Writing Life Stories and teaching Memoir

I like to teach memoir writing and will be teaching an online class for the Institute of Continuing Learning, ICL, beginning July 13. 

I have been my family historian for years and have collected many stories about my ancestors and my immediate family. I have binders filled with family history and tons of stories on my computer. 

I published a family history book in 1998 and have used that book as a reference for other stories I have written. 

These are some of the things I teach my students about writing memoir:

Factual details paint the story's canvas. But the emotional truths comprise the story's soul.

Writing is Rewriting

Writing never comes out perfect the first time. Good writing means rewriting. Give yourself the time and space to rewrite material, until you have something that is an authentic expression of your life, voice and wisdom.

Get Support

Find a writing teacher, take writing classes, read what you want to write.

Find a writing friend or a group that will tell you the truth about your work.

A coach or writing teacher can guide and advise you, especially when you are not sure how to proceed.

Hold on to Your Vision

When you are stuck or discouraged, remember why you are doing this.

Is it to leave a legacy? To share your wisdom?

Think about how happy or touched others will feel after reading your memoir. Think about how your story will make a difference in their lives. Think about how satisfied you will feel completing it.

Hold on to your vision of completing your memoir.

The good thing about teaching classes on Zoom is you can take this class no matter where you live. I would love to have students who live far away from our mountains in North Georgia or Western North Carolina. 

Audible vs. reading - My Review of Becoming

"In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare."

My thoughts on this book and this author:
Instead of buying the hard cover memoir, Becoming, by Michelle Obama, I purchased it on Audible. She narrated her book which made it all the more authentic. She was a very unique First Lady. In her book, she explains why she did what she did and how she felt as the first lady and the first Black First Lady.  Much pressure was on her to be extra good at her job! 

She was in the public eye all the time and she tells in her book how difficult it was sometimes to be locked in the White House at night and unable to just go outside for a few minutes. Her great sense of humor comes through and her ability to laugh at herself. I liked that about Barrack Obama also. I can't imagine spending time with a man who has no sense of humor and who cannot laugh at himself.

Michelle Obama

In the book she lets the reader in on how she met Barrack and how they became friends before they developed a personal relationship. She tells how he proposed, and it was so cute. I can visualize them as young college students and then trying to decide what their paths would be. Obama seemed to know what he wanted from the time he was very young, but Michelle took one path, the one her parents had planned for her, before she realized what she was really called to do.

She is so down-to-earth and easy to relate to because she could be any of us growing up with working parents who hope their children will have it better than they did. Michelle and her brother were extremely good students, and they ambitiously sought the highest goals. They applied to the best schools and Michelle was accepted to Princeton. She had her own problems with the question we all ask ourselves -- Am I good enough? With other students arriving at school in limousines, she arrived in the family sedan driven by her father.

I remember how I used to feel in high school when some girls arrived in cars driven by their parents' employees, and I arrived on a big yellow school bus. That must have been how Michelle Robinson felt. Being smart is good, but that will not make you popular. Michelle overcame her insecurities because of the confidence instilled in her by her family. She pushed on, not discouraged. She graduated, went on to Harvard Law School, and got a job in a prestigious law firm. Little did she know that the lanky young man who kept dropping in at her law office would one day make her the most famous woman in the world.

I now know I must have this book, the paper back at least, in my hands. It matters not what political party you support. It is not a political book. I think all women, young and older, will appreciate this book and learn good lessons from it. 

Wish I could go and hear her speak in Atlanta in May, but the days of standing in lines surrounded by hordes of people are over for me. That kind of event is for younger people who have the stamina.

If you have read this book, let me know what you think.

I am really curious to know what someone who votes republican thinks.

Leave a comment. It is easy to do. 

Thanks.

Old newspaper clippings about my family made for interesting reading today.

Going through some boxes and folders today, I opened a manila envelope and found faded clippings from my hometown newspaper, the Albany Herald. The articles were clipped by my mother, me and  my sister June over the past forty years. I enjoyed seeing a big write up  when the family sold the  manufacturing business, Hercules Bumpers, located in Pelham, Georgia. There were some errors but  the reporter gave lots of details about our clan. Everyone was mentioned except for Mother who was the most important one of us.

I was surprised when I saw my little nephew, Sam Farkas, in his first business venture. His father had set him up with a cart  at the Albany Mall where nine year old Sam sold holographs. It was a big business for a kid and he made a sizable profit, so large it made the news. Today he can be seen on television when he announces the Power Ball numbers. His day job, however, is working as a successful attorney.

I read an article about my sister Gay marrying her young navy man, Lieutenant Stu Moring, at our home in Albany, Georgia. In those days every detail of the clothing and the food was described in the Society Page of the newspaper. Stu's family came down from Chicago and Gay's friends came from far away.  It was a good day at our house on Fleming Road. I had forgotten that after the wedding and short wedding trip, Stu had to go back to Guantanamo and Gay went back to college in Valdosta, GA where she was earning her masters degree.

We had a mini celebrity in the family in the late seventies and early eighties. I found several photos of my brother's granddaughter, Carrie, who was singing from the time she could talk, I believe. She used that talent and her pretty face to win a number of beauty pageants while she was in middle school and high school. Today she is married with a show stopper of her own. Her little boy is not the singer she was, but he is just as pretty and is quite a talker.

I hope to preserve those clippings and the many others, but will have to research how to do it. The ink fades badly on newsprint, so I will be careful.

I will tell my memoir writing class about this experience. Each clipping is a prompt for a story. All one has to do to find something to write about is look through scrapbooks and photo albums. The ideas and memories will bubble up like a mountain spring.

