A new published poem plus

 I’m pleased that the Story Circle Journal has published my new poem, “Writing My Truths” in response to their submission topic Silence. I certainly recommend my women writer friends to look into joining the Story Circle Network: for women with stories to tell. This group has been very supportive of my work.

Here’s a little description from its website:

The Story Circle Network is an international not-for-profit membership organization made up of women who want to document their lives and explore their personal stories through journaling, memoir, autobiography, personal essays, poetry, drama, and mixed-media.

Writing My Truths

I have a new room.

I write in there alone.

I sit at my draftsman table,

looking out the bay window

to the garden.

I see the trunks

of the three palm trees,

the small cement pond,

and the ferns swinging

their leaves behind it.

Sometimes a bird comes

by for a drink,

surfing along the top

of the pool.

Yet, I don’t open the window

to hear its song.

I want to hear

the songs my son

once played before he died.

They are my muse.

His memory

lets my soul

listen to the words

in my head. It allows me

to put my fingers

on the keyboard

and write my truths

in silence.

And since this is a poetry post, here’s one I wrote when my husband was three weeks post hip replacement surgery. He’s now going on nine weeks and continually improving.

Hip Hip Hooray

Just over

three weeks ago

my husband’s hip was

replaced by titanium and plastic.

But you’d never know

anything that violent –

sawing and hammering

a long rod

into his femur

to replace the old

with the new –

ever happened.

He goes for walks

without a walker or cane,

the home health nurse

has bid him adieu,

and now back to work,

he drives himself.

The trainer at the gym

puts him through his paces

twice a week,

and he only needs Advil

in small doses

to quell occasional pain.

A wide streak of black and blue

from his butt to his foot

is all that’s left.

Favorite books and what I'm reading now

Now that I work as an author people ask me what books I’m reading and would recommend. That is a tall order. I think our reading choices are very personal. Besides I’m not a very good person to ask. I seem to fall in love with the book and author I am currently reading.

 

Right now I’m reading two books chosen by my two book groups: A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson, the sister of Steve Jobs, and Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, by Madeleine Albright. I’m not sure if I’ll finish A Regular Guy – it is a poor excuse for a story about her brother. I liked his biography (see below) much better. Prague Winter, crammed with historical details, is definitely a must read. My real interest in it is how her Jewish family survived the holocaust.

My three favorite books in 2013 were:

11/22/63 by Stephen King. I never thought a Stephen King novel would top my list. I read his wonderful book On Writing, but steered clear of his gruesome novels. This book is not gruesome. It is about time travel and preventing the Kennedy assassination.  The suspense, the love story, the history are totally believable. I couldn’t put it down.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Even though I find the character Steve Jobs someone I’d never want to meet personally – he was a little brusque to put it mildly – his story is incredibly uplifting and motivating. This man could make things happen that were not even possible. He had that kind of attitude. He’d tell his brilliant employees they could do something they totally believed they could not, and guess what? They ended up doing it. Since I grew up with computers – from the large ones that filled up huge rooms in the aerospace company where I worked, to the first cumbersome text editing systems I tested, and now to the marvels of the products Job’s created, this was definitely a book for me. I loved every word of it.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I think Foer is totally original. He uses graphics, he writes about very smart precocious children, and his story about Oskar’s search for the lock that his father’s key opens after his father dies during the September 11 attack makes me cry.  That Oskar is the narrator gives this book more poignancy.  Sure it is clever, it is gimmicky, but why not? He’s a young author of the twenty-first century. And old as I am, I can still relate.

A few years ago. I was very taken by Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, her story about her first year after her husband’s sudden death.  I experienced magical thinking after my son died in 1999 – even though I never for a minute believed he would or could really come back to me. Didion’s book is raw, passionate, stunning. I believe nothing less should be expected in a memoir. She tells the truth and her inner thoughts and feelings. I only wish she had done the same in her memoir about her daughter’s death, Blue Nights.

