"Memory is the mind of the soul..."
                                                                                                                                                             -Edgar Cayce

Making a record of our personal stories says who we are, how we lived. It clinches our existence. It memorializes the wake of our passing before it disappears. Sharing your personal story is a tiny contribution to immortality, an inheritance and often an indelible mark. To people who care about us, sharing the personal story can be a gift. "Dear Grandpa," wrote the teenager, "I can’t believe how cool you made growing up on a ranch sound. I’m really glad you decided to write about the olden days."

In the workshop sessions, we bring short vignettes we have written and read them aloud to each other. Then we discuss them in a supportive, constructive atmosphere of shared impressions and observations. The object is to mine as much memorable detail and vivid emotion as possible from past experiences and to recognize how they might relate to or reflect on our personal stories today. We also seek to sharpen our ability to remember moments, places, people, feelings, surroundings and to write with fresh insight about them.

People ask, "But don't I need to be able to write or have real writing experience?"  No, you don't.  You have all you need.  You have telling experience, I reply, and telling your personal story in your own words with your own voice is more than sufficient.  In fact, rather than depend on style or expertise, some of the most moving, memorable pieces are ones that let the facts--the details--speak for themselves. The strength of your personal story lies in the quality of recalling and relating rather than in literary ability.

       Challenging Journey

What material do we know better than our own lives? What is more authentic than researching our own past? Our personal stories are strewn with forgotten, denied, tangled, hazy memories—and others just waiting to be recalled in glorious good humor or in bittersweet regret.

A friend named Jim tells about growing up poor during the Depression. When company came for dinner, his mother warned the kids to refuse the meat when she offered it so there’d be enough to go around. But when dessert-time came, she’d say, "Sorry, you didn’t eat your meat, so no dessert." Talk about bittersweet!

Retrieving such moments can be a surprising, rewarding, challenging journey. They may involve the child’s celebration or loss of innocence, adolescent rites of passage, adult epiphanies and acceptances. They trace critical moments in our passage through a circle of time.

People remember or resist remembering for different reasons. Some are shy and dismissive. "Oh, my life just wasn’t that interesting," they’ll protest. Not so. Each life is memorable if we choose to share our personal story. You may have led an interesting, active life filled by a whirlwind of adventure. Or you may have patiently raised your children and lived in the same small town for years.

Your life might be marked by major tragedy or blessed with contentment and steady accomplishment. Most likely, your story will blend both dark and light. No matter how large or how small a life seems, it will be filled with stories that are precious, especially to those who care for us.

Let’s assume, then, that we’re all writing to be read by somebody other than just ourselves—maybe children, grandchildren, other relatives, friends. This workshop is good practice because we are connected by a common bond: people poking through their past in search of a sometimes elusive truth; people seeking to revisit childhood joys or sorrows; people who simply want to remember and record. We’re looking back at a landscape of peaks and valleys; some are hazy, distant. We all are trying to recapture and express authentic moments in our lives, and to recognize those vital to understanding our own personal story.

     Memory Makers

The moments return for good reason: we are, in fact, what has happened to us, what we have done and thought and felt ever since birth. Everything we do immediately becomes the stuff of memory—of a time gone by. At the instant of our present action, we create our past; we add to memory. Even worries or hopes about the future immediately become our past. We’re not aware of this natural by-product in the never-ending process of time passing. In fact, we humans are uniquely memory-makers.

All we have experienced has been processed through our five senses and leaves behind sensory traces, signature trails by which we can recapture key elements of our personal story from the astonishing storehouse of memory. Some lingers at the forefront of our memory file; some has been pushed to the rear of our remembering. Indeed, memory lives on two levels-- conscious and unconscious--and it changes place in this bi-level existence. Certain scenes we recall with stunning clarity. Some return in pieces; shadowy, dispersed except for vague details or mysterious feelings.

      Gunshot Swiftness

Yet how quickly a particular smell or sound immerses us in the past. It can come careening back with gunshot swiftness, strong and clear. Or it may need to be coaxed out of hiding gently, like a shy child into a crowded room. Often, a particular stimulus acts like the proverbial pebble-in-the-water, rippling out in a rich pool of recollection. If we learn to steep ourselves in these waters, we can explore deeper parts of ourselves and feel a greater fullness of living.

The history of writing is full of triggers that sparked memory and moved writers to create great works: Marcel Proust’s tea cookie ballooned to the 14-volume Remembrance of Things Past. A stone in a snowball started Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy . The hit French movie, Amélie,  used a box of hidden childhood trinkets as trigger for an entire film.

One of my childhood "triggers" was a sharp smell of beer and the radio crackle of Sunday baseball, both favorites of my taciturn uncle, a chain-smoking printer who came from work wearing an ink-spattered newsprint hat. Another is fireflies winking in a summer night—beacons of an early romance.

