This comes once again from Susanna Donato, blogger extraordinaire at Cheap Like Me:
This Saturday panel included several writers with diverse projects:
- Mike Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre and author of the memoir Still Pitching
- Mimi Schwartz, author of Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village and also Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction
- Dustin Beall Smith, author of Key Grip: A Memoir of Endless Consequences and a professor at Gettysburg College
- Kim Dana Kupperman, founder of Welcome Table Press and author of the forthcoming essay collection, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings (winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize)
These writers are teachers, as well, so they spoke from their perspective as authors, but also from what they teach or have taught their students.
Steinberg spoke of research and the establishment of a book's cultural milieu as an opportunity to deepen and extend the memoir. He described his own original intent to write a coming-of-age memoir, but then his story's need for a larger context.
He decided that his narrator's passion for baseball was the key theme, especially given its baseball-centric time period. So he set his story between 1947 and 1957, and also tackled what he termed "disturbing relationships" with the narrator's baseball coaches as a teen. These themes required significant research, which "grew out of a genuine need to extend the narrator's story beyond the personal."
Kupperman described memoir as a format to find out "the things we didn't know we know" and addressed her work researching her Russian immigrant grandmother's story. That story brought surprises, which led Kupperman to Kiev and Chernobyl, which in turn led to a completely different essay. She said the terms critique and criticism come from the same root as "crisis," which means "sifting," and she defined "cultural critique" as sifting the culture we come from and finding that which is so elementally true that it speaks to others.
Perhaps unwittingly, Kupperman encouraged those who write family memoirs to avoid prejudging how relatives will feel about the information the writer uncovers. She said she learned of a major omission in what her grandmother had told family, but when she mentioned it to her father, he said, "After all these years, what does it matter?"
Smith spoke about his students, who to his surprise have difficulty with some memoir because they cannot distinguish the voice of the 60-year-old memoirist from the voice of the narrator as a "young braggart." He posited that memoir "offers a bridge across the temporal divide -- we suppress the 'I' to let another 'I' speak."
Schwartz offered some philosophical guidance for memoirists, suggesting they ask: How is what exists in the world connected to what I am doing? How can you promote discussion? (By keeping conflict and complexities in the work, or perhaps juxtaposing your authorial point of view with someone else's.)
She also described her effort to avoid letting research sink the narrative by free-writing about her expectations before an interview, then free-writing about her impressions afterward. And then she would let the work sit, so that the important things could rise to the top.
"If it doesn't serve the narrative, let it go," Schwartz said, "or use it in something else."
--Susanna Donato
