Memoir Festival July 16-18, 2010 - Rhinebeck, New York

Omega is sponsoring what promises to be a terrific memoir festival. I'm going. Meet me there! Below is the URL: Howard

http://eomega.org/omega/workshops/458ca10c5a87cb22553ba80b1633938f/?content=LNK&source=WEB.OM.HB&subject=CF

 Faculty

Nick Flynn is the author of a new book, The Ticking is the Bomb, which comes on the heels of his first stunning memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of a PEN/Martha Albrand Award. (Nick Flynn will not be in attendance Friday evening.) nickflynn.org
Malachy McCourt, an actor, singer and raconteur, is as moving and entertaining in real life as he is in many books, including the best-selling, highly acclaimed memoir, A Monk Swimming.
Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death, has published essays in Elle, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Parenting. susannasonnenberg.com
Alphie McCourt is the author of A Long Stone’s Throw. The youngest of the famed McCourt brothers, he has written for the Washington Post, The Villager, the Limerick Leader, and Icons magazine.
Darcey Steinke is the author of Easter Everywhere, as well as several novels. Her writing has appeared in Spin, Art Forum, The Guardian magazine, and the Village Voice, and she teaches at Columbia University, the New School, and Goddard College.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of When Skateboards Will Be Free, as well stories and essays for The Paris Review, Granta, and Open City. sayrafiezadeh.com
Fred Poole is the founder of Authentic Writing and the author of Authentic Writing: A Memoir on Creating Memoir. authenticwriting.com
Marta Szabo is codirector of Authentic Writing and author of the The Guru Looked Good. She writes for the blog, Mostly Memoir, and posts her writing regularly online at Experiments in Memoir. authenticwriting.com
James Kullander is a program developer and editor at Omega, as well as a freelance writer. His acclaimed essay, “My Martial Status,” originally published in The Sun magazine, was anthologized in The Best Buddhist Writing 2008.jameskullander.com

What’s So Funny About Borscht, Anyway?

What’s So Funny About Borsht, Anyway?

review by Monique Paturel
Just finished Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, an entertaining account of her time back in the fold of her Mennonite family. She begins with three events that had the collective power to send her home. 

      The first crisis involved a botched radical hysterectomy with the surgeon “accidentally punch[ing] a hole in two of [her] organs” leaving her incontinent, with husband Nick responsible for her care. The second crisis was a car accident a few months later involving a drunk driver. Broken bones and bruises she rolls around the house in casts in an office chair with one arm immobilized. Where’s Nick? Packing up to leave for his new lover Bob, whom he met on Gay.com. That would be the third crisis. What a crappy week.  Rhoda gathers herself up and goes home to California, back to her Mennonite family and roots.

      Janzen’s mother is a woman comfortable in her skin. Down-home goodness and honesty make the perfect foil for her daughter, who has spent too much time in an abusive marriage forgetting what authenticity looks like. Her father, frugal and handsome, is the model patriarch. Together they seem to remind Rhoda of everything she hated about her childhood.

      Jansen’s resentment of the Mennonite culture creeps quietly through the book. Her humor is gratuitously mean-spirited at times. Her brothers, who continue to embrace the Mennonite lifestyle, marry and have children within the community. Why she is surprised that they don’t want to talk politics or beliefs with her is perplexing.  Staying off uncommon ground seems a sensible strategy given their divergent lifestyles and history of theological boxing matches. Her sarcasm toward the sisters-in-law whose tastes and lifestyles are ridiculed made me cringe. This went nowhere, wasn’t that funny, and sounded bitchy. But she’s hard on herself too, with self-disapproval swathed in humor accompanying us throughout the book. 

      Even with the helpful primer in the back, I came away not really understanding the Mennonites as an ethnic religious community. Bits of tradition, mostly in food form, are on each page, but I never got the gestalt of the culture. The food bits were fun though. The image of a cabbagey bowl of borscht being opened in an elementary school cafeteria filled me with dread on her behalf. Surely kids have been tortured for less.

      This review sounds like a pan, but I actually enjoyed reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Janzen is a funny and concise writer. (Though her vocabulary often overshoots the crowd.) While memoirs are typically based on memory, this book has the added strand of writing about her experiences in real time. There was something I liked about distant memory, recent memory, and yesterday playing off one another.

      As the extent of Nick’s abuse and mental illness are exposed, we begin to understand that Janzen’s coming home to heal had less to do with recent events and all to do with her 15 years with a man who took advantage of her early training at subservience. With time she begins to soften and allow herself to remember that the faith and kindness of her past is not her enemy. That’s when she truly arrives home.

memoir session at forthcoming NYC writers conference

 http://www.mmm.edu/cgi-bin/MySQLdb?MYSQL_VIEW=/news/view_event.txt&newsid=537

Writers' Conference 2007 (for a full description of the conference copy the above URL and paste it in your browser. To read about just the memoir session, scroll below)

June 7, 2007

Described as “the best one-day writers’ conference in the land,” over 70 distinguished authors, agents and publicists will discuss how to succeed in the literary world. Cynthia Ozick and Sara Nelson, Editor-in-Chief of Publisher’s Weekly, will serve as keynote speakers. Joining them will be a who’s who of literature, from Mary Higgins Clark to Claire Messud. As always, there will also be a networking reception following the day’s discussion panels.

