Shakespeare wrote one…a story he turned into a play he called A Winter’s Tale. I bet you have a few winter stories you could tell. Growing up in Southern California, I experienced few WINTER winters. However, I did spend some winters in Utah during my college years and learned what it was like to trudge through the snow to classes on frigid mornings. Later, after I married, I shivered through three Boston winters when my husband was in law school and believed I was getting frostbite every time I gripped my car’s steering wheel. Nevertheless, most of my childhood winters were primarily bathed in California sunshine.

I thought about this recently because I had lunch last week with a new friend who moved here from Utah. This is her first California winter, and when I joined her at the restaurant, she was wearing a wool sweater and slacks, even though the temperature outside was in the mid-80s, hot even for California standards. “I know I look ridiculous,” she said, when she greeted me, “but it’s January. I must wear my winter clothes.” From there we gabbed about the different ways each of us experienced winter during our childhoods.

I can’t think of too many stories from my past I would label specifically winter stories, because I always seem to think a winter story should involve snow. I have a vivid memories of what my brothers and I called “going to the snow,” the two or three occasions when my parents took us to the Angeles National Forest about an hour north of Los Angeles. These excursions always began with us rising before the sun did and pulling on our outer clothes over our pajamas–because we had no real snow clothes–and driving to Frazier Park. If it rained in the winter in Southern California, it likely snowed at Frazier Park, where the elevation was around 4700 feet. We kids loved those snow trips, sledding down the gentle slopes on cardboard squares, drinking hot chocolate from thermoses. We sometimes brought Kool Aid or Tang with us and sprinkled it on the snow. We thought we were pretty clever when we scooped it into cups and fashioned our very own snow cones. By midday, we drove home to the mild climate of Manhattan Beach, where we lived a few miles from the Pacific Ocean.

I have a number of winter stories related to my years in Utah and Boston that are specifically related to snowy weather–driving in scary, treacherous conditions, being snowed in, etc. One favorite sweet memory involves rushing to the hospital one snowy night in Boston four days before Christmas to give birth to our first child. We brought our baby son home in a Christmas stocking on Christmas Eve. A frightened new mother of 21, I walked into my apartment to discover my husband had bought and decorated a Christmas tree in my absence. That’s a story I definitely need to write.

Now, what about you? What winter tales do you have to tell? I’ve made a list of a few ideas to jog your memory a bit. When you get a moment this week, light the fireplace, don some comfy slippers, and make yourself a mug of hot chocolate—even if you do live in California—and let your mind drift back to a memory about…

1. A time you were snowed in
2. An accident you had in the snow
3. Chores associated with winter
4. Snow fun—skiing, sledding, ice skating, making a snowman or a snow fort
5. Winter in a warm climate. What you like about it. What you dislike about it
6. The winter blahs
7. The clothing of winter. What you liked, what you didn’t. Snow suits, the sweater you had to have
8. Winter cooking
9. Mishaps due to the weather
10. An important event that occurred during the winter
11. Going to school in the snow
12. Preparing the house or yard for winter

Good luck,
Memoir Mentor

PS: Those are my cute grandkids in the photos, in Park City, Utah, and that’s my dog Emma sniffing the shovel.

It starts after I heft the last of the Christmas decorations into the garage attic. I look at the blank spaces in my house where the manger scene, Christmas village, and other decorations sat and realize I need to fill them with the pictures, flower arrangements, and other doo-dads that sit in those places the other months of the year.

Pulling those accessories out of their storage places makes me look at them in a new light. Maybe I ought to arrange them differently this year, I think. Why should the house look the same year after year? And so I create a new arrangement on the coffee table with photos, picture books, and a candle. It looks pretty nice, but it could use a little greenery to soften the effect, so I borrow a small arrangement from another room to see if it works. It does. Then I work on another area, soon moving things from room to room, rummaging through drawers for this and that, setting a few things aside for Good Will, and…I’m on a roll.

I can feel the buzz of an organizing binge taking on a life of its own. It can last for days as I move from tabletops to bookcases to drawers to closets. Sometimes I become so engaged in the process, I forget to eat, which is a good thing. You know, because of my Pioneer Woman escapade?

