Prologue: Life at Daniel's Place

Weeks after the governor shut down North Carolina due to the coronavirus pandemic, I put on a pair of tennis shoes. It was a Sunday in April, yet my church held no services. Since I couldn't go there to worship, I drove across town to Markham Memorial Gardens. People feared the virus, but fear was nowhere on the rolling lawn dotted with grave markers and tall Carolina pines. The dead can't get Covid. And I can't get the illness from them. As I drove, I smiled at my dark humor.

But my humor evaporated once I faced the white wooden fence at the entrance. My eyes blurred with tears. The tears, which I'm a fanatic about labeling, were not tears of sorrow, hurt, or pain. They were those special tears cried when we know someone has cared for, looked after, and loved us, even when we didn't realize what was happening. My spirit had come to this place for safety, but not from Covid or our country's looming troubles. Long before news of the virus and the shutdown, this corner of the world had become my secure haven and respite.

As I walked the circular driveway, passing the familiar gravestones and landmarks, flashbacks played through my mind. Here, I had once wanted to die, before my healing had begun.

Four years into my grief, I was invited to facilitate a writing workshop. Sascha, a poet and bereaved mother who had lost both her children— the youngest to drowning and the oldest to suicide—asked me to fill in for her at a conference in Denver, Colorado. She was ill and needed a substitute. I was instructed to share how beneficial writing from heartache is. As I stood at the podium before forty bereaved parents, I knew writing helped me. But did others find it therapeutic? I introduced some writing prompts and was pleased when parents stood to read their poetry in memory of their son or daughter.

After I made it through the workshop—where I hoped no one had noticed my insecurity from being a novice—one of the event volunteers approached me. I thought she was trying to make me feel good when she said, "Alice, there was a lot of healing going on in that room." I had no idea what a room of healing looked like.

Decades later, I know. I know how a grassy landscape of remorse becomes a sanctuary of discovery and gratitude. I know how God takes our most profound agony and replaces it with his joy. I know how pouring pain onto paper transforms pent- up anguish into hope. I have experienced how a mother lacking confidence dared to seek fulfillment. This did not happen over weeks; it took years.

The cemetery welcomed me that Sunday in April. True, the dead were still silent; they could no longer share their opinion, ponder, or rush to be anywhere. For them, what was done was done; it was over. As for me, I still had a course to run— peace to absorb, ideas to wrestle with, lessons to invite, and healing to embrace. Gratitude for the quiet landscape rich with my history filled me; I started to sing. I belted out one of my favorite hymns, repeating the first verse six times because that was the only verse I knew from heart. “Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.”

And that is another pleasure of being at the cemetery: the dead don’t complain.

Read it all! Get the memoir here!

Make it Come to Life : Prologue to a memoir

A view from a train window can kick start a fascinating story. Look what it did for Walt Disney. On a journey from Manhattan to Hollywood in 1928, Walt looked out his window as large towns gave way to wheat and corn fields. And there, under an apple tree, Mickey Mouse showed up. Perhaps Mickey waved a white-gloved hand, or maybe he just smiled. Walt captured him on a sketch pad and the stories began. Walt’s gone now, but his cartoon mouse has traveled all over the world and lives forever.

Although I grew up on trains in Osaka, Japan, my creations weren’t the kinds you sketch, but printed words. I looked out the windows and instead of a mouse, four teens appeared on a boat. They needed an ocean to take them to a remote tropical island where they would get lost, build campfires at night, eat mangos the size of footballs, and have fascinating adventures with the natives. I put them in a rowboat (at age eleven I was not the smartest seafarer which meant neither were my characters) and let a storm fester with just enough wind for their vessel to wash against the shoreline of the island. I named the island Blue Hama (I suppose I didn’t have the knack for good names at age eleven either).

