Today I stood in an Ohio corn field owned by my third-great-grandfather, Joseph J. Parrett, nearly 200 years ago. It’s early June and the slender, soft green corn stalks extend only about a foot above the soil. The field lies in Jefferson Township in Fayette County, not far from Parrett Station Road, named for my Joseph and the other Parretts who settled here in the early 1800s on Ohio bounty land set aside for Virginia Revolutionary War soldiers.

My Joseph was twenty-two when he arrived here in 1814 with Rebecca, his wife, a year-old son, and nearly forty other relatives and in-laws who had made the three-week journey in four wagons up the Wilderness Road from Eastern Tennessee. The son of Revolutionary War soldier John Parrott, Joseph had recently served a term for the Tennessee Volunteer Infantry in the War of 1812.

I knew all that before coming to Ohio this week. Libraries and Internet searches filled me with facts. I didn’t know what it was like to stand on soil that once belonged to him, filled with a jumble of thoughts about family, mortality, and the excruciating physical labor required to support a family of ten two centuries ago. I needed to walk the land, witness its expansive flatness, observe the way Paint Creek snaked through his landscape, stand alongside his cemetery grave marker on Memorial Day. Coming here, I feel better prepared to write about Joseph Parrett’s world than I was when I only knew facts.

Of course, while I’m here, I’ve been combing the local libraries and archives, looking for “filler material” I couldn’t access from my home base. And I’ve found stuff—good stuff—that will help enrich my story.

For example, I didn’t know until now, that my Joseph, called “Tennessee Joe” to distinguish him from other Joseph Parretts in the county, liked to flop on a chair on his front porch in his later years and spend his evenings “combing his wiskurs.”  I love this personal little window into his weary soul.

May he rest in peace.

My spring classes ended last week, setting my students adrift until fall without weekly writing nudges from me. Whatever will they do with all that free time this summer? I feel a bit like a hand-wringing parent who has just sent her daughter off to college for the first time. Maybe a reminder letter from home will do the trick…and here it is:

Your Summer Writing List!

Dear People… When you’re lying in your comfy hammocks basking in the summer sunshine, perhaps sipping a tall, frosty glass of lemonade and listening to the birds chirping in the maple tree, let your mind lazily drift back to your childhood summers—those idyllic, seemingly endless, carefree months when you cast off your shoes along with your cares and wallowed in being a kid.

I did some thinking along those lines and came up with all kinds of story ideas. Realize that I grew up in Southern California, where summer is pretty much a year-round event. Nevertheless, I still have some vivid memories of the way my life changed when the school bell rang mid-June, and I was suddenly free as a bird. I’ve listed some of those memories below, hoping they might spark your recollections of what it was like when May turned to June and you skipped into those “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.”

• Summer clothes—finding the right bathing suit; wearing sandals or “go-aheads” (thongs), or going barefoot; never worrying about sunscreen
• Keeping cool—wading pools; playing in the sprinklers; going to the plunge; wanting a “doughboy” pool; sleeping with the windows open and the covers off
• Summer food—popsicles, eating all the watermelon, peaches, plums, and apricots I wanted; dinner consisting solely of tomatoes and corn on the cob. (Arguing with the family about whether it was better to eat corn like a typewriter or spiral-style.)
• Summer chores—picking fruit off the trees; helping Mom make jam; earning $ with Kool-Aid stands; working in the yard
• Staying up late—playing hide and seek and other games in the dark; staying up to watch old movies with my night-owl mother (Ziegfield Follies, the Hope-Crosby “Road” movies); sleeping late in the morning
• Reading, reading, reading—a book a day (Nancy Drew, books by Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder)
• Playing, playing, playing—putting on “shows”; cowboys and Indians; hula hoops; jacks; jump rope; Kool-Aid stands
• Vacations—camping and fishing; visiting relatives; long, boring car trips; going to the beach
• Summer romances—hmmmm; unrequited love, mostly
• Sound, smell, and feel of summer—ocean waves; sand in your shoes; sunburn; coconut suntan oil; lawn mowers; warm grass; roses; ripe fruit; barbeques; weenie roasts at the beach
• Radio/Records associated with summer: listening to the Dodgers on my transistor radio (especially 1959 when they won the World Series), listening to “A Summer Place” and “Mack the Knife” (big hits of 1959); The Beach Boys; Jan and Dean; Peter, Paul and Mary.