All that happened last week. And it’s mostly done. And it feels good, freeing my brain for tackling a new year of memoir-related work. You knew I was going to get around to the M-word, didn’t you? Still feeling the vestiges of my buzz, I’ve been thinking how some of this organizing energy could be applied to personal history projects. A little bit of memoir housekeeping can free your mind for greater creativity—maybe even spark some story ideas. Here are a few organizational projects you might consider…

• How about last year’s calendar? Do you still have it? Did you write down events and appointments on it? If so, you have a good resource for reconstructing your year and maybe have some material for a story or  two. Go through last year’s calendar and make a list of all the things you did. Assign a date to each event and jot down a few notes. Is there any story material there? If you have calendars for previous years, do the same thing. What an interesting project this could be. Sometimes one year blends into the next–particularly as we age–and we don’t take note of interesting things that happen. My students tell me they don’t like to write about their adult years because they’re boring. Maybe not…check out last year’s calendar.

• In a similar vein, consider making lists of all the books you read last year or movies you saw, projects you completed, or places you visited, etc. I’d love to have lists like this from my grandparents. If you can’t remember much about last year, start keeping lists this year. For some years, I’ve tried to keep a list of the books I’ve read and post them on this blog and, because I’m a movie fan, I keep a list of all the movies I’ve seen each year and assign them a grade. My entire family does this and we have fun exchanging our lists every year.

• If you haven’t already done so, begin creating a life chronology (timeline), a surefire way to begin thinking about your life in story terms.  My blog post here explains how to do it and why it’s important.

• Have you digitized all the important records that pertain to your life? I haven’t, but it’s on this year’s project list. I plan to scan and save on my computer all my school report cards, along with personal documents and certificates of various kinds so they’re all in one place. I may want to use some as illustrations in my personal history. Frankly, I haven’t foreseen all the ways I can use them, but I know this project will assure that I have a copy of everything in one place—a computer file or DVD—instead of spread around the house in scrapbooks and manila folders.

• Do you know what stories you intend to write this year? Do you know when you intend to write them? If you don’t have a plan, you won’t be as productive. The months will go by and another year will have passed and you won’t have finished your personal history. Make a list of stories you’re going to write and assign a completion date for each one. Be realistic, but be ambitious, too.

These are just a few ideas for getting organized in the memoir way. Some won’t fit your organizational needs or style, but they may spark other projects. If you have ideas that have worked for you, please share them with all of us.

All the best for a fruitful writing life in 2012,
Your Memoir Mentor

I’ve decided this blog post will combine two writing assignments I gave my students recently: Write a story about a holiday memory, and write a story about food.

I’ve  been thinking a lot about food in the last two months, and the scales show it. It’s natural, after all. As Mom and Grandmother, I’m in charge of holiday food preparation (we’re traditional at our house)–and Thanksgiving and Christmas are the two biggest food holidays of the year, right?

Ree Drummond

I discovered “The Pioneer Woman” (TPW) on the Food Network in mid-December, and since then my cooking and waistline have taken off on a new trajectory. After being thoroughly enchanted by TPW’s Christmas show, I checked out her blog and felt like the last person arriving at a gala party. I consider myself a foodie of sorts, and I wonder how I could be so out of the loop. Why, she (Ree Drummond, aka TPW) has a mind-boggling 20-plus million people visit her blog every month. Amazing! Where have I been?

I may be a little slow on the uptake, but I’ve scrambled to make up for lost time. Since watching TPW’s Christmas show, I’ve made her cinnamon rolls TWICE (delivering them to my nearest and dearest the way she did on her show, but without the cowboy duds), her prime rib, cream gravy, and Dutchess potatoes (served on Christmas Eve to rave reviews), and her Italian Chicken Soup (last night’s dinner fare). I’ll say this in my behalf: I’ve spent substantial time looking through the comments on TPW’s blog, and it seems to me that most of of her followers say things like, “Sounds like a yummy recipe. I’ll have to try it.” I just wonder how many of them walk the talk like I’ve done, and in such a short amount of time!

TPW has carved out a great niche for herself in the foodie sector with her city-girl-turned-ranch-wife narrative. That, plus her lively personality and mouth-watering recipes (cinnamon rolls!) have garnered her a well-deserved following. My friend Lorna says I must read her books. Really, how does TPW find the time? She even home-schools her four kids!

This rather long intro, leads me to the  story I’ve prepared to fulfill the two assignments I gave my students. When it comes to writing, I’m usually slow to practice what I preach, but consider this story an effort to fulfill a resolution I set for myself three days ago. There are areas where I, too, need to Walk the Talk.

An Ode to Barbara’s Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

When I married at 19 with minimal cooking experience, I could have been intimidated by my new mother-in-law, who had been a high school home economics teacher before she married. But Barbara was welcoming and gracious, sharing many of her recipes and cooking techniques with me over the years. She knew everything about the basics of cooking, particularly baking. Thanksgiving gave her ample opportunity to show off her baking talents to a very appreciative audience. Pumpkin chiffon pies were one of her specialties.

