November Newsletter

By Jessica Page Morrell

Where Memory Leads

When I was a girl, one of the best mornings of the year was on Thanksgiving. I'd wake to the smell of roast turkey wafting up the staircase of our old farmhouse. It was heady, it was redolent, it held the promise of a day of ease and feasting-save the dreaded task of peeling potatoes for our family of eight and washing stacks of dishes after the meal. In those days my mother would rise early to start the turkey, sauteing onions and celery for the sage-scented stuffing. These smells were followed by the perfume of pumpkin pie baking and I noticed that every pumpkin pie has that particular indention in the creamy center.

In my memory, I can see the dining room, the table in the middle of the room, with its leaves extended to accommodate our family, the buffet against the wall, and the trio of bay windows. There were also three tall windows framed with crisp, white Priscilla curtains that faced the front porch. In memory's eye, I see the light filter in on those November afternoons. Outside, snow was already piled deep under the windows and the sky wore that particular late Autumn hue, part metal of winter sky, part holiday magic. After dinner, without fail, we either went sledding on the hill across the street (In November Devil's Creek at bottom of the hill was frozen over) or we'd ice skate at a rink about ten blocks from home.

If we went skating, we'd walk down Foster Street until it hit Main. At this intersection, we'd pass a cluster of taverns in this partly commercial neighborhood. They were dim, mysterious, smoke-filled dens. And around Thanksgiving the cars belonging to hunters who were in the taverns celebrating their kills lined the blocks along Foster and Main. These vehicles, Chevy's, Fords, Chryslers painted in the muted colors of the sixties were adorned with deer tied across the hoods. The animals were trussed, necks twisted at a dreadful angle, eyes blank, staring blackness.

My memory finds those animals, notices the glint of weak afternoon light on their golden-red coats, avoids the smear of blood. We'll pass Schendel's Dry Goods Store where each hunting season, Mr. Schendel, stocked his display window with clothes to fight the cold; red, one-piece long johns, flannel shirts, orange vests and thick, woolen socks.

Memory always calls our name and makes demands of a writer In this season of holiday excess and exhaustion, take a different route. Travel to the snowfalls and holiday tables and rituals of your childhood. Peek into your grandmother's kitchen, taking in the sight and smells of her specialty dishes. Take a long look at your uncle who's just returned from his hunting shack and smells of snow and cherry pipe tobacco and Canadian whiskey. Notice frost on the windows, the track of footprints in the snow, the sled leaning against the back door, the color of sky that shapes the backdrop of your memory.

If your memory is stalled, look at old photos, cook your family's heirloom recipes, rent movies from the era, find old Life and Natural Geographic magazines, watch Ed Sullivan Show reruns or the like.

Of course, not all memories are golden or sweet. But distant memories can infuse our writing with nuance and sensory detail and power. And remembering, you'll discover the younger writer within, who might be afraid, but has stories to tell, words to weave. Memory is a slippery thing. A distant scene will appear unbidden, a tragedy will refuse to leave our consciousness. We are sometimes haunted by our past, sometimes able to slip into a distant time to relish life again.

The word memory comes from a Greek goddess, Mnemosyne, the daughter of Earth and Sky, the wife of Zeus, the mother of all the Muses. Because that's where art begins. With remembrance and tracking our younger self. In finding your past, you can unleash your natural voice, and excavate truth, meaning, and imagination.

Many memories hold emotion, and naturally belong on the page where these keenly felt events can be sorted through. And it is in this sorting process, the emotions from the past and the ones surfacing in the now, will meld into a powerful rendering of life.

Write From Your Life

Writing means knowing yourself deeply. We all have graces, genes and gifts that make us unique. We all have core stories, memories and events that had lasting significance or caused lasting pain. Dredging up our core stories is another way of getting started, to bring them to the page by tracing your memories.

Here are some prompts:

A time you ran away.
A time you escaped.
A time that was horrible then, but is funny now.
The day you realized that you were no longer a child.
An encounter with death.
A time you did something reckless that you shouldn't have.
A time that you were proud.
A time you were mystified.
A time you lost something forever.
A time when you discovered a secret.
A time you were terrified.
A time something happened to confirm your belief.
A time you confessed.
A time when you came home.

'You don't have anything if you don't have the stories." --Leslie Silko

"Sometimes just being alive feels like raw flesh-vulnerable, responsive, irritable, in constant danger. Those are the times when I most need to sense my place among other people, to hear their stories and know they are mine as well. I badly need to be sure someone can hear me; I need to receive his answering cry." --Sheldon Kopp

"In most lives insight has been accidental. We wait for it as primitive man awaited lightening for a fire. But making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationship, context." --Marilyn Ferguson

Inspiration:

"I yearned for a writing outlet that would call on my creativity and at the same time unleash the inborn writer-and person caged within me. I remembered twenty years ago, when I had let my Bedford-Stuyvesant students choose topics they wanted to write about. They had written about love and beatings, birth and foster families, hunger and fulfillment-and their writing had improved. They seemed to have been born with the ability to express themselves well in writing. Now I wrote like them, about how I had caught a whiskered catfish in a Prospect Park pond, and I reexperienced the combination of delight and revulsion that I felt as the fish squirmed in my hands. With this, the mechanics of writing sprang to me naturally. I did not need explicit formulas and abstract exercises on how to "write a good lead line," on how to "show, not tell," or how to "find my own voice." Writing researcher Ken Macrorie explains how this worked: As I wrote, the smells and sounds of the past affected my body, and I began to shape my writing with the rhythms and images that belonged to those events and with words that sounded out my feelings." June Gould, The Writer in All of Us

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