White Cat-Black Cat: The Question of Truth In Memoir-Writing

By Sara Taber

Sara is leading a Writer's Toolbox workshop at TWC beginning September 19.

A memoir writer vows to tell the truth.  Most often, for those of us not famous, this stringent vow is qualified slightly.  While trying to be as accurate as possible, we promise the most we really can: to offer our--admittedly limited—version of the truth, and to convey our own emotional truth.  But even with these provisos, the task is confounding, for what is the truth about one’s life?

I suppose the search for truth is especially knotty—and keen--in my case, because I was the daughter of a clandestine C.I.A. officer, but it is so for most memoir writers.  To me, identifying the truth is like gazing at an Escher painting. First it looks this way: like a school of fish. Then it looks like a flock of birds.  While writing, I might recall the feral cats I saw on walks by the North Sea.  A particular day, I might remember one cat; the next, a different one might spring to mind.   

My childhood, spent criss-crossing the globe, was a rich, exotic lark, deliciously happy. 

My childhood was a field of grief, rent by constant moves, brittle secrets, self-doubt, and friction.  

In order to tell you the truth of my childhood, which story do I tell?  The triumphant, happy, hearty story—the American success story?  Or the bogged-down, sad, troubled one a Swede might write?

If you looked at a movie of my childhood, you might say, “This is the story of a sensitive, shy kid who grew up to be, for the most part, strong and happy, with struggles along the way.”  Then again, depending on your mood, you might say, “Wow, what a cool, lucky childhood,” or “I wouldn’t have gone through that for the world.”

Beyond the happy-sad dichotomy, there are so many stories about my childhood that would be a version of the truth:

The shy, lonely, grieving girl

The joyful, valiant girl

The girl with the spy glass, who could sail any sea

The girl who wound up on a U.S. Air Force psychiatric ward

My brave, inspirational mother

My terrified mother

My war with my mother

My sweet and philosophical father

My father the tortured spy

A life within secrets

My childhood that zig-zagged across the globe

The people I have loved

My crazy schools

Itinerancy and its consequences

Cultures I have known

One girl’s story of what it means to be American

The truth is: Truth is multiple.  

In writing a memoir, one is forced to make choices between truths, even if one endeavors mightily to include them all.  

Closing the book, I can say of my memoir:  This is one story of my life.  This is not all of me.  I could have written it as though the black, instead of the white cat was on the strand.  But that is for another day.  

Sara Mansfield Taber’s memoir, Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter, will be published in January 2012.  Her other books include Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf (Beacon, 2002); Of Many Lands: Journey of a Traveling Childhood (Foreign Service Youth Foundation, 1999); and Dusk on the Campo: A Journey in Patagonia (Henry Holt, 1992). Her memoirs and essays have been published in The Washington Post and multiple newspapers and magazines, and produced for National Public Radio.  Her website is: www.sarataber.com               

The Writer's Toolbox: Your Writer Questions Answered

So here's this week's question (and if you have questions you'd like answered by workshop leaders or our favorite writers, let me know by e-mailing me at kyle.semmel@writer.org).

How do I get a publisher or an agent for a collection of short stories?

James Mathews, alum, workshop leader, and author of the Katherine Anne Porter prize-winning collection Last Known Position:

One of the best tracks to follow for a collection is to first get as many stories as possible published individually - in literary or other competitive journals. This greatly increases your chances of landing a publisher or agent as it demonstrates the prose has already been, in a sense, peer-reviewed.

Matthew Pitt, Spring 2011 Emerging Writer Fellow (who'll be reading at Story/Stereo on March 4). He will also lead a one-day short fiction workshop at TWC called "Openers, for Openers":

There’s no short answer to this. But the shortest answer I know—write/revise with unwavering dedication, and be lucky, and have a completed novel in your drawer—seems both true and glib. A longer answer is the "how" differs from writer to writer, project to project, and is a moving target, depending on what particular agents and publishers are seeking at a given time.

So here's a beginning strategy. Read a lot of collections, from publishers large and small. Not only to support fellow writers, but to absorb as much about voice, craft and technique as possible. Think about the collections/writers on your shelves you most admire, or feel your work most resembles. See if they mention their agents in the acknowledgments. If so, query those agents. If you admire a collection with a small publisher, go to the website: many modest-sized publishers will allow writers to submit portions of their work at specified times. Others will hold contests, offering monetary prizes, travel grants, and, best of all, publication.

