A Memoir is like a quilt

Writing a memoir is like stitching a quilt together. I started with small patches, scenes from the past and the present. A memory of an explosion in Cape Cod. Ice skating on a pond in upstate New York while my parents were in the hospital. A phone call. A black telephone chord on a brown table. Cradled in the warmth of my aunt, uncle and cousins. My sister’s tears. Her asthma. Returning to New York. A family reuniting.

But these were all scraps of memory that took years and years to sew together. I was afraid to go deeper. I woke up scared about remembering. I had dreams of fire. I couldn’t cross bridges. I had a husband and small children. I wanted their memories to be of the zoo, swinging in the park, reading books. But I seemed to tell too much because the telling became obsessive like sanding a table and wanting to get past the old paint and scratches down to the grain. But I learned to balance the past—that memoir—with present joys. The book still was not ready, though. It would take more years to bake and the death of my parents to free the parts of the story that I didn’t want to tell when they were alive.

It was only after working with an editor/friend in Montreal that the book took shape. I made timelines for each character. Everyone has a story from beginning to some sort of end. The stories were separated. The characters were developed—what they liked to eat, what they liked to wear. What flowers might they choose to place on the table. Then the stories were put together, like vanilla and chocolate batter that is swirling together so the swirling is just right. That took a couple of years, to write the sketches, to merge the stories. To go back and forth as life does like on a sea saw. Not one moment but past, present and future like the sun dipping at the same time as the moon rises. Or how all the stars, even the ones light years away are illuminated.

The story was finally told and sold. It started as a patchwork quilt, small patches of remembering.

Peace

I wrote this for Red Room for authors--Peace can certainly help all our bodies and minds recover.

When I think of peace, I think of different moments. At my daughters’ pre-school, the children were taught to use “words” instead of hurting each other. I taught there for one summer and remember hearing tiny voices in that sunny one room school in the Richmond District of San Francisco, upset over who could claim possession to a red truck, be told to put the truck down and speak to each other: “I had it first and I’m mad you took it from me.

“But I wanted it. You had it so long.” At the end of the conversation, mediated by a teacher from the sidelines, a truce was formed, the truck was transferred for a few minutes to the little boy who wanted it and then politely given back. Voila. A war was stopped!

I also think of 1968 at the University of Wisconsin. I was protesting the Dow Chemical Company who was then making napalm, burning the skin even of innocent children in Vietnam. I sat in the Commerce Building, scrunched in with hundreds of others and suddenly got claustrophobic. I also felt something really bad was going to happen and I quickly excused myself and ran out of the building and stood in my long black coat on top of a grassy knoll again with hundreds of others. A few minutes later, police officers stormed the building, beating students and dragging them out. There was screaming and crying and blood. Outside, young men, the same as age we were—19, in the National Guard came towards us with pointed rifles and then tear gas appeared like rain. I had something in my eye or just wanted to be blinded from seeing friends put into ambulances and I ran down toward Lake Mendota with my friend Joanne. I found a water fountain and put water in my eyes. That night we all gathered together, found out about who was hurt and who was recovering and I aged considerably from a middle-class college student to a protestor who had been tear gassed and seen friends hurt for wanting an end to war. We chose to speak in one voice and there were a lot of us. We took the consequences, some much more serious consequences than others. Ultimately, we wanted peace in the whole world.

I also think of “fighting” for a Black Studies Department(as it was called back then) at the University of Wisconsin and picketing classrooms for two days. It seems absurd now as many Universities have African American Studies Departments that students take for granted. It was winter and well below freezing. I had a huge pink scarf from India wrapped around my whole face so only the slits of my eyes showed. People alternately made coffee and donut runs and we marched for hours. I also remember that there was no violence, and that we were successful. I’m not sure when or how, but our efforts were part of the success of the program.

I also remember last semester at City College of San Francisco where I teach—in my class Trauma and the Arts, I assigned an “anti-war poster” after students studied Picasso's Guernica and the Spanish Civil War. A few of my very vocal students said they’d prefer to do a “pro-peace” poster and we discussed the linguistic difference and all decided on pro-peace. Thought the posters had some scenes of war, what I remember are fields of flowers, deer running through tall trees, and the guns and the violence just a whisper, slowly disappearing from the foreground to the background. So that’s what I would like: that negotiations prevent war; that people stand up for human rights; that schools are built before bombs are dropped and that somehow, some way we can put an end to wars.

Louise Nayer is the author of Burned: A Memoir to be published in April 2010.

The Day I Sold My Memoir

My memoir was sold on Valentines Day when I was at the Associated Writing Program in Chicago. I was relishing some time away from the computer, enjoying the windy city--jazz on the street corners, the spectacular art museum, ice sculptures of Ghandi and a couple dancing--My agent had tried to sell my book to a number of big houses. No one had wanted it, and I was devastated, again, as I had been trying to sell the book for over ten years, four revisions, three agents and myriad changes of point of view, additions, deletions, and a virtual army of people who had helped me along the way to what felt like nowhere. The "Big House" metaphor was daunting. I wasn't being let in. There was an inner sanctum for a certain set.

