Light At the End of the Tunnel?

In one more week, 168 hours, we’ll be watching the early returns. This awful election will finally be over, and we’ll begin to have a sense of what direction things may go in the next four years. But I can't help wondering, is the light at the end of the tunnel a train?

Each presidential election for the last couple of decades has grown more distressing to me. I can’t recall the last time I voted for a candidate because I thought he or she was well-suited for the job rather than voting for the lesser of two evils. That is more true this year than ever.

As I contemplate this election and the state of the nation, I feel a strong urge to record these thoughts and my general political history for posterity. I want future generations to know how troubling this campaign has been for me and why I don’t trust or believe either candidate; why each one scares me, for different reasons. I want them to know my views of the issues of the times.

I also want them to know about our family political history. As a child I learned to take politics quite seriously, and was excited about turning 21 and being old enough to vote. (Yes, I’m so old I couldn’t vote until I was old enough to drink!) My maternal grandmother was the first state president of the New Mexico Republican Women’s Club, and she served as a delegate to the National Convention in 1952 and 1956. I remember listening to all the sessions of the 1956 convention on the radio, hoping to hear her name if not her voice.

I aspired to follow in her footsteps, joining the Republican Women in Richland, Wash. in time for the 1972 campaign. Those were also turbulent years, as much on the local and state level as national. That was the year we were voting on the Equal Rights Amendment in Washington, and I was in the thick of that campaign. I stayed active in the Republican party for several years, but thenI overheard the county chairwoman confide to someone that although she attended services and occasionally donated money to one of the churches in town, “the Republican Party is my real church!” My hair stood on end, and that was the end of my active party involvement.

I prefer not to look too closely at the way the government runs today; the way deals are made, ears marked, barrels filled with pork, and “walking around money” buys votes for members of the double-size Pennsylvania legislature. When I think of those things, I am filled with despair. What can one person do?

One person can vote. I can vote for the least of the evils. I can talk to the incumbents between elections and make my views known. I can send e-mails. I can talk to friends, and I can stay informed. Yes, there is a lot I can do, and will be doing more of in coming years than past, and I want to leave a record of that, perhaps in story, certainly in my journal. And when I record these thoughts, I will be sure to note that although I may sound pessimistic, I am convinced that the future will indeed be brighter than it looks right now. Whichever candidate wins will surely make sweeping changes, and ultimately that can make way for good things to happen down the road.

Write now: grab your journal or sit down at your keyboard and write down your feelings about the 2008 presidential election. Who will you vote for? Why? How do you feel about this candidate? Have your political leanings changed over the years? Do you make an effort to stay informed, or make your choices based on headlines and friend’s recommendations?

Living Color

I’m a great fan of Natalie Goldberg. Not long ago I read her book, Living Color. The book is filled with Natalie’s glorious art, in all its aberrant color. Natalie explains her color choices on page 3:

I was delighted one day to paint an adobe house blue. Stepping through the belief that I must paint mud brown, I experienced an explosion of energy and freedom. It was as though that blue paint were a sword slashing through illusion, bringing me into direct connection with the house’s essence. Objects began to dance unhinged from their proper pigment. That man is green, those sheep are maroon, that horse is scarlet, I suddenly wanted to shout with a new-found freedom as I gazed around me from the hilltop where I had drawn the blue house.

Her explanation about using color to learn metaphor is hazy, but I was intrigued with the idea of playing with color that way. It reminded me of a post I wrote in September about the origins of the Inner Critic. I felt bold. I wanted to play with color, and I wanted to do it the easy way, so I Googled my way to The Coloring Spot and found ready-to-color pictures. In the interests of full disclosure and truth, I’ll admit that I did my coloring on a fresh layer in Photoshop® with a virtual felt-tip pens. It would have been easier to print the pictures and color with crayons!

I began with the Great Wall of China. I didn’t give specific thought to choosing color. I just picked orange for the sky and went from there. I did add a big yellow sun, because the picture told me it needed a sun, and I didn’t want to mess with the sun. The sun is what it is. Everything else is negotiable. I also added a person (me) walking on the wall. I didn’t bother to add the other thousands of people who were there with me. I feel lonely without them, so next time I’ll draw more people. 

The Great Wall was so much fun I turned to Mt. Rushmore. As I began scribbling, my inner child grew tired. My Brat started arguing with my Good Girl. Mommy had to put the colors away.So, I had fun. I had lots and lots of fun. Did I learn anything about writing? Sort of. I did some writing practice and discovered that I can write nutty, bizarre descriptions, wild as you can imagine. I wrote about a man who needed to have his lawn mowed to keep it out of his eyes, and a walking flower garden (a woman in a wild floral print dress. I can crumple these up and toss them into the trash when I'm done if I want. My mind grows a little wider this way. I’ve put out a few feeder roots out of my thought ruts toward more colorful descriptions.

