The Black Girl Next Door – Books for Black History Month

Posted on February 20, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

Jennifer Baszile has an intriguing new book out that examines the issues of growing up black in a white neighborhood. Jennifer’s parents wanted and had the means to provide the best for their daughter, and in order for that to happen in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s they had to live among whites. The Black Girl Next Door provides a serious look at the reality of race relations, but is also “packed with offbeat humor and suspense,” as Connecticut Post’s Joe Meyers wrote in a review. It’s tough being “the only one,” especially in those days, and money doesn’t make you “one of them.” Dwight Garner in his New York Times review says the family is “at the same time too black and not nearly black enough.”

Baszile, the first black woman to teach history at Yale, is writing a second memoir that deals with her life from high school through college, moving into the challenges of the adult world.

In honor of Black History Month (it’s never too late), read a book by an African-American author. If not Baszile’s try one of Maya Angelou’s (I have a signed copy of Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now, a treasure), or The Color of Water by James McBride, which is a very multicultural treatise about his mother, a white Jew who marries a black man and raises a large family in Harlem. How about Ben Carson: Gifted Hands, about Carson’s rise from inner city boy to director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins (made into a TV movie that aired earlier this month). Or Zora Neale Hurston’s famous Their Eyes Were Watching God, written in south Florida black vernacular. One of Barack Obama’s favorites is Song of Solomon by Tony Morrison. For younger kids try Most Loved In All the World by Tonya Cherie Hegaman, about a slave mother saving her child from the cotton fields to work in the Big House, then creating a quilt to help her follow the Underground Railway. Or Priscilla and the Hollyhocksby Ann Broyles, based on a true story of a slave child separated from her mother and ending up on the Trail of Tears. Expand your horizons. And don’t tell me we don’t need a Black History Month since Obama was elected.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in book talk, multicultural | Tagged | 1 Comment

Researching Your Memoir

Posted on February 18, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

A member of Sharon Lippincott’s and Jerry Waxler’s Lifewriters Forum Yahoo Group found a great article by Lisa Koning about the benefits of doing research when writing your memoir or lifestories. Lisa says that while memoir is based on personal experience, it doesn’t hurt – and may actually help – if you do some research into facts and details around those experiences. Not only can adding historical fact and additional personal details enhance the stories by providing more information and a broader perspective, but research can remind you of stories and feelings you had forgotten. Reading books, searching the internet, asking friends and relatives what they remember about your stories, these all help to corroborate and add to your stories – and perhaps most important, that research will prevent