She typically made her pies the day before Thanksgiving to free herself for other cooking tasks the day of. When her pies were completed, she stored them on wire racks in her laundry room and warned anyone heading that direction to be careful not to disturb her pies.

Barbara prided herself on her pie crust and assumed the role of final arbiter of its quality, assessing the degree of flakiness and worrying about it becoming “soaked” overnight from absorbing too much moisture from the filling. These assessments were mostly made to herself in a muttering voice while we all sat at the table wallowing in a sensory overload with every bite of her incomparable pie. I always seemed to be sitting to her left, a witness to her mutters from time to time.

I had never before tasted pumpkin pie the way she made it. It was light and fluffy, the pumpkin custard folded into whipped egg whites before being cooked on the stove and poured into her baked pie shells. She always made enough pies for everyone in her large family to have two pieces–one an hour or two after dinner, and another later in the evening. She cut the pies in generous wedges after slathering the tops with a thick layer of sweetened whipped cream. Eating Barbara’s pie was like biting into a fluffy pumpkin cloud that melted in your mouth like cotton candy.

I liked the lightness of her recipe compared to the standard custard pumpkin pies I’d been used to, particularly after a heavy Thanksgiving dinner, but some of the “in-laws” who later joined the family didn’t share my opinion. One year after dinner, a lively discussion ensued about the merits of Barbara’s pies compared with the traditional recipe and one of the in-laws came up with humorous labels to distinguish them. Barbara’s pies were “air pies,” he pronounced, and the familiar pumpkin custard pies were labeled “solid state.” Barbara took it all in good humor and the labels stuck.

We lost Barbara a few years ago, and I miss her. Besides teaching me how to cook, she taught me many life lessons I deeply appreciate. This Thanksgiving I looked for her pie recipe and it disturbed me when I couldn’t find the recipe card in my files. I remember exactly what it looked like: Well used, it had pumpkin-colored fingerprints on its edges, the directions written in blue ink in Barbara’s clear hand. Frustrated in not being able to find the card, I went online, Googled “pumpkin chiffon pie” and found a recipe that looked similar to Barbara’s. However, when my daughter-in-law announced that her husband, my son, had “shamed her into making a pumpkin pie” for Thanksgiving, I decided to put off making mine until next year. My daughter-in-law’s pie was delicious but, alas, it was Solid State.

I bet TPW has a recipe for pumpkin pie on her blog. I’ll have to check it out, but judging from what I know of her cooking proclivities, I’d guess she’s a “Solid State” kind of gal.

All memoir writing teachers soon discover they’re teaching far more than a writing class. While writing a personal history may be the project that initially draws people to the class, something far more important and meaningful keeps them coming back, again and again. One of my students approached me yesterday and said, “When I leave this class, I feel like I’ve attended church, visited my psychiatrist and doctor, and went to a friendly family reunion…all rolled into one.” Frankly, I feel the same way. Something magical and meaningful happens when people come together to share heartfelt stories about how they became who they are. Whether polished or plain, funny or sad, these stories invite us to reflect on our own life experiences and examine the common threads that bind us all together regardless of gender, culture, or educational background. Many find the experience validating and liberating, an antidote to regret, guilt, resentment, loneliness, and self-pity, one that draws them back week after week, year after year–for some, going on ten years now. I’m pleased if they get some writing done along the way, but I know that what really engages my students is something far more transforming and transcendent. For that, I’m grateful.

My student Judy Huck captures these feelings perfectly in the following moving story about her classroom experience.

What I Learned in School
by Judy Huck

I have always said that I would like to write.  I said it, but I didn’t do it.  Whether for fear of not being perfect and profound or simply out of procrastination, my contribution to the written page was sparse and sporadic.  One day a friend recommended Dawn Thurston’s memoir writing class, and so I ventured into the class, expecting to learn about the craft of writing and get a kick-start in the pants to be actively involved in creation.  Well, yes to number one and somewhat to number two.  I have learned a great many things about how to express myself in writing, and have even written a few pieces.  I have also found myself the recipient of the most precious of gifts – the knowledge of how glorious human beings are.

When I joined the class, I found the students to be just what I expected.  Ordinary people of a certain age who wanted to leave a legacy to their family.  I had my own legacy that I wanted to leave, so I settled in. At first I was very quiet, taking notes copiously and comparing the writing I had done to the stories that were being read at each class.  Yes, it was just that superficial.  Just listening for the quality of the work and comparing it to what I felt I was able to do.  I was white-knuckled at the thought of reading a piece of my own, and it was a while before I finally submitted a piece to be read.  So went the first session I attended.