In a few days I’m going to get out my crayons and color with my three-year-old granddaughter. I want her to know it’s okay to make the sky orange if she wants to (just in case she hasn't figured this out). I’ll invite Natalie to sit with us, in spirit if not body, since she has no children or grandchildren of her own. I know she’d have fun.

Write now: take a break with your box of crayons or marking pens, or Photoshop. Dare to color outside the lines and use unexpected colors. Be brave. Be bold. Have fun. Then go back to your writing and write something utterly ridiculous and audacious. See how it feels to use big juicy words for tiny topics.

Secrets

Secrets! We all have them. Many will go with us to our graves, perhaps because they are so trivial we forget them.

Ybonesy reminded me of a couple with her RedRavine post about a minor mishap she had as a newly licensed driver that she and her passengers attempted to cover up with a Secret. I wrote a comment about early driving secrets my sister blackmailed me with for ages.

This type of secret is bush league compared to the Secrets discussed by Polly Kahl in a blog interview with Howard Dully, co-author of the NYT best-selling memoir My Lobotomy. In Part 2 of the interview, Polly explains her early life, the subject of a memoir she recently finished and is shopping around.

For me, the meat in her material is her description of the interviews she had with people in her past as she researched and wrote her story. She interviewed family members, neighbors, all sorts of people, and got varying responses. Of one man who was twice her age of 14 when he had sex with her, she says, “...when I interviewed him, he offered to me that it was sexual abuse, and he offered to me an apology, so it wasn’t like I was confronting him, it was like he offered me the gift of apology, and because of that it was a very healing experience for me.”

In both her case and Dully’s, their parents “just don’t get it.” That’s okay, they claim. It’s enough that they had the discussion. Coerced apologies or psuedo confessions and understanding are meaningless. What matters, as I understand their accounts, is that they brought it up, gave people a chance to explain, and their consciences are clear with respect to writing about the memories. They did not wait until the people were dead and no longer had a chance to explain or defend themselves.

Whatever the outcome, disclosing these secrets and writing about them has been profoundly healing for both. Legions of other memoirists have had the same healing experience, and readers often experience vicarious healing through reading these accounts.

Still, most people are as unlikely to publicly bare their emotional scars and shame in print as they are to parade down Main Street in their birthday suits. That’s okay. The good news is that you can experience the same degree of healing if you write for an audience of one. You don’t need to write a polished memoir or even an organized story, so weak writing skills are not an impediment. Journals are a profound way of writing to heal emotional wounds and weaknesses.

I’ve begun exploring the wonderful world of journaling in depth. Stay tuned for more on this important aspect of life writing and the role it can play in lifestory writing.

Write now: find a secluded spot and make a list of secrets you keep closely hidden. You’ll be amazed at the power of seeing these words in print, on paper, in the light of day. When you have finished, burn or shred your list if you have any fears that it may be found.

The Turkey Farm

Who would think that a lifestory or memoir would be co-authored? Rather surprisingly some excellent ones are. I recently finished reading The Turkey Farm – Behind the Smile, a gripping memoir about Jennifer Keefe’s life. Jennifer survived, among other things, the brutal murder of her mother, being raised by the hippie farmer and occasional drug dealer her mother didn’t get around to marrying after she divorced Jen’s alcoholic father, early exposure to drugs, endless betrayals by family members and her first husband, and facing down her mother’s murderer. In the end, it is a story of triumph. You can read my formal review of the book on the Story Circle Network book review site.

Quite aside from the content, this memoir is worth mentioning for many reasons. Among them is the fact that it is co-authored with Cheryl Archer, Jennifer’s best friend, whom she has known since grade school. In an account on Citizen.com, the electronic arm of The Citizen of Laconia (NH), the women tell of their adventures in writing the book.

The idea began when they were nineteen and wanted to capture Jen’s “stranger than fiction” story on paper. It took over fifteen years and lots of additional life experience to come to fruition. Jen still had a lot of life lessons to learn, and in the process of working with Cheryl to clarify things in her past, the story became a “journey to forgiveness” rather than an expose.

That’s not to say the story treads lightly on any topics. As you’ll read in the review, Jen’s stepfather sued unsuccessfully to prevent the book from being published, and her birth family members surely squirmed when they read it. For various reasons explained in the book, none were willing to take Jen and her brothers into their homes and raise them after their mother died. Her disclosures are brave and true, written from a witnessing point of view rather than one of blame. It took guts to go public with that material in any circumstances, and hopefully her courage will inspire others.

Jennifer’s life was changed by insight and forgiveness as a result of her collaboration with Cheryl, but Cheryl found reward enough of her own. What could be more rewarding than to see your best friend “wake up”, confront the demons of her past, and triumph over them to become radiantly happy, with a plan for her future. “It was the best gift I could give her,” she says. And perhaps the best gift she could give herself.