Later, when I had crushes on boys with names like Ethan and Harold, I looked out the window as trains took me to and from school, and saw handsome boys on bicycles near parks where they met pretty girls named Belinda, Camithia, and Sylviana. I bought spiral notebooks at the local stationer’s near my home in Awaji, knowing that each notebook would be the place where a best seller would be brought to life and I’d be rich and famous before I turned twenty.

Each train ride from Awaji to Karasuma—the station closest to my international school—took forty-seven minutes. That’s a lot of time to peer out of windows. In the afternoons, the train was less-crowded and when I got to sit down, I lured my characters, bringing them from outside where they began along the tracks, to inside the pages of my notebooks. I gave them words, obstacles to conquer, and lots of love in their hearts.

If Walt and I had ever crossed paths, or if we’d been seated on the same train, he might have used his pencil to draw me as a kid. Two blond ponytails sticking out from just below my ears, plaid skirt, red tights that bagged around my ankles by the time school got out, and a pair of black patent-leather shoes that were magnets for doggy poop. In my hand would be a yellow number 2 pencil sans an eraser on the end because erasers never last the lifetime of pencils. The pencil would be scratching out my messy words (I had what was known back then as sloppy penmanship) over the lined notebook’s pages, and my ears, although not as prominent as Mickey’s, would be stretched to listen for the conductor’s announcement of my train station.

I spent my childhood on trains. And when I wasn’t on one, I was running to catch one or if I missed it, waiting for the next one on the platform.

Every parent has some story they repeat and repeat, passing it onto their offspring. That’s how those tales of suffering get handed down like certain unwanted family heirlooms: “I had to walk to school in the snow.” “I had to walk up hill in the snow both ways.” “I had to walk in the snow both ways with no shoes.” Mine is: “I had to ride the train to school every day for forty-seven minutes. And that was just one way!” And like any other parent, I’m always subject to the indifferent attitudes my children display when my story is told.

When the Amtrak thundered over the track that day in 1996, I no longer rode the train to school. I was a grown woman of 35 with three of my own children. My middle child, Daniel, aged three, was by my side as we watched the silver cars streaked with red, white, and blue. One after another, after another, racing along, going somewhere. We stood, silent, as one does during the singing of the national anthem or during a prayer. The track was just beyond the slide and swings and the shade of the massive oak tree where we’d had a picnic lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because those are the easiest for moms to make.

The sound of a train has always tugged at the wild hope chord of my heart. A train symbolizes a way toward a happy destination, but more—the actual journey, looking out the window, passing places you’ve never set foot in, capturing vistas that are quaint, majestic, or even spiritual.

Daniel seemed to understand my need for reverence, he paused from playing with Caleb and tickling his baby brother Ben to be captivated with me.

But once the train was out of sight, he left me for the slide. He climbed up the ladder and at the fourth rung, stopped. “Where is the train going?” he asked.

“To the next station.”

But my reply didn’t seem enough for my son. “Where is the next station?”

I know that Moms are supposed to have all the answers, it comes in a kit they hand you at the hospital after delivery, soon after the umbilical cord is cut. Since the park was just miles from the state capital, I offered a guess and said, “Raleigh.”

“The train’s going to Raleigh?”

Why not? “Yeah.”

“Where’s Raleigh?” Daniel asked.

“Oh, about two miles from here.”

Satisfied with my answer, Daniel continued his climb to the top of the slide. From there he lifted a hand from the railing to wave at me. Just as my motherly instincts kicked in, and with them, the familiar phrase that all moms are taught to say, “Be careful!” Daniel said, “Bye, Mommy! I’m going to Raleigh.” And down he slid, his blond hair flying with the speed of an oncoming train. At the base of the slide sat his friend Caleb, whom Daniel managed to only nick with his shoe. “Sorry, Paleb,” Daniel apologized.

Caleb, unalarmed, continued drawing in the sand with two sticks, one in each hand, swirling them around as though stirring a pot of stew.

