Family History: Mark Twain Quote

In his newly released Autobiography Mark Twain argues that the usual cradle-to-grave account of one’s life makes less sense than our meandering memories . . .

“The side excursions are the life of our life voyage, and should be, also of it’s history.”

Mark Twain

In other words, tell me, instead, about the day the circus came to town or how you fell out of the apple tree or why you like oysters.

Family History: 25 Years of Storytelling Wisdom

When I said lots of people think stories are just stories and not always true, I happened to also sneeze. Cherie Karo Schwartz’s comeback was a Yiddish proverb “Sneeze on the truth.”

Families, she told me, are like the 33 Chilean miners recently rescued from half a mile underground. To survive, they organized themselves. They designated parts of the mine for sleeping, eating and other purposes. They picked a leader. They sang and told stories. Families do the same. They create space and tunnels and make decisions. A spiritual leader arises to hold the sacred space. “It’s really the only way to stay sane,” she added, “especially when you’re stuck in the dark.” In her mind, “soul” and “story” are nearly the same, I realized, and she defined “sanity” as something akin to preserving and perpetuating our stories–our souls.

I’d driven to Denver and I was sitting in her kitchen, eating honey cake that morning, because I wanted to know why people came to her sessions on family folklore. I thought she’d know. She was a professional storyteller who’d made a specialty of family folklore for more than twenty-five years. I also thought I knew the answer. I expected her to talk about a need for roots, a place in history, a search for identity . . ..

We touched on those things but, deep down, she seemed to think story existed on an even more primal level. Quoting Bary Lopez, she said, “Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory.” She continued, “We need stories to stay human, like those miners trapped with no obvious help. Stories are heartbeat, everything.”

Cherie Karo Schwartz descends from a Rabbi, known as a lawgiver, mystic, and storyteller. He said a malech or angel sat on his shoulder and whispered stories to him.  Her grandmother, her bubbe, used to say, “Sit down, let me tell you a story and make you a part of the family.”

When I asked if people came to her sessions because they felt they’d lost their family stories, she shook her head. “We’re human beings; we have stories.” Nevertheless, she provides a page of  questions to get people started. Asking good questions applies to a lot of things, she believed. “When children come home from school, don’t ask what they learned, ask whether they asked good questions . . .”

I left hoping I’d asked one or two.

My Grandmother’s “Fancy” House and the Power of Writing

One of my college writing classes started every morning with free-writing as a warm-up. The idea of free-writing is to put pencil to paper and write without stopping for three minutes—just let the words flow. I have no idea what I wrote most days, but once the subject was grandmothers—yours, the cliché, whatever. Mine had died recently. I didn’t want to deal with those feelings, so I started writing about my grandmother’s house.

Her house wasn’t large, but it was furnished nicely–like something you might see in a magazine, and, for some reason, that was held against her. Most of the family considered her an indulged wife, who supposedly spent my grandfather’s money as fast as he made it. Proof was that she dressed better than anyone else in the family, and her house was always “fancy.” At the time, I was feeling confused, because her furnishings looked ordinary, almost shabby in my mother’s house. Suddenly in the middle of writing, I realized my grandmother was not the spendthrift she was reputed to be; she was an artist—probably a frustrated one. She took ordinary furnishings and ordinary clothes and made them look good together. She had style. As a result of that free writing exercise, I’ve never thought of my grandmother the same way again.

Want to gather your family stories? Just start writing. Sometimes you’ll discover things you didn’t know you knew.

When the Stories are Complete . . .

Verna Wilder writes an insightful blog called OUT OF THE CUBE. As part of her entry entitled Turn the Page she reminds us exactly why we need to pay attention to family stories:

At the end of the day (so to speak), all we have are stories. And I don’t mean to diminish their value by saying “all we have,” as if this is nothing. In fact, isn’t it everything? Don’t the minutes and moments and remember-the-time-whens accumulate and dissipate like fog in low-lying land? It’s like this: for more than 10 years, I’ve been meeting up with my siblings annually at Dad’s house, where we sit in the garage with the big bay doors open where we can stay dry while thunderstorms pass through, where we tell stories and create new stories, and just as the storm passes and leaves everything fresh and new, so this visit passes into memory – and into story. Thank god for story.

At the end of the visit four years ago, as I was putting my car in gear to pull out of Dad’s driveway, I looked in the side-view mirror to see Dad and my sister Carolyn waving at me, Carolyn doing that imitation of our grandmother who used to wave a hankie at our retreating station wagon on those childhood visits, and I thought, as I often do, that this could be the last time I’d see my father.

Carolyn died three weeks later. Just like that, the Carolyn stories were a complete set. There would be no more.

Truth Better Than Fiction OR Vice Versa?

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” —William James

And who isn’t wise enough to gloss over a few things when we tell our stories? Ah, but where is the line between applying a little wisdom and telling a story that never happened?

I will confess that I loved the movie Julie and Julia, about Julia Child and a cooking blog by Julie Powell. I liked the idea that the movie was based on real events. That doesn’t mean that I expected every single detail to be true. That never happens. My husband and I can come home from the same dinner party and remember the evening entirely differently. Everything we do is colored by memory, expectation, our differing feelings and experiences. Not to mention whatever wisdom we’ve applied to the things we’d rather not recall. Nevertheless, when I picked up the book Julie and Julia and read the disclaimer that parts of the book had been fictionalized, I put it down again. As a reader, I didn’t want to wonder which parts.

The following article from thedailybeast.com argues that some true stories are better as fiction. I agree. I also like memoir. Mostly I want them to be clearly one or the other. However, wisdom aside, even that may not be as easy as it sounds. See what you think . . .

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-19/why-some-memoirs-are-better-as-fiction/?cid=topic:featured1