Others books I gravitate to are about strong women. Even as a child I loved The Little Princess and The Secret Garden both by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Then as I got older I raided my parents’ bookshelves and read Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor and my favorite book of all time Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Amber and Scarlett – both great names – were strong-willed feisty and outspoken women who fought endlessly and ruthlessly to get what they wanted. Other books on that list are Mrs. Dalloway and Lolita – Lolita mainly for the beauty of the writing although Lolita was a very strong-willed character. And, if you haven’t heard Jeremy Irons read the audio version, you’re really missing out.

One other book stands out on my list. It is the book I’d suggest everyone read: Remember Be Here Now by Ram Dass, in print since its initial release in 1977. It’s about spirituality, yoga and meditation. But the lasting message for me is live in the now: don’t look back, the past is over; it is little more than story, and don’t look ahead. The future doesn’t exist yet – except in your mind. Such a simple message yet so hard to achieve.

So whatever you read, just enjoy. Maybe you’ll also fall in love with the book you are reading now – until the next one comes along.

A masterful memoir by LInda Joy Myers

I had the pleasure of reading a review copy of Linda Joy Myers re-released memoir, Don't Call Me Mother. Every memoir writer should read, savor, and learn from the mastery in the way this book is written.

Is this a great cover?

Linda Joy Myer’s memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother: A Daughter’s Journey form Abandonment to Forgiveness, totally fulfills her memoir writing axioms: write to heal, write your truth, write to bring your dark stories into the light.

From the minute I picked up this book and started reading I was hooked. Her poetically visceral words drew me in and never let me go. Even when I had to take a break from her increasingly dark story of being abandoned by her mother and living with an abusive and controlling grandmother, her words stuck with me. They still do. I couldn’t believe how this woman could have lived through such a childhood and come out alive, whole, and productive.

Emerging as a viable adult was a grueling process. She revisited the cities and farm land where she grew up, she walked through the houses where the abusive experiences occurred, she interviewed family members to verify her memories were real, she made peace with her sexually abusive cousin, and she sat with her dying mother by her hospice bedside and actually forgave her.  In the end, she reached her goal of not perpetuating the cycle of abandonment she and her mother both experienced.

Besides being taken in by the compelling story I became enthralled with the music of Linda Joy’s words. She brings in all the senses. She uses metaphor like a master. I experienced the drumbeat and whistles of the always arriving and departing trains, the burgundy and rust colors of the symphonic music she played as a young girl, her grandmother’s slaps on her little girl’s face, the belt strokes on her bare behind in her foster mother’s basement, her father’s inappropriate kisses on her lips, and the heat of the mud that she and her adult daughter sunk into while together at a Calistoga spa.

Ultimately this is a memoir about love and forgiveness. It became that because Linda Joy worked hard at it. She always hoped for her mother to acknowledge her and love her, and almost by brute force hope is fulfilled. Through years of therapy and becoming a therapist herself, Linda Joy finally found peace and forgiveness and learned how to be a loving mother and grandmother herself.

I recommend this book to all memoir writers. Linda Joy provides tips for memoir writing at the end, but the reading of this book is a lesson in itself. She writes the dark and secretive truth. She doesn’t let up on her readers. She says, “…our memoir keeps asking us to open out, to bear witness, and to tell the truth as we know it while coming to terms with what we can bear and how much it might cost to share it.”

Linda Joy

Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D. is the president and founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and Co-President of the Women's National Book Association, SF. She's the author of Don't Call Me Mother--A Daughter's Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness (SheWrites Press, February 2013); The Power of Memoir – How to Write Your Healing Story, and A workbook The Journey of Memoir: The Three Stages of Memoir Writing to be released in 2013. Linda Joy co-teaches the program Write your Memoir in Six Months with Brooke Warner and is a speaker, coach, and online memoir teacher.

Linda Joy’s prizes for fiction, memoir and poetry include: First Prize, Jessamyn West Fiction Contest; Finalist, San Francisco Writing Contest for Secret Music, a novel about the Kindertransport; First Prize, poetry, East of Eden Contest, and First Prize Carol Landauer Life Writing Contest.