It was April, a warm and sunny Southern day. Baby Benny played in his stroller, his chubby hands wrapped around a stuffed blue dog, one that Daniel let him borrow. We often came to the IBM Park on clear days because kids and the outdoors are a freeing combination and moms should get away from houses that need cleaning. Everyone is entitled to some kind of liberation. On days when I babysat Caleb so that his mother, Susan, could work on her music duties at our church, he came with us. Susan packed him lunches in brown paper bags—chocolate pudding cups with peel-away lids, fat ham sandwiches, fruit gummies, and homemade cookies.

“You want that? How about this? Paleb, are you gonna eat this?” Daniel would sort through Caleb’s bag, pulling each item out, shaking it in front of his friend’s face, and asking. That which his friend did not want, Daniel, happily indulged.

They tell you in the Mom’s Kit that your children will always prefer the lunch of another child. Something to do with the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, which boils down to other moms are cooler because they know what kids really like. Sometimes, when I encouraged him, Caleb ate his ham sandwiches. Daniel eyed those sandwiches and every bite Caleb took as he solemnly chewed his own peanut butter and jelly. I eyed those sandwiches, too. Mother and son wishing we had a mom like Susan to make us lunch.

About three weeks later, when a train whistle sounded and a freight train clamored past us in the park—oil cars, refrigerated cars, a car with graffiti—Daniel waited until the caboose was only a dot on the landscape. Then, turning to me where I sat on the grass with Benny who was getting sand in between his bare toes, Daniel said, “The train’s going to Raleigh.”

I smiled. “Oh, is it?”

“Yes. Raleigh is the next station.”

Years later—eighteen to be exact—I was seated in my grandma Stubbs’ mauve recliner, one I had inherited after her death. I looked through old photographs, color prints that mark time. It was a parade of matte and glossy visits—Easters with baskets bigger than my children, the Christmas we got the puppy, birthday cakes decorated with thick butter cream icing, our first night in the new house on Monticello—all made their appearances, chronicling the passage of the years. Rachel, Ben and Liz had all walked in and out and back in the new house many times again and again, even the puppy that grew into a senile beagle, made her way through and out the doggie door. But there would be one person who would never walk through the laundry room door inside or out. No one would ever see his smile or hear his laughter. He was gone, and yet he was everywhere. He was in every story we remembered and told.

The afternoon in my living room of remembering gave into the evening. Through the winter stillness, a train whistle sang—low, mellow, permeating the air. I didn’t stand, but my whole being was attentive until the song turned into only a murmur, as I envisioned its journey down the familiar tracks, tracks I could not see, but knew too well.

“Where is it going?”

Oh, Daniel, you know.

“The train’s going to Raleigh.”

And back again. And even beyond. There is so much to be discovered.

The story was already there, I just had to find the best way to make it come to life.

A Lesson From Geese

It's a slow process but quitting won't speed it up.


The first time I stood over my son Daniel's gravestone I wished it wasn't so small. Sadness, coupled with regret, wove a shroud around me. “Don’t worry, baby," I said in the way a mama talks to her child's grave. "I’ll make things right. I’ll tell the world about who you were as my boy.”

As the March wind rustled over the last of the dead leaves from autumn, I made my promise. I would atone for not spending more money on a lavish marker---one larger than life---as he had been to me. I was a writer; I would write a book in his memory. Not just any book, it would be the kind that sparkles against a deep starry night. It would be brilliant and bold, honest and filled with the things he loved.

I wrote poetry about his soul being in Heaven, stories about the way he lived and the things he had enjoyed---watermelon slices, trips to the beach and mountains, watching Toy Story over and over again. Some of the poems were published. Articles I labored over about losing a child after cancer treatments ended up in bereavement magazines. I wrote some novels too and made sure each one had a character who had experienced a significant loss. I compiled three cookbooks in memory of children gone too soon. More time passed; my three living children grew up and left the house.

But the book I had vowed to write was still a long way from being completed.