Leslie Pietrzyk, another alumni-turned-workshop leader at TWC, Pietrzyk has published two critically acclaimed novels, Pears on A Willow Tree, and A Year and a Day:

Story collections are notoriously hard to sell, so make sure your stories have been published first in excellent journals. Most agents aren’t interested in story collections (unless you also have a novel), but you can enter your ms. in contests run by small/university presses. Best list of legit contests: http://www.pw.org/content/writing_contests_0 Best database of small presses to query: http://www.pw.org/small_presses?apage=* And if you want to look for an agent to query anyway, here’s a good place to begin: http://www.agentquery.com/

Leslie blogs at Work-in-Progress.

The Writer's Toolbox: Your Writer Questions Answered

Two posts today. First, historian & TWC member David Stewart (author of Summer of 1787) answers this question:

"What role do publishers and agents play in today's world?"

Publishers and agents play two critical roles today. They serve the reading public by identifying good writers and bringing it before the world for its consideration. And they serve writers by helping to package their books and helping them figure out business and marketing challenges for which most writers have little intuitive feel. Even with the growth of digital books, there will continue to be great value in having those roles performed well.

For those of you interested in book reviews, David is one of the many forces between American Independent Review of Books, a new initiative aiming to be a force in the industry of book reviewing, locally AND nationally. Once that site goes live, I'll post a link and have a write up.

Post #2 is by Sunil Freeman, The Writer's Center's programs guru. I asked him to give a review of last Sunday's Open Door reading. Here's Sunil:

The Writer’s Center hosted a reading featuring three poets published in Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry this Sunday. We’d been looking forward to the reading for several months, having received a proposal from Pireeni Sundaralingam, one of the three co-editors. She noted that poets published in the anthology would be in Washington attending the huge gathering of writers at the Associated Writing Program conference, so an early February reading would be ideal.

She was joined by two other poets published in the anthology, Ravi Shankar and Dilruba Ahmed, who read their own work as well as several other poems from the anthology. Indivisible came into being after a literary publicist suggested that, since South Asian voices had been somewhat marginalized in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attack, it would be fitting to create a small compilation of work by poets from that part of the world. The editors quickly discovered that the project would grow into a much larger undertaking.

They also learned, to their considerable surprise, that there had never been an anthology of South Asian American poets. The call went out for submissions, and hundreds came in, from which the three editors selected 47 poets to include in the anthology. Poems came from poets they already knew and admired, from general calls for submissions, and from the editors’ extensive reading of contemporary literary journals, always looking for particularly striking work by South Asian poets.

Pireeni described how, as word about the anthology grew in the publishing world, several presses expressed an interest in publishing what has become the first ever anthology of South Asian American poetry. In the end, the University of Arkansas Press published the 288-page book. It’s an extraordinary collection, with a wide range of poetic voices. Speaking of it, Yusef Komunyakaa noted “Moments of graceful resiliency are captured again and again, and Indivisible becomes an unbroken map of lyrical recollection. There are lived lives behind these marvelous poems.”

I’ll end with just a taste of the many poems shared at the reading:

Ravi Shankar lent a comedic touch with “The Flock’s Reply to the Passionate Shepherd,” his poem inspired by Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”:

Marooned upon this grassy knoll,
We wander lost from vale to pole,
Our woolly backs resemble thorn,
It’s been a while since we’ve been shorn . . .

From Dilruba Ahmed’s poem, “The 18th Century Weavers of Muslin Whose Thumbs Were Chopped,” inspired by Agha Shahid Ali:

What you’ve heard
of the weavers is no alchemy, it’s true:
they could have woven
you a cloth as fine as pure mist.

Beyond silk. Beyond gossamer.
Twenty yards in a matchbox
like folded air. Or fifteen
through a golden band, diaphanous. . .

And from Pireeni Sundaralingam’s “Vermont, 1885,” inspired by W. A. Bentley, who at age 19 was the first person to photograph a snowflake. Bentley later formulated the theory that no two snowflakes have the same structure:

I go home to my attic’s silence, adjust
focal length and lenses, grind out
the sea-green glass. Microscope
and camera: beneath their quiet stare
the snow disappears, is replaced
by a single, unique, six-pointed star.



# # #

The Writer's Toolbox: Your Writer Questions Answered

Question

How do you feel about the trend in literature to move from pure genres to mixed genres and do you think it's a sign that people want more entertainment from their dollar?”

Answers

Barbara Esstman, a fiction award winner who has written two novels that were adapted for television, responds:

Genres have always been developing in response to changes in human culture.  Epic poetry is no longer a hot item, the novel didn’t get jump-started until the 18th century, and the short story didn’t show up until the 19th.  No big surprise that as we move into a super-accelerated age, genres will morph or combine in ways we’ve yet to imagine.