This book, which can be ordered from this webpage, has many lessons to offer, and for our purposes here, I’ll highlight these:

• The healing value of life story writing. The entire writing process was valuable, and an impromptu writing tip Cheryl gave Jen led to the final resolution of her anger and allowed forgiveness to rise from the ashes of her despair.
  

• The value of teamwork. Although anyone can write something, and anything you write is better than writing nothing, some are endowed with a more powerful gift for writing than others. Cheryl has far more of this gift than Jen. Jen lived the story, Chery put the pieces together to “find” the story.

• The power of persistence. Although it took over fifteen years, and countless obstacles arose, they never gave up.
  

• The satisfaction of helping another. Cheryl has seen the transformation of her best friend, and what could be more satisfying than knowing she played such a role in bringing that about? Cheryl is continuing to write other things now.

After reading this book and thinking deeply about it, I’m considering volunteering for one of the many Hospice programs in our region to help capture deathbed life stories. Perhaps you can think of ways to use your writing skills to benefit your friends or family members.

Write now: some memories and thoughts about someone you care deeply about, friend or family member, who may benefit from your help in getting their lifestory written. Is there some way you can share your gift for writing to help this person tell his or her story?

Write-It-Yourself Gifts

The holiday season is approaching approaching like a freight train, and legions of people are looking for inexpensive gift ideas this year. Here’s an idea for you: Give the gift of yourself.

If you have already been writing life stories, this may be the perfect year to compile an anthology of your stories, lay them out nicely in a single document, and upload them to Lulu.com or Amazon’s CreateSpace for printing. You can produce a fully professional volume in your choice of hard or soft cover for a fraction of what it used to cost. For example, a 220 page paperback in the standard “trade” size of 6" x 9" lists right now for $6.25 base price on Lulu.com.

I used Lulu.com last year to publish The Albuquerque Years, a memoir of my life as a preschooler. It is 88 pages, full of photos, a slightly larger, wider page size (7.44" x 9.68") to accommodate the pictures and it sells (without any markup) for $6.29 on the Lulu website. You can also download a free eBook version there.

If you are primarily interested in creating books for your own use as gifts, or for order at cost by family members and friends, I recommend that you work with Lulu. They will convert your file to pdf format for you (although you can easily do this yourself with the free, downloadable pdf conversion utility, PrimoPDF), they have on online cover creation utility if you need help with that, and they allow you to list the book in their catalog without adding a markup for royalties if you wish. You can even allow people to download your book as a eBook for free from their website.

CreateSpace also allows you to obtain copies of your book with no set-up fee, and they may be even less expensive than Lulu. I say may be, because quite frankly, I find CreateSpace confusing and a bit intimidating. I set up an account, but did not easily find information on pricing and related matters. Even though it is confusing, I do recommend CreateSpace for projects you want to sell commercially with a royalty. The direct link into Amazon is probably worth the hassle, and I have heard good things about the quality.

There are other Print-On-Demand services, but these are the only two I know enough about to comment on.

If you don’t have a pile of stories ready to be compiled, you may prefer to do a cookbook with favorite family recipes. Write a short story with a quick memory associated with each recipe, and include Cooks Notes about menus using the recipe, special modifications you make, who especially likes it, and that sort of thing. I haven’t checked this on CreateSpace, but on Lulu you can order your book bound with a comb binding, a nice option for cookbooks. The advantage of using Lulu is that you can select page sizes other than letter-size as you’d get at a local copy shop.

Since you can include an unlimited quantity of photos and other artwork in a Print-On-Demand book, you could also create an annotated photo album. Lulu can print in color as well as black-and-white, though the cost per page is significantly higher.

If you need help with layout to get your manuscript ready for conversion to a pdf file, I give step-by-step instructions for everything you need to know in the final chapter of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing.

So, there you have it — ideas for write-it-yourself gifts, and a referral to a production partners to make it happen. Get those fingers flying while there's still time, and delight the people on your list with a one-of-a-kind, write-it-yourself gift.

Write now: an outline of contents for a gift book for one or more people. But don’t stop with the outline. Keep your momentum going and create the file.

To Post, or Not to Post

For various reasons, I have not actively encouraged people to post lifestories on the Internet. Today I heard a chance remark that sent my thoughts around a corner. As I talked about lifestory writing with a Senior Center program director, she mentioned how much she wishes she had stories about her grandparents, who are all deceased.

“With the Internet, it is so easy to find out facts about people, and who your ancestors were, but there aren’t any stories,” she lamented.

“Wow!” I replied. “You are so right. If people put stories, even general ones, on a website, maybe in forty years one of their descendants would find it after everyone had lost and forgotten about paper copies.”