When: Thursday, June 7, 8:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Where: Marymount Manhattan College (221 E. 71st Street, NYC)

Cost: $175 if registered before June 1, $195 afterwards. Lunch and reception included.

Register now! Call (212) 774-4810.

Special rate if you register for Conference and Writing Intensives at the same time! Total cost is $525 before June 1, $585 afterwards.

11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. SESSION II

Memoir
Moderator: Sidney Offit – Author, Memoir of the Bookie’s Son
Panelists: Debby Applegate – Author, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Sir Harold Evans – Former Editor, The Sunday Times, Random House; Author, The American Century
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt – Author, Me and DiMaggio: A Baseball Fan Goes in Search of His Gods
Daphne Merkin – Contributing Writer, The NY Times Magazine and Author of Enchantment: A Novel
Patricia Volk – Author, White Light, All It Takes, and The Yellow Banana
Carole O'Malley Gaunt - Author, Hungry Hill: A Memoir

Some New Memoir Titles

Allison, Jane. The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir. Mariner, 2010.
Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010.
Blodgett, Bonnie. Remembering Smell:A Memoir of Losing Discovering- the Primal Sense. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
Butturini, Paula. Keeping the Feast: One Couples Story Love, Food and Healing in Italy, Riverhead Books, 2010.
Pfeiffer, Jules. Backing Into Forward:A Memoir. Nan A. Talese, 2010.
Hastings, Michael. I Lost My Love in Baghdad:A Modern War Story. Scribner, 2010.
Kerman, Piper.Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison. Spiegel and Grau, 2010.
Koterba, Geoffrey. Inklings: A Memoir. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Making Babies

"Happy Birthday Sweetie. How are you?" a parent tells his/her daughter who has just turned thirty something. Daughter responds with "I want to have a baby." It's a common scenario. Behind the young woman's statement is the ticking of her biological clock. Like millions of other young women in their 30s in postindustrial America, including the three authors of Three Wishes, she has put career on the front burner, ahead of marriage and motherhood. But like Pam Ferdinand, one of the three authors of Three Wishes, they all share some version of Ferdinand's dream in her early 20s: "I had imagined myself in the future as a married mother with five children living on a farm in Vermont."

Journalists Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Ferdinand (GJF) have written a revealing and well integrated account of their respective journeys from being single successful professionals to married successful mothers -- and professionals. Along the way to their longed for destinations, they had to navigate a bunch of difficult shoals -- including kissing a bunch of frogs (if I may mix my metaphors).

Author Goldberg decided to try IVF at age 39 after she broke up with a cheating
boyfriend. Sometime after she successfully convinced a new one to become a father to a child, they broke up, she had the baby and then became involved with a third somewhat older fellow who said about Goldberg's daughter, "I don't love her yet, but I'm sure I will love her. That relationship too collapsed.

Jones conceived with her husband who reacted to the news of her pregnancy by saying, "This isn't the most convenient time," Then she miscarried, divorced and had an unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend (who had a track record of numerous short-term relationships). "We'll figure this out," he said when she told him she was pregnant. "You just have to give me a little time." Then came a phone call from a genetic counselor, "I have your amnio results. . . . Beth, I'm sorry," and she aborted a Down Syndrome fetus. At one point, Goldberg gave her a vial of sperm that Goldberg had received from a sperm bank (which in the end neither of them needed.) The story goes on from there.

Ferdinand too took a while before she reached the promised land. For a while she was busy with a creep who described some vacation plans at one point, "come over with me and spend the first five days there. Then the guys [will] come [and you'll go home.] She too received the magic vial which in turn -- well, read the book.
In addition to the above problems, GJF also experience the threat of infertility and fear of familial rejection if they chose to use IVF.

One of several delightful features of Three Wishes is that it has some of the attributes of a mystery. The reader quickly becomes involved in their lives and determination to become pregnant. But this time the mystery is not who done it -- but who (as in which guy) will it ("it" as in get the woman pregnant)? And who will stick around?