Whether it’s an awful screech of brakes, the touch of a dog’s tongue or that wonderful smell of morning pancakes, these stimuli are keys to open the storehouse of our memory file. The episodes triggered come attached with feeling, texture, atmosphere, geography, story.  These are the sensory trails along which we'll journey to recall the filed-away memories of our past.

As a kid, I played pirate, cowboy, painted warrior and WW II dogface in a vast, welcoming park across from our house that featured lakes, ponds, woods, a castle-like boathouse and a steep, bone-crushing sledding hill. That’s where I find many of my most piquant childhood memories, some happy, some not (I lost two fingers there).   We all have general locales where we played out early fantasies and dreams. The more we go over this ground, the more it reveals in richness of unique, personal content, the fabric and texture of no other life than our own.

      Blue Beard’s Castle

Yet some triggers can draw a blank. Psychology tells us that what we don’t want to remember, we can block, misremember or transform. Many people resist looking backward for just this reason: they don’t want to encounter again a fearful, shameful or painful episode or feeling. They don’t want to be "negative."

This locked door in Blue Beard’s castle, however, can be like the bogeyman under the bed. Opening the door can shine revealing or resolving light into that dark corner and free us.

On the other hand, we do hear of truly shattering childhood experiences, so emotionally punishing that the personality "splits off" and disassociates; the ordeal happens to "someone else." We’re not into primal scream here; and some "recovered memory" of abuse has proven almost coerced, an artifact of auto-suggestion.  Still, for our purposes, if a door doesn’t want to open, don’t force it: some doors stick for good reason.

What else militates against remembering? Many of us have an inner critic who tells us it’s unimportant or dangerous to mess with the past. The critic chatters like so many monkeys: stern parent, sibling rival, school yard bully, a coach or teacher who tormented us. The message is usually the same familiar: "you can’t," "you shouldn’t," "you better not," or "you’ll be sorry."

The inner critic’s scolding is really parental and societal efforts to get us to "behave" or "grow up," forces we personify and internalize. They are intimidating forces that vex and mask the real "us." They’re inside us yet we spend our whole lives trying to get away from them. Go figure.

If we hearken to these warnings of failure or dire results, we may never benefit from going back to revisit key moments. Worse, to heed the censor invites the anger, frustration or sadness of repression that darken life and cripple joy. If we turn away from memory, we lose a piece of our humanity, for the price of re-feeling happiness or joy is the risk of recalling also pain or heartbreak. The bear can’t get to honey without a few stings.

Can attempting to stand in a moment of a time forever gone, trying to recall past happiness or disappointment, really alter anything? Nothing already done can be modified, but we can change our attitude, appreciation and our level of insight about what happened to us and why.  We can begin to recognize forces that drive us below conscious awareness; we can learn to tune out the subliminal critical chorus.

          Links to the Truth

The power of the personal story is its ability to link us to the truth of our past for better use in the present. A new perspective yields new insights that can both strengthen and heal our future outlook.  We wake up to how much mental time we spend in the past without really being aware of it.

We may recognize that to live by our feelings foremost is to go in ever more frustrating and confining circles.   We walk around with many stilted myths and notions in our heads until we wake up to the truth, dial down the back-channel bickering and start living in the "right now" instead of yesterday.  I see a big difference between obsessive navel-gazing and looking inside with clear-eyed curiosity.  It's not until we find out what prisoners we are of feelings that we learn to get in touch with facts.

Don't be surprised to feel an uptick in self-esteem after looking squarely at your personal story from the remove of memoir.   Knowing—and acknowledging -- what we really felt helps us develop more honesty and clarity. An opportunity to rediscover lost innocence or enthusiasm arises. We may realize that what has always seemed like apparent loss or liability—even infirmity--has been transformed by time into a gift.  And it’s no secret that the act of writing (and remembering as we write) can bestow near-therapeutic benefits.

This workshop, however, is not about pop psychology. It’s about remembering effectively, including sharpening your skills of recall. It’s about reaching a deeper truth in understanding the worth and import of our personal story. And it’s about having fun in our pursuit and capture of the past and its possible meaning.
 

Section II    How to Start the Process:  Begin!
SectionIII    Writing Better Than You Know
SectionIV   The Trick of "Telling" Rather than "Writing"
SectionV    "Eat the Elelphant One Bite at a Time"
SectionVI   Show & Tell:  Knowing the Difference
SectionVII  Details:  Keys to Unlock Your Personal Story's Power
SectionVIII Senses:  Your Strongest Links to the Past
Section IX A Glimpse of How the Workshops "Work"