Matthew Shepard's mother's memoir: recalling a brutal killing

The 1998 murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard because he was gay, shocked the world. The image of his body tied to a fence carried over into at least one TV show, Bones. But like other world headline making crimes such as the 1985 killing of Leon Klinghoffer who was thrown overboard in 1985 from the Achille Lauro, or the 2002 decapitation of reporter Daniel Pearl, with time it has receded from many people's memories.

Publication of Judy Shepard's (Matthew's mother) memoir, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed (Hudson Street Press, 2009) casts the young man's murder in a light that I suspect may burn it and its significance deeper into readers' psyches. Put simply, Matthew, victim of a horrendous crime, was also someone's son. For sure there are parents with hearts so hardened from homophobia that they cannot sympathize. But I suspect and hope that they are a tiny percentage of the American population.

I believe that any parent who reads Judy Shepard's slow starting book will come away from the experience a bit changed. With no intention to compare homophobic killings to the immensity of the Holocaust, I suggest that just as Anne Frank's diary was the first book to put a single victim's face on the Holocaust, Shepard's puts one on the continuing epidemic of hate towards gays.
Although The Meaning of Matthew should probably be read with a supply of tissues on hand, it is much more than a tearjerker. We learn that long before Matthew outed himself to his mother - a difficult step for him - he asked her not to tell his father -she suspected he was gay and worried that he would never have a family of his own. In addition, Matthew was not street smart and at the age of 18 or so, he was raped one night while abroad with some classmates, by a group of three men. The incident left him with post traumatic syndrome which appears to have left a permanent mark on him.

Matthew' s difficulties with his identity also extended beyond the difficulty he had revealing his secrets to his father. He told two of his grandparents who seemed fine with the revelation, until his grandmother was asked if she would be willing to meet Matthews gay friends; she flunked the test by refusing.
Judy Shepard first learned about the circumstances of her son's death when, returning to the US from Saudi Arabia where her husband had been working, she saw a New York Times headline in airport kiosk. Summoned home for an unspecified emergency concerning Matthew, it was only in the hospital that the Shepards learn how serious things were. There they found him unconscious, his face and skull having been smashed in.

One of the unexpected consequences of what quickly become an event of worldwide significance, was a sympathy call from President Clinton. Initially Matthew's father refused to take it, fearing Clinton was trying to gain some political capital by calling. This was the first sign of things to come.
After Matthew's death, the family had to deal with the memorial service they arranged for him becoming a media event; CNN wanted to film the entire service. Even worse, a fanatical Christian group calling itself the Westboro Baptist Church, which travels the country protesting Gay pride events, picketed outside the church and later outside the courthouse when Matthew's killers were tried. "God hates fags," read one of their picket signs. With all the media storm created by the murder and the memorial service, the police even had Matthew's father wear a bulletproof vest he made a statement to the press.

In the aftermath of Matthew's death, Judy Shepard established a Matthew Shepard foundation devoted to fostering respect for other people, especially non-heterosexuals. Sheppard mentions that repeatedly Republicans have blocked adoption of a hate crime bill. She also briefly blasts the Catholic Church because Roman Catholic priests and the Newman Center tried to influence the jury and the outcome of the trial by persecuting the prosecutor of Matthew's killers.
Don't worry about the few moments in which you will need the tissues. In the end, The Meaning of Matthew is a reaffirmation of a mother's life and her love.

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.