As the second session rolled around, I started to really listen to the stories that were read.  Instead of roaming around on the surface of the stories, I fell into their interior.  I heard a great deal about what people choose to do when they reach a crossroads.  I felt the joy of life and the anguish of loss. I felt the urgency of recording events and people who are in danger of being forgotten. Most of all, I experienced the integrity, the honor and the honesty of people going about everyday life and making it work for them and for those they love.

I heard about the man leaving the only home he had ever known to seek a better life for his family.  He dared not look back for fear that he would turn back.  I heard about the grandmother who ran away from home rather than say things that would be hard for her or her child to forget.  After giving and receiving the gift of space she braved the aftermath of a snowstorm to return to keep a promise. I heard about the schoolgirl in a country far away who escaped from school with her friends on their lunch hour to keep a rendezvous with their idol, who didn’t know that he had a rendezvous to keep.  I heard about a woman whose husband  left her and who recreated her life in a rich and fulfilling way.  I heard about a woman who travelled to a beautiful, tragic land to see if there was a life for her and her children with the man she loved.  In doing so, she found the love of her life.

I am amazed and grateful for these stories. They are not about people who ruled or amassed great riches.

They are not about people who led the headlines in great deeds or scandal or tragedy.  They are about every one of us who have had a family, a career, dreams, and a story to tell.  They are richly embroidered with personal emotion, without being turgid or over-emotional.  They remind me of the lines from a song by John Stewart:  “They was just a lot of people doing the best they could, just a lot of people doing the best they could, and they did it pretty up-and-walking good.”

Yes, my dears, this is about you.  This is my love letter to you for enriching my life and inspiring my muse.  If I never wrote another line in my life I would still want to be in this class listening to these stories, and finding the genuineness of lives well lived.

Last week I gave presentations at a week-long adult education conference sponsored by Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. Held annually the third week of August since 1922, Campus Education Week attracts around 20,000 attendees from all over the world, though primarily from the Western United States. It’s an incredible undertaking for the event planners, with over a thousand classes offered on an array of topics.

I taught a three-hour class on the first day of the conference focused on family history writing, then partnered with my husband to present one-hour presentations on personal history writing the four remaining days of the event.

This is my eighth year teaching at Education Week. I always come away from the experience touched and inspired by the many wonderful people I’ve met who are fired with a sense of mission to write their personal and family stories. I regret that I can’t spend more time with them, for  I understand the magnitude of the task they’ve set for themselves and know the days, months, and years ahead will be fraught with all the questions, frustrations, and self-doubt that go with the territory.

As I talked with people before and after my classes, I was reminded of the universal nature of the concerns we all face when we contemplate writing our stories:

• Are our lives worth writing about? Will anyone read our stories and find them interesting? (Yes, and yes…more than you’ll ever realize.)
• Do I have the ability to write an interesting story? (Yes. Everyone’s life is interesting. Just tell your story in your voice. You want to sound like yourself. Remember to make it personal. Share your thoughts and feelings. Let readers know how events affected you. Don’t just write what you DID; explain who you ARE.)
• How do I handle all the sensitive, sometimes dark, issues in my life? How much should I tell? (Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to this question, but we all have to grapple with this problem and find a solution we can live with. Your solution will depend on balancing a variety of competing concerns: your purpose for writing, the relevance of your sensitive issues to your life, your audience/readers, your commitment to the truth, and your tone. I think tone is key. You can say the same thing in different ways. A tone of compassion, fairness, and forgiveness allows you more room to tell your truth with less offense. This may seem like a simplistic answer, but your decision will come down to striking a balance between these factors.)

When I finished teaching my last class on Friday afternoon, I felt a bit like my parents must have felt when they dropped me off at BYU as a college freshman years ago. As they drove away in their yellow Chevrolet Impala from the Helaman Halls dorms where they left me, I’m sure it wasn’t long before one of them said, “Well, we’ve done what we could. She’s on her own now.”

It was true…to an extent. But I had classes and books and mentors to inspire and teach me how to proceed on my own. It’s my hope that those of you who attend my conference presentations will seek out writing classes at your community college or adult education center to keep you motivated to write. If you can’t find a class, start a writing group with other like-minded people. Writing is such a solitary pursuit, it’s vital that you find some way to keep yourself motivated. Finally, read published memoirs to learn how other people have written about their lives. I’ve posted a list of excellent memoirs in the “Reading Resources” section of this blog.

Good luck to all of you…and keep plugging!