The Movie 42 - I finally saw it.

Growing up near where Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, GA, I heard some horrific stories from my father about treatment of black people in the rural areas. Those stories have stayed with me all my life. I write about them in my memoir.

I'm glad the movie, 42, was uplifting. What a brave young man Robinson was to take on the entire world of baseball, to take on the verbal abuse from the players and the fans.

I was happy the movie portrayed a southern team mate, Pee Wee Reese, as one who put his arm around Jackie and faced the fans to let them know where he stood. That was also a brave man. 

In my book, I'll tell about my sister and how she had to defend herself while in college, from racist remarks of hometown students who had read in a newspaper that she was on the welcoming committee for Charlene Hunter, first of two black students at UGA. The article was untrue, but the meanness and accusations were not.

The movie, 42, made me feel good about how far this country has come although we have so much further to go. I think racism has just gone underground, at least in the south, because people tell me that a heavy racist population prospers right here in our mountains. I am fortunate to know and be able to socialize with open-minded intelligent and informed people. Most of them I have met through writing. 

We have more good people than bad, I believe, and I'm glad good people, after a long time of blindness, saw the wrong being done by ignorant people, and changed our laws. Sadly laws can't change the prejudiced hearts and minds of others. They have to obey law, but still, inside they hate.

What do you do when...

Come on, tell me. What good old home remedies work for head and chest congestion that hangs on and on?
I've tried the whiskey and  honey in the little bottles that a friend told me about a few years ago. Pershaps I've not used enough. Tomorrow maybe I should drink two or three of the little chaps.

I was advised today to boil honey and lemon juice and then add whisky. Cool and drink. How often? How much?

I smell like Vick's because I rub that on my chest every night.

My mother cured my sister from double pneumonia many years ago with a poultice of tar and tallow. She called it a tar and tallow plaster. I was too little to remember the event but Mother described in detail the night she and her neighbors sat up with the dying baby. She described it as a miracle. I wrote that story a few years ago and it was published in an anthology.

You have stories also you can write about and you can publish. I'll begin a new class in June at Tri-County College on Writing Life Stories. If you live in the area and like to write about your life experiences, call the college and register. I'll give more details later or you can go to http://www.glendacouncilbeall.blogspot.com/ (Writers Circle) and learn more.

Memoir - What to Include, Where to Begin

I will be teaching memoir writing at JCCFS for senior adults who want to share their life stories with family.
Many of my students are not professed writers, but men and women who write letters or have written technical papers or used writing in their careers in some way.
Like many of us, the average person thinks he/she can write the story of their life with no help from anyone. After all, who knows their life story better than the person who lives it? And so they begin, just as my 90 year old cousin did. But she never finished it. “I don’t know where to start,” she said. “Every time I get to writing I find after about ten pages in that I forgot something. Then I have to start over. I just get discouraged.”
As amateur writers, choosing the parts of your life to include is one of the hardest things to do.
“But I want to tell it all,” you say.
Helen Keller chose only the most important parts of her life to include in her autobiography.
We cannot possibly write all the memories in our brain no matter how dear they are to us. Our memory holds more information than all the sets of encyclopedia you could stack and pack into 100 rooms. We just can’t write it all.

Today memoirs are no longer autobiographies, but short and meaningful moments in a person’s life arranged in the best way to tell a story. Good memoirs should read like fiction, using many of the elements of fiction.



A memoir can begin any place in your life. A memoir doesn’t have to tell your whole life, but can be any part of your life.



Popular memoirs seldom start with “I was born on January 2, 1937, in Springfield, Missouri on Jefferson Street in a little brown house.”

We must find the story in our lives that needs to be told. We must ask ourselves, what do I want the reader to take away from reading about my life? Ask ourselves, why would the reader like this book and finish this book? How do we engage our reader? We must have a good concept, interesting events and we must use sensory detail; these three are the most common ways to balance action (what takes place) and reflection (what you think about the action as you remember it).

Writing Memoir at Young Harris College for ICL

My class at Young Harris College, Young Harris, GA has filled but today I gave permission to add one more student. I hope you have registered if you planned to attend. (see information on registration on sidebar)

Each class will only be two hours long. Therefore, to let all students have time to participate, I like no more than ten - twelve in my classes. Also, a small class lends to better bonding of the students. That is important. To tell our true stories with complete honesty for the first time often requires that we trust our audience.

As our writing community grows in Clay County and Cherokee County in NC and Towns and Union Counties in Georgia, it pleases me to see my students reading at Open Mic and widening their horizons trying different genres - poetry, journalism, and more.

Veteran's Day Story in Clay County Progress

Once again I am proud of one of my students, Ash Rothlein, who wrote an essay that will be published this week in our local newspaper, The Clay County Progress. Ash served in WW II and has begun (in his mid-eighties) to write his memories This story is most fitting for Veterans Day.

While he never hesitates to shower me with appreciation for his beginning to write, I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to know Ash. A gentleman, the like seldom seen in today's world, he shepherds his classmates to meetings held about every three months, as they share new memories. Unlike some war veteran who never want to speak of the war, Ash decided to tell of  his recollections in touching and sometimes humourous stories.

We learned more about the kind of man our friend was in his youth, and our eyes filled with tears when he took us back to a battle field in Europe and the sentiments he continues to feel about that day.

If  you live in the Hayesville, NC area, pick up the Progress and read Ash's story. And if you have memories you have been meaning to share, get out the paper and pen or get to your keyboard. Don't wait another day. No more excuses. Write now.