Veteran’s Writing Project: The stories that must be told
I am honored to have an excerpt from my memoir published this month in O-Dark-Thirty, the magazine of the Veteran’s Writing Project. Here is a description of the project written by the editors:
“O-Dark-Thirty is the journal for the Veterans Writing Project. Our editors curate the works submitted to this site. We have two sections. The Report is our hub. It’s where the vast majority of our work will be based.We chose the title The Report because of this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, we have seen with our own eyes, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.
The Review is our quarterly journal. It will be a little tighter, more closely edited. It might have themes. It is our plan to present the finest literary writing we can find.
One of the tenets upon which we built the Veterans Writing Project is the idea that every veteran has a story. This site is where those stories get told. Sure, there are other places to hear or read the stories: around the bar, on a road trip, in some other journal. But like the man says, “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” This is our journal. It was conceived by and designed for, is run by, features work written by, and provides voice to members of the military community.”
My story, What the Dog Understood, describes a […]
Writing When the Time is Right: Memoir and Emotional Events
On this New Year’s Day, I am stuck on a thought: When is a writer ready to write about an emotional life experience? Most writers of memoir say that we need time and distance to enter the reflective process, especially with a highly charged memory. We know we have been transformed, but how? Transformation (healing, movement of ideas, change) occurs slowly over weeks, months and often years. Each person responds in their own rhythm with the revelation and understanding of how the event is part of the big picture – the story. For those who want to nudge the process along, taking notes and keeping a journal is useful. Then, at the right moment, a voice says: Write something, now. Surprise yourself with ideas about what happened. Go as deep as you can, for now, always asking: Is this true?
My mother and I were more like sisters than mother and daughter. She lovingly tolerated me when I was a child, but a deeper, more collegial bond emerged when I became an adult. I was surprised when I felt “orphaned” after her death on January 1st, 2008 at 12:00 noon. I was sixty-one and thought it odd to feel bereft of a parent in this way. I had witnessed her decline for years and I watched her battle against impending death during the four preceding days and nights that it took her to depart the world. The sudden awakenings, the furtive looks, the grasping for my hand, the noisy, ominous breathing, the calming effects of morphine doses – only during the last four hours of her life did she seem […]
What’s So Funny? Humor in Non-fiction Writing
Not long ago in a writing workshop, a colleague offered to read a personal essay I had written about a difficult life experience. My kind friend reported back that he felt as if I was dragging him, sad and depressed, to the abysmal end of the story. “I don’t want to feel as if I’m being forced to feel bad,” he said. “Where’s your sense of humor? And you’re not having any fun, either.”
Humor? I didn’t see anything funny about the story of my trip to Washington, DC, to see my husband’s name on the Vietnam Memorial for the first time – but – maybe I was taking myself a little too seriously. Perhaps Colette, the French writer whose husband locked her in a room to keep her writing, was right when she said that total absence of humor renders life impossible. Humor in nonfiction writing demands taking a firm, self-confident position about our “self” and then flipping the situation upside down. Writer Leigh Anne Jasheway calls this creative misdirection; engaging readers by taking them someplace they don’t expect to go, choosing words and metaphors that make readers giggle without knowing why. She says a smiling reader wants to read on even if the topic is inherently sad.
Where was my sense of comic relief? Obviously, I had forgotten that humor creates a bond with readers and cuts down on tension and anxiety. People need to cry and laugh. Humor fosters a sense of immediacy, a close personal connection. There was little to joke about in my essay, but there were some curious ironies that […]
Reunion: Circle of Remembrance
Dave (wearing headphones) and members of Alpha Company.
My face was bathed in the scent of a potpourri of aftershave lotions by the time I had been kissed by the last guy in line in front of me. This was not a typical reunion with old friends or classmates. I hadn’t known any of these men until this moment. As they hugged me and planted friendly kisses on my cheeks, they gave brief introductions:
“I’m Joe. I carried the code book for the Captain.”
“I’m Phil. I was his track driver. I don’t know why I wasn’t driving for him that day.”
“I’m Dick. I was one of his platoon leaders. So glad you’re here. Dave was the best CO ever.”
“I’m Lon. He was my hero.”
“There are so many stories we have to tell you,” they say. “He was the best of the best.”
They said they had known about me in ‘68-‘69 even if I didn’t know them. My husband, Army Captain David R. Crocker, Jr., carried a picture of me in his pocket in Vietnam, and at some point he had taken it out and shown some of them; perhaps some quiet moment when they sat around eating “beanie-weinees” or “ham and lima beans” from a pack of c-rations, or playing Blackjack back at base camp. For an infantry company in the area of Chu Chi province, there wasn’t much down time. In April, 1969, one month before Dave was killed with four […]
Memoir and Family
I often hear people express a desire to write a memoir. “What aspect of your life do you want to write about?” I ask.
My friend Susan replied, “I’d like to write about growing up with an alcoholic mother, but she’s still alive. She’d kill me.”
“Really? What part of the story do you think she’d object to?” I asked. I was being a bit devilish or at least provoking, because sometimes it can be too early for the writer to approach certain subjects/life experiences – which doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try to write about them, it’s just that it may take many drafts, many re-entries into the subject, to find out what it is they want to say. But this is the purpose of memoir. In writing about what we remember we are reflecting about something significant that happened in our life and trying to do it as truthfully as possible. The fact that some members of our family may not agree with our understanding comes with the territory. My brother often reads my work and says, “Oh, no, Ruth, it wasn’t like that.”
But what about this nagging question as to whether we should write about certain subjects at all, ever?
Judith Barrington writes in Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art that memoirist Jill Kerr Conway said that she couldn’t have written The Road from Coorain while her mother was alive. “She would have struck me dead,” said Conway. But Annie Dillard simply left out any details that might have troubled her family in An American Childhood. Teresa Jordan said that it was extremely hard to start writing about her family when she wrote, Riding the White Horse Home. “The ranching world is a very […]