Sure, readers buy books for their entertainment value, though I’m not sure you can put a dollar amount on that.  We always want art to entertain, as well as instruct, amaze and all those other possibilities.   But we’re all entertained differently.   I don’t want to read “Twilight” or “The DaVinci Code” any more than the fans of those books probably want to wade through “Quarantine” or “Under the Volcano.”  So I think it’s important for writers to avoid trying to outguess the market, a tactic which doesn’t work anyhow, but to write what engages and therefore entertains them to the highest degree.   I mean, hey, if you’re not entertained by your own book, your readers are going to be really, really bored.

I also think it’s interesting to consider what’s happening to us as humans that will be reflected in the new shapes of our art.  Already personal tech devices and an onslaught of sensory input have affected attention spans and possibly the way people think.   When we’ve gotten used to listening to a newscast while reading the weather report streaming across the bottom of the screen, then graphic novels or art installations that come with audio are rather natural extensions of this brave new world multi-tasking.  But again, none of us can predict exactly how this is going to work; better to write what you care about and keep open to new forms that might fit with your style.

Charles Jensen, founder of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT and author of numerous poetry collections, says:

Personally, I think entertainment value has little to do with it.  We are in an era when hybrids of all kinds are essential parts of our lives: phones that check email.  Game consoles that stream movies.  Print magazines with online content.  In some regard, I think it's very exciting to play Dr. Frankenstein and mix elements of different genres to see what you can create.  But I also think that as writers, we have some sense that much has already been done by writers before us.  It was barely 100 years ago that Ezra Pound admonished us to "make it new."  Why stop trying to make it new?  There's no reason yet.  Crossing genres is just a recent innovation--as our technologies change, our interests wander, I'm sure we'll find new and ambitious ways to keep writing interesting. 

The Writer's Toolbox: Your Writer Questions Answered

Today's question: Do I need to make a trailer for my book? (And how do I do it?) is answered by poet, writer, workshop leader, and TWC board member Sandra Beasley, who is the perfect person to answer it, having just released a trailer for her forthcoming memoir, Don't Kill the Birthday Girl:



Poor authors. As if we weren't busy enough building a website, blogging, Facebooking, maintaining an email list, and oh yeah...writing...now our publishers are asking us to make book trailers. The good ones can be funny, heartbreaking, provocative, or visually stunning. The bad ones look like something slapped together for an tenth-grade presentation on Jane Eyre.

The million-dollar question: Will a trailer sell books? And my honest answer: No. But a trailer can generate conversation among fellow writers, garner secondary blog and media coverage, and create reading opportunities. All THAT can sell books. Teachers have mentioned the value of being able to show their students the videos for my poems, which has lead to scheduling classroom visits. Maybe you're a nonfiction author who would make a fabulous talk-show guest. A trailer can showcase that. And sometimes a novel whose hook relies on tone can capture that in a trailer far more effectively than in dry jacket copy.

Plus, you might really enjoy the creative exercise of making a trailer. It's a good way to burn off the time between turning in a manuscript to your publisher and seeing it in print.

You can make a trailer without breaking your budget. First, make a plan for 1-3 minute video. Storyboard it. Fiction writers, imagine your book has been made into a movie. How would you tease the reader's interest in the plot, without revealing the ending? Poets, approach this as if you're making a music video for a poem, ideally one that is representative of the tone of your collection. Nonfiction writers,don't try to prove the book's breadth of information or depth of research. Center on one compelling figure or theme. In my case I decided to play up the memoir element--my story--rather than the science of food allergies.

Now, move on to the technical production. Check your computer for free video editing programs. Most Windows systems come with some variation on Microsoft Live MovieMaker. Most Apple systems come with iMovie. You can also use online programs such as Animoto and xtranormal. Make sure any music used in a soundtrack is royalty free; Kevin MacLeod's website, Incompetech, is a great place to start. If you're recording a voiceover, minimize background noise. As for images, you can scan your own photos, get inexpensive commercial options from iStockphoto.com, or scour free sites such as the Library of Congress's archive. Try to mix in a few moving images--also for purchase on iStockphoto, or self-recorded with a digital camera. Whatever you choose, be sure to keep the resolution of your images consistently high. Nothing makes a trailer look cheap like fuzzy, pixelated graphics. And don't forget to include your book's cover--once at the beginning (in case someone stops watching midway through), and once more at the end.

I won't get into the nitty-gritty details of recording and editing. But you can find plenty of tips on the web, including my blog Chicks Dig Poetry (search for "animated poems"). Good luck!