The idea of thinking forty years or more into the future about something changing as fast as the Internet taxes my imagination, but it’s worth a shot. I would not post anything highly personal, and I wouldn’t post anything with enough specific information (like birth date and place, address, phone number, and so forth) that could make you a target of identity thieves, but posting a few general stories about your life and times could strengthen your place in history. If the website fades into oblivion, you haven’t lost much.

A growing number of websites encourage people to post life stories at no charge. Not surprisingly most are subsidized by the various services they offer to help you collect your stories, lay them out, organize them and publish them. I have no personal experience with any of these fee-based services, but they look like solid places to post stories. In addition to the sites on listed in my Post Your Stories links, I have found several more. I have not explored these in any depth, but they look interesting.

• Life's Story Travel stories requested.

• Tokoni A new story posting site founded by Skype and eBay executives.

• Dandelife A place for your multi-media urges. A one-stop shop mash-up of photos, video and blog-type story entries. Most are just story.

• Our Story Save photos, videos and stories on your own personal timeline.

• Real Life Stories of Inspiration A place to post your inspiring real life success stories.

• Archive X Submit stories about your paranormal experiences.

• Story of My Life Sign up for free and post your stories “forever.” There seem to be lots of ways to organize and link your stories to those of family members and others.

I don’t know if any of these sites will last for decades, but it’s fun to have people read your work and comment on it, and I recently learned that this is a great way to flesh out a Writer’s Resume for those who may seek paying publication opportunities.

Write now: pick a site and post one of your favorite stories. See you Out There.

Clearing the Dead Would

In his essay, Politics and the English Language , George Orwell shared a list of five Writing Tips. Rule #4 is  

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

This may be the single most valuable tip for improving your writing that you’ll every hear. A search for “passive tense” turns up more than a million links to advice urging you to reword your work and frame it in active tense.>
I’m not going to dwell on that advice. I’m going to share the second most important tip:

Get rid of the dead would. 

An example of dead would follows:

In the summer my friend Annie and I would often pack a picnic lunch. Then we’d head for the beach where we would set up our umbrellas. We would rub Coppertone suntan lotion on each others backs and settled onto our towels. Sooner or later the guys would show up and ....

Compare that passage with this revised version that does nothing more than eliminate would:

In the summer my friend Annie and I often packed a picnic lunch. Then we headed for the beach where we set up our umbrellas. We rubbed Coppertone suntan lotion on each others backs and settled onto our towels. Sooner or later the guys showed up and ...

Doesn’t that just brighten the passage right away?
 
The word would does have a legitimate place in the language. For example, it’s appropriate to say, “I would do it if he gave me $50,” or “I would do it for $50.” In both these cases, would is properly used in its conditional sense, not as a verb modifier.

Most of the time would serves only to muddy the voice of your writing. Read through your stories and scrub it clean of any would not directly paired with a condition.

Write now: read through several old stories to see if they have a “woulden” frame and edit as needed.

Attitude of Gratitude

I’m grateful to Blogster for this blog site, and for everyone who reads it. I’m grateful for a huge long list of other things. I’m a great believer in the power of gratitude — the attitude of gratitude, that is, not just the word.

I didn’t always understand gratitude. In fact, although I’ve known the word forever, it’s a relatively new concept to me, as a state of mind anyway. Sure, I always knew the importance of being thankful, but for me, being thankful doesn’t have the same ring to it, the same gut feel, as gratitude, and it's not nearly as powerful. I’m grateful that I learned about gratitude, and have come to understand the importance of this simple emotion in enhancing both mental and physical health.

I first began to focus on Gratitude as a specific mindset three or so years ago when an invitation to join the first 42 Day GoGratitude experiment arrived in my e-mail. Each day for 42 days, I received a zany thought-prompt about gratitude. The founders chose 42 days, because experts say it take 21 days to cement a new habit, so they doubled it to ensure that Gratitude became a habit.

About the same time I read about Gratitude as one of the keys to stress reduction in The HeartMath Solution, by Doc Childre and Howard Martin, and I found it as part of the Journey to Wild Divine biofeedback game I gave myself as a 60th birthday present.

The concept has grown, and the Internet is awash with Gratitude sites, including instructions on how to keep a Gratitude Journal, (for example, the Simple Abundance site, SleepyDust, and eHow). WebMD offers a video on Gratitude and links to articles on Gratitude and Health such as this one by Joan Borysenko.

Today my Gratitude Adventure has come full circle. GoGratitude has begun a second 42 series. This time the focus is the whole world. I derived so much personal benefit from the first round that I’m definitely in for the second. You can find out more about it and get involved yourself by clicking over to their new World Gratitude site to view a video and sign up if you wish.

Write now: a list of things you are grateful for. Or start a gratitude journal. Or write a story about an experience or person you are grateful for. And sign up for the 42 day journey.