I’m sure there’s more, but this is a start. Now make your list…and write, dear friends, write!

Trying to help my students envision the bigger picture when they’re writing their stories, I assigned them to explain in two sentences what their life story is all about. To help them along, I told them to think of the paragraph they would put on the back of a book jacket that would tempt people to buy their book. It’s actually a tough assignment, and I saw more than one student’s eyes glaze over during my discussion. They will be bringing their summaries to class next week, and I’ll post them on my blog, along with my reasons for giving this assignment.

I also asked my students to specifically identify who they’re writing for. Their answer will shape what they write and how they write it. When I consider all the potential people I’m writing for, I find that the readers who matter most to me are the people pictured in the photos below–my grandkids–because it’s important to me that they understand who came before them and how their lives have been influenced and, yes, blessed, by the struggles and often difficult decisions of their forbears. Therein lies family pride and a sense of identity. I’ve acquired a couple of cute photos of them recently, and this is as good a time as any to show them off. So, here are the Thurston grandchildren. The first photo shows them modeling their new Easter outfits. I snapped the second one last weekend of them inside a movie theatre wearing their 3-D glasses prior to the screening of How to Train Your Dragon. They LOVE 3-D!

I’ve been presenting seminars recently for a variety of groups ,so I haven’t had time for blogging. I spoke to an enthusiastic group of genealogists in the Southern California Genealogy Society in October about writing family histories.

At the end of the month my husband and I flew to Pennsylvania and attended the annual conference of the Association of Personal Historians, a fine organization of about 600 talented and generous folks who are in the business of creating written, audio, and video personal histories for their clients.

This year’s conference was held in Valley Forge, and it was the perfect time of year to be in that part of the country. We met at the Radisson Hotel, which is right across the street from the Valley Forge historic site, and a couple of miles down the road from the King of Prussia Mall, purportedly the largest mall on the East Coast. Talk about a great location!

My husband and I presented a five-hour seminar at the conference on the subject of truth in memoir writing. We discussed how to use fiction techniques to make memoirs interesting…and still tell the truth. My husband drew from his career as a lawyer when he discussed legal issues—copyright, libel, trademark, etc.—that relate to the work of personal historians. Later in the conference I taught another class and presented ways personal historians can make the people in their stories seem more alive and real.

I learned a great deal from the other classes I attended and particularly enjoyed the “show and tell” evening where APH members shared the books and videos they created for their clients. As always, I was impressed with the professional caliber of their work. I have recommended the services of some of these individuals to people who want to turn their personal history project over to someone else, someone they can trust will get the job done to their satisfaction. If you’d like to learn more about this fine organization, visit the APH website at www.personalhistorians.org.

After the conference we spent a few days in the area discovering what fall looks like in all its glory. Being from Southern California, I find it hard at home to tell the difference between seasons. We visited Valley Forge, which was inspiring and beautiful, important to me because several of my ancestors spent that long terrible winter with Washington’s troops in 1781, when the war appeared to be tilting toward a British victory.

We also spent a few days in Philadelphia, visiting historic sites like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, which we had seen on a prior vacation. We then drove to New York’s Hudson River Valley for the last two days of our trip. It’s an area we’ve always wanted to visit, and the fall foliage provided a spectacular drive.