For many women in GJF's predicament the ending is not a happy one. Many don't or can't take the chance of becoming single mothers. But for GJF themselves, it all works out in the end: children and husbands/fathers. Did I give away the ending? Don't worry. The book's mystery is in the process much more than in the ending(s).
Three Wishes inspires the reader to empathize with the authors' quest for parenthood and even cheer them on. One more thing -- although it might sound like a "woman's book," its scope is too big and too compelling for such narrow categorization. The book deserves a broad readership.

a tale of Zimbabwe

Has author Douglas Rogers increased the dangers facing his parents from Zimbabwe's Mugabe regime by writing about them in his compelling and remarkable book, The Last Resort? Given Rogers obvious intelligence, street smarts and first-hand familiarity with their situation, probably not. More likely the fame he has probably given them acts as a protective shield around the brave couple.

On one level, the subject of The Last Resort is Rogers's family. But the author, ordinarily a travel writer, has written one of those fascinating memoirs that tell a broad story that goes beyond what it looks like at first. Want to better understand what's going on in crazy Pres. Robert Mugabe was Zimbabwe, read Roger's book.

In many ways, the Rogers family symbolizes the experience of a large number of white farmers whose families settled long ago in the former Rhodesia. Despite how the repressive regime portrays its policy of appropriating white owned farms as land reform, that is not at all what it is. It's theft pure and simple which is not even benefiting the poor people. It is not at all simply a matter of white versus black. Most of the victims of Mugabe's repressive policies are black Africans who support his political opposition. True the Rogers were born into privilege, but they long ago accepted and perhaps even embraced black African rule.

When Mugabe first began his crackdown on Zimbabwe's white farmers, Rogers called his parents from the UK where he was then living.

"What's going on?" He asked his mother when she picked up the phone.

"Oh it's terrible, terrible!"

"What's happened?" He asked, his heart in his mouth.

"They lost."

"Who lost?"

"Why the cricket team."

It wasn't that Rogers' mother was unaware of what was going on. But she kept her perspective. As it happened, initially the Rogers got a pass from the appropriation policy; they own a resort, not a farm. But that didn't stop gangs of young toughs from riding up to their front door waving weapons in the air. In addition, through entirely extralegal manipulation, at one point Rogers' father finds out that his lost legal title to his land. But still they hang on.

Gradually, the Rogers' resort, having lost its tourist customers, metamorphized with part of it serving as a haven initially for white Zimbabweans who were forced off their land and part of it as a bar which attracted people from the nearest city. In addition, for part of the time some of the land was sublet by a man who ran what amounted to a bordello.

Along with plenty of scenes of high tension, Rogers provides a number of comic scenes in a gripping writing style that deserves a wide readership.

A Horse Story

The human experience is such that some people carve their own paths out of misery. In the case of Susan Richards, author of Saddled: How a Spirited Horse Reined Me in and Set Me Free, her way out of the alcoholism that threatened to destroy her was to love and care for a horse. Only several years after she stopped drinking did she join Alcoholics Anonymous.

Richards' drinking followed a disastrous childhood. A number of people in her family were alcoholics, her mother died when she was young, and soon afterward, her father abandoned her and her brother, leaving them unattended and alone. Only after three terrifying days did her grandmother’s chauffeur come and take the children to her house. Afterwards, Richards was shuffled around from one unloving relative to another.

Reading Saddled, I wondered about Richards’ focus on a horse and her penchant for divining what the horse thinks. I was reminded of the Tom Hank’s film, Castaway. In the film, a plane crash survivor on a small deserted island developed a dependency on “Wilson” a volleyball that also washed ashore, that the Hank’s character anthropomorphized, and on which he painted a face. I suggest that this strange relationship somewhat parallels that of Richards and her horse. In both cases, desperate people reach out to find a way out of their loneliness.

Part of the reason for the success of books like Richards’ (and films like Castaway) is how they plumb the depths of a condition that few of us can completely avoid. This is the secret of Wizard of Oz, in which a wicked witch and her simian minions threaten poor Dorothy to her very core. In Richards’ case, the villains include her mean grandmother, the grandmother’s vicious chauffeur, Richards’ second husband and a two-timing boy friend. Both Dorothy and Richards want to “go home” to a secure place.

There is a big difference between Richards and Dorothy, of course. Richards is an adult who must bear responsibility for her actions as a grown up; Dorothy is a fictional child.

This reviewer was tested by Richards’ claim to divine the thoughts of her horse. “There couldn’t have been any doubt in her mind that whatever her status had been for the past year, here she was a celebrity,” Richardson tells the reader at one point. Really?

Richards’ odd claim notwithstanding, she does a fine job of tracing her metamorphosis from abandoned child to abused alcoholic adult to a largely healed person who has resolved many of the problems that plagued her for decades. In the end she became a certified social worker who gained the self-knowledge that she lacked in her earlier years.

Richards tells her story using finely and thoroughly wrought (though sometimes repetitive) scenes, many of which beautifully describe a horse in action. An earlier Richards book, Chosen by a Horse, was a NY Times best seller and despite some of the book’s flaws, Saddle, too could achieve that success. It has a ready audience among the multitude devotees of animal-themed books. In addition, Saddled will also please readers who just want a well-told story of human redemption.