The cemetery provided spring mornings for sitting and writing. The aroma of mowed grass and the songs of the birds that nestled in the oak by Daniel's grave all became part of my healing. But there was life on the other side of the cemetery that called me and took my time. My husband and I had a wood-working business and there were orders to fill, sanding, and staining to do. When I made time to write, the words that I typed felt bulky and weighted. Writing a memoir was more difficult than writing a novel. I wanted to get the facts right and poured over articles by memoirists about emotional truth.

When I woke during dark mornings at two, I thought about how I could tailor the book and make it shine. But it didn't shine, it didn't even glow. My inner critic told me to give up writing a book about Daniel. One day I was so fed up with it all I decided to listen to her. I went into the garage and found some wires and jump rings and things that I'd stored in a box from previous years when I made some very sad looking earrings. I looked online on how to make necklaces with beads. And one afternoon when business was slow I made a necklace. And then I made another. I ended up making three necklaces. They were pretty and I wore them. But they were not my heart. They were just a detour to keep me occupied until I could figure out what I really needed to do to get my book into shape.

On an autumn day under a gray sky, I learned a lesson that would transform me. God used a gaggle of geese to show me the art of persistence.

When I arrived at the cemetery on that particular morning, across from the circular drive where I always park my Jeep, I saw a new sight, something I'd never seen before or since then at that location. Canadian Geese greeted me. A few walked in circles on the pavement. Others walked away from me as I approached with my camera. There was one who darted over to a grave. The overall consensus was clear to me. These creatures were confused, and as my aunt Mollie would say, discombobulated. None of them were in cahoots but all were cackling, wobbling, vocal. I took some more pictures and then decided it was time to get my pen and pad from my Jeep and sit on a towel by Daniel's grave and do what I came to do. I walked away from the noisy encounter and the screeching conversations I did not understand.

When I got to the Jeep, I opened the door and that's when I heard the most air-shattering sound. The ruckus made the entire cemetery come alive. I looked overhead because that was where the sound was the loudest. That's when I saw it. In a V-format, flying through the sky, were those discombobulated geese. I grabbed my camera and took a picture, but by then, the geese were far into the sky and just little specks dotting the gray.

When the cemetery returned to calm, I asked, "How?" How had those geese, who had been so confused just minutes before, were now flying in sync together in harmony with purpose and direction? Which one of them had given the sign that it was time to be responsible? Had one of them lifted a foot indicating that it was the moment to leave? A wink? Can geese wink? How had such a motley crew taken off in such a glorious formation?

I spread Daniel's Thomas the Tank Engine towel, and sat with legs stretched out by the tiny grave that I had struggled with all these years.

I picked up my pen. I wrote a few words.

I had begun. Again.

One more time.

My inner critic had even been transformed; she was now my cheerleader. "One day," she told me in that way that critics speak to us, "if you do not give up, it will resemble a gaggle of geese who have found their place after a morning of confusion."

To the untrained eye, the photo I took of the geese in flight doesn't look like geese. Some might mistake it for a crow, a drone, or a smudge on the print. But to me, it is one of the tangible items I view to show me not to give up. Persistence is what we have to put on every day, if we want to pursue what is ours to do.

10 Tips for Writing a Memoir that Resonates With Readers: Guest Post

These days, as COVID-19 sweeps the globe, our days seem to be melting into an undifferentiated fog of worry and waiting. Still, this season of fear can be the perfect time to think back on the stories that make us who we are.

It might seem strange, looking to the past to make sense of a disorienting present and an uncertain future. But it can help us remember our resilience and capacity for joy. In the end, it’s our old triumphs (and traumas) that have given us the resources to weather this new terror.

Dig deeply enough, and you might find yourself excavating a powerful story from the material in your memory, a narrative even you couldn’t discern before. Why not fashion that story into a memoir and share it with the world? Here are ten tips for writing a memoir that resonates with readers — because we could all use a nourishing dose of inspiration right now.
1. Start in the middle
A memoir isn’t an autobiography. You’re not beholden to the tyranny of chronology, so you shouldn’t feel obligated to start at the very beginning. The occasional memoir might open with an exhaustive account of the author’s birth. But most of our origin stories aren’t very gripping.

Feel free to skip ahead to the interesting parts, lest you lose your readers as they yawn their way through your earliest hours. Instead, start in the middle with a vivid scene that promises to stick in their memory. Speaking of which….
2. Write in scenes
You might be writing nonfiction, but the fruit of your labors will bear a striking resemblance to a novel. It may sound strange, but a strong memoir has more in common, stylistically and structurally, with an epic fantasy than with a history textbook.

Memoirs, like novels, are written in scenes — not inert streams of fact, but vivid set-pieces animated by concrete details and immediate action. Instead of telling your readers about what you experienced, show them your most powerful experiences in real time. Set the scene with description and bring the people involved on-stage as characters, with gestures to make and lines to speak.

3. Treat the people in your memoir as autonomous characters
Fiction writers invest a lot into making sure their heroes and villains read like real people, but memoirists aren’t exempt from the work of character development. Because the people populating your memoir have real-life analogues, you don’t have to craft their characterization out of whole cloth — you can rely on memory, observation, and even interviews to refine their physical descriptions and tease out their motives.

The key is to make sure the “characters” in your memoir are as finely drawn as any literary characters — that they behave like people instead of plot devices in your story. The reader should be able to imagine them living their lives off the page, not winking out of existence the second they leave your side.
4. Show emotional growth
Of course the most important character you’ll be developing is the protagonist — you. Most readers want their protagonists to emerge from the other side of the narrative somehow changed by their experiences. Whether they’re more confident and independent or more selfless and serene, that sense of evolution makes the reading experience feel worthwhile.

As you write your memoir, make sure you’ve sketched out an arc for your growth as a character. Can you pinpoint how you’ve changed — and link that transformation to the experiences you write about?
5. Show off your imperfections
Turning yourself into a compelling protagonist is an act of radical vulnerability. You’re allowing readers an unflinching glimpse into your character — warts and all.

Even the most self-aware memoirist can find themselves lapsing into PR mode, quietly shaping their account of events to justify a mistake or airbrush a character flaw. Watch out for those self-aggrandizing tendencies as you write, and remember: memoir readers don’t want to read about saints. Your imperfections will make them root for you all the more.
6. Arrange events according to a clear narrative arc
Shaping your characterization around an arc of emotional growth will give your memoir a crucial sense of dynamism. By the same token, the individual scenes you write should build on each other in a way that suggests the story you’re telling is going somewhere.

To put it differently, your memoir should have a plot. That means the scenes you write can’t just shine individually — they have to make sense together, bound by a clear causal logic and a sense of change over time.
7. Don’t let your message overshadow your story
As your memoir comes together, you’ll continue to grapple with what inspired you to tell your story in the first place. Your motivations might evolve over the writing process, as long-buried memories emerge, and once-insignificant pieces of your past take on a breathtaking new clarity. But maybe there’s an impetus you’ll carry with you from the beginning: a message you need to get across.

Let that message seep into your writing. But don’t allow it overtake the story you’re telling, replacing evocative detail with sloganeering. Say you want to demonstrate, for instance, that grief can’t be rushed. You don’t want to fill each chapter with too many point-blank statements to that effect. Instead, craft scenes that show what happened when you tried to “progress” through your grief according to a normative timeline rather than listening to your own needs.
8. Tell all the truth but tell it slant
You might remember James Frey, whose Oprah-touted memoir turned out to be, upon extensive fact-checking, a novel. The revelation that he fabricated his haunting account of addiction ignited a media firestorm. Memoirists have presumably been on their best behavior ever since.

Needless to say, pulling a Frey is a non-starter. But that doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice the emotional truth of your story on the altar of newsprint facticity. Take inspiration from the ever-wise Emily Dickinson, who spoke of telling the truth at a slant.

In practical terms, that means you can reconstruct dialogue you can’t remember word-for-word, and cut out details that bog down your narrative. Just don’t make up events with the freewheeling panache of a fantasist.
9. Fact-check yourself
This tip might sound like it contradicts the last point, but it’s crucial to ensuring that minor memory lapses don’t jolt your readers out of your story. Say you write about singing along to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” on your iPod as you make nachos, your cat winding furry figure-eights around your feet and your TV humming in the background. You look up to check if your oven is preheated, but the TV screen catches your eye: you see smoke billowing off the Twin Towers as the news breaks on 9-11.

This could be a striking scene — ordinary domestic joys pierced by national tragedy. But some of your readers may remember that “Beautiful” came out a year after 9-11. Suddenly they’re closing your book to confirm their suspicions on Wikipedia.

To make sure you don’t lose your readers at a pivotal point, verify any of the details that can be verified. Memory plays tricks on us all, but you can outsmart it with some careful research.
10. Don’t try to sound like anyone else
We all know most celebrity memoirs are ghostwritten. But their outsourced tell-alls only work because the hired pens involved manage to capture this politician’s folksy charisma or that actress’s wry charm.

If you don’t opt for the red carpet route and instead write your own memoir, it’s important to hang onto your greatest asset: your inimitable literary voice. If you blindfold your best friend and read your memoir aloud through a voice changer, they should still recognize you.

Allow room for the expressions that naturally flavor your speech, and above all, don’t try to sound like someone you’re not. If you find yourself reaching for haute-literary language that feels unnatural, or dumbing down your prose to sound more accessible, give yourself permission to stop. No one else, after all, can tell your story. And it should sound like it’s coming from you.

~*~*~*~*

Lucia is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book world’s best editors, illustrators, and book marketers. In Lucia’s spare time, she enjoys drinking iced coffee and reading comedienne memoirs.

Memoir Writing Workshop

So this morning when I couldn't sleep due to those middle-age night sweats and pain in my left ankle from when Levi, the boxer-dog ran into me, I thought.

I thought about the memoir I've been slaying over, and, after jotting down a few notes in the darkness, I was reminded that I haven't posted on this blog in too long. So on my memo pad, while my husband and boxer slept, I wrote: Write a blog post tomorrow.

Shame on me for not keeping up with posts here. I am not sure what excuse I have but I suppose I could blame it on our business, working on my memoir, and those other aspects of life that worm their way into the day-to-day threads of living, some good, some just frustrating.

Having said that, my memoir is at a good place. I think. Oh, ask me tomorrow. Tomorrow I might want to toss it out the window. This memoir is much harder to get right than any novel I've ever written. Just when I think I'm content with it, I learn something new and realize that some chapters must be re-worked.

The surprising news is this: A fellow author asked me to facilitate a memoir writing workshop, and although I am no expert on the subject, I said YES. I figured that with all the articles, books, and webinars I've poured into my brain on memoir writing, I can share my self-taught knowledge with others. So I'm up for the task.

I've learned about so many of the components of writing a memoir as I've educated myself through the gurus who hang out on the Internet. I've listened to talks on finding themes and plots, structure, and strong starts and significant endings. I've read dozens of memoirs this year, analyzed what I have enjoyed and what I haven't.

But yippee, I get to share my knowledge at a workshop!

The memoir writing workshop starts April 2 and will be held for five weeks at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, NC. Not Princeton, NJ, so don't head there. The workshop is free; yes, you read that correctly. It is being offered thanks to a grant. The workshop will be given each Tuesday in April from 4 to 6 PM.

For those of you reading who live close enough to Princeton, NC to join me at the workshop, I hope to see you there. Bring a pen you love and a notepad and/or a lap top.

Let's discover the magic of writing memoir together!

Location:
Princeton Public Library
101 Dr. Johnnie H. Jones Jr. Blvd.
Princeton, NC 27569