The highlight of our time along the Hudson was our visit to Franklin Roosevelt’s home and presidential library and a tour of the campus of the Culinary Institute of America.  If I could go back in time and have a “do-over,” I’d enroll in that cooking school. What a beautiful campus it was, perched on a knoll with a view of the Hudson River. Our tour took is by kitchens where students—dressed in chef’s hats and coats—were learning how to make bread and pastries.  There was a lecture about French wine going on in another room. We were there in time for a late breakfast and we had a hard time choosing from the delectable array of pastries displayed in glass cases in the Apple Pie Bakery Café. We decided, when you can’t decide, buy several.  A good idea, as it turned out.

I’ve thought a lot about Frank McCourt and his engaging memoir Angela’s Ashes since hearing of his unexpected death yesterday. McCourt published Angela’s Ashes the same year I finished the family history of my Scottish grandparents. Until writing that book I hadn’t paid much attention to the memoir genre. Frankly, I can’t remember reading a memoir before Angela’s Ashes unless one counts Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. I must have been drawn to McCourt’s book because of all the attention it was receiving. Little did I realize  how that book would change my life.   

Writing my family history helped me see the value of leaving a record of one’s life. As I wrote about my grandparents’ lives, I keenly felt the loss of not having known them and hearing their story as they would have told it. I had my mother and two aunts who were valuable resources for factual material, but it wasn’t the same as being able to hear my grandparents’ version of what happened to them.  

That sense of loss led me to the conviction that I should motivate and help others write their life stories. I have written before about how I naively believed writing that one family history taught me enough to teach others. Of course, I soon realized I was in over my head and began looking for help. And there was Angela’s Ashes. It couldn’t have been more fortuitous timing. I learned so much from that book that helped focus my thinking.  Here was an ordinary man—not a hero or a celebrity—who had written about his life in such an engaging way that it resonated profoundly with people everywhere, selling millions of copies worldwide, winning a Pulitzer Prize.

I learned many things from Frank McCourt, but there are two that stand out.

1.  A person doesn’t have to be a celebrity to write an interesting life story. We’ve all had interesting lives. It’s just a matter of telling our story in an interesting way. Here’s how McCourt did it…

• He re-created incidents from his life and presented them as scenes so readers felt they were living his experiences along with him.
• He re-created conversations that occurred decades before, thereby illuminating personalities by letting people speak for themselves. While there was no way he could duplicate exactly what was said in these conversations, they “ring true” all the same.
• He didn’t whitewash the flaws of difficult people but wrote about them honestly and fairly, showing both their strengths and weaknesses.
• Although people he loved often made his life miserable, he wrote about them with compassion and forgiveness, even humor, so he never came across as bitter or vindictive.

I continually stress these techniques in my classes and included them when I later wrote my life story writing  book—quoting McCourt frequently—because I think they’re essential to writing an engaging memoir. I thank Frank McCourt for showing the way.         

 2.  McCourt taught me something else: You’re never too old. You’re never too old to tell your story, a message I convey to my retirement-age students constantly. And, you’re never too old to embark on a new career path. McCourt published Angela’s Ashes when he was sixty-six—after three decades of teaching and at a time when most people retire. Then he published TWO more books after that!  What a role model he’s been for us. I came to teaching relatively late in life—after I had raised four children and filled spare hours with volunteer work. My last fourteen years as a teacher have been some of the most interesting and rewarding years of my life. The sense of fulfillment I’ve experienced from teaching life story writing has enhanced every other aspect of my life. Like McCourt, I consider myself a late bloomer.

As I’ve read many of the tributes to him these last two days, it’s apparent that others have Frank McCourt to thank for their personal success. For some time the publishing industry has experienced what many call a “memoir boom.” While I haven’t studied the phenomenon closely, I suspect Angela’s Ashes was the catalyst—giving courage to countless others to write and publish their stories.  

I’ve felt unsettled ever since hearing the news of McCourt’s death, keenly feeling the loss of someone who has been important to me and regretting that I wasn’t able to tell him.  But I can tell you. Blogs can serve all kinds of good purposes.