I should have stayed a poet, I lamented, instead of this one way ticket to Palookaville. But I wasn't going to give up(the mantra that I tried to repeat) and at the conference saw there were a number of great university presses. I had just come out of a workshop where some seasoned and well known writers talked about their foray out of the major houses. I wanted my work to get out there somehow, some way.

I'll check my email, I thought, even though it was a few chilling blocks to Kinko's. Once in the door, I sat down at one of the computer banks, put in the code and the meter was running. As I entered comcast, my trusty server, I saw three emails from my agent. Why would she be writing me? Then I saw the heading, Good news! My hands were shaking, not from the cold, but from an excitement that would take me out of the trajectory of the last ten plus years into a new place.

"Atlas and Co. a wonderful publisher, loves your book." The loves had three exclamation points after it. When my agent gets excited, she gets really, really excited. "Call me immediately!" I looked at the other two emails before this one, all telling me good news is coming. I thought of the Spiritual I teach "Good News is Coming," and was practically singing the song. I quickly jotted down the two numbers where she said she'd be--paid my money and stood in the doorway at Kinko's looking out the plate glass window and called her. When Laurie picked up, she was ecstatic. "It's a great press. I got you an advance-- They want to know by Monday."

I was silent for a minute. This was my baby about to be placed in a home--I asked more questions. She answered. I said, "Is this really happening." She said, "Yes, this is really happening." I could feel tears well in my eyes.
"This means so much to me," she said. "So much." We talked for another half hour as we often do--about the AWP conference, the workshop, the synchronicity, that this happened on Valentine's Day, that this was all a gift and meant to be.

We finished talking. I went out into the Chicago cold standing a lot taller. "My book sold," I told my colleague and friend, "my book sold." For the next two hours, any time I ran into a friend I told them and that night I celebrated. All the years before--the great interest and then the rejections(two agents worked with me and then gracefully recanted). Somehow, I knew that I had arrived. Was some of this luck? You bet! Was some of this constant work, reworking, learning, growing as a writer and the belief of all my friends, family and agent that this would ultimately happen. Yes it was.
What can I say to a new writer? If you believe in your story, if you believe that you can put in the time to make the writing as good as you can; if you can ask for help when you need it--then with luck, your story will be sold as well.

Burned: A Memoir will appear at the end of April 2010. If anybody reads this and wants to know some more of what I went through in getting this book to print, please ask.

Panic Attacks Be Gone!

Ah panic attacks- Mine have mostly vanished but seem to "rear" their ugly heads every once in a while when I"m in an elevator which I need to do three days a week at City College of SF. Last time when I got into an elevator, a woman getting out said she had been temporarily "stuck" and that she's claustrophobic but the police were great--very kind on the elevator phone and then like magic, the elevator door opened. I took a deep breath when the door closed and I was alone. The door on that elevator shuts very fast but takes a long time to open.

When I was very, very small--my best friend and I were on an elevator that stopped between floors and the door opened to nothing but a concrete wall, as if that was to be the place where we might have to live for the next hundred years--not a door I wanted to go through.

So it is mainly elevators that trigger the old panic. In NYC I was on elevators all the time. In San Francisco I mostly move in an elevatorless world except for those few hrs. each day at school.
I think there are some people, like my husband at times, who love enclosed spaces--spaces you can burrow into and maybe never be found. I'll try thinking of the elevator next time as my burrow.

From Panic Attacks to Selling My Memoir

For over ten years I’ve been writing, revising, searching for agents, working with editors and finally selling my book about a childhood trauma: my parents were severely burned in an accident on Cape Cod when I was four years old.

This blog will be of interest to those who have been through an early trauma and suffered from panic attacks—in my case decades later-- and also to those who have spent seconds, hours, days, months and yes, many years trying to bring a book to publication.

This very beginning—testing the waters—will be an attempt to combine the two threads. So I will start by just saying that my book Burned: A Memoir was sold to Atlas and Company and will be published in April of 2010. Making that statement represents years of sitting in front of the computer between my teaching job and raising kids –and my determination that the book would get good enough to be sold. The fact that it did sell also represents love of family and friends—a good dose of luck-- and what I learned about navigating through the publishing world.

So as I said—this is just a beginning—and as the weeks go on I will continue to write about the past (overcoming the panic attacks that ttriggered the writing), how I wrote and rewrote the book and perhaps how I would approach this differently(hindsight). The present and the future all converge to this very moment. My children are now grown—my parents have died—and my sister, six at the time of the accident lives in the Virgin Islands, returning to the sand and the sea—where we had such beautiful and such terrible memories.