture taken? In what country and state? Near what town?
• When was the picture taken? 
• What was the occasion of the picture? In this case, where had they come from? Where were they going? Why were they on the road? Why did they stop here?

Maybe the Photo Detective, Maureen Taylor, can provide some answers about my mystery photograph. I’ve sent it to her, and if she discovers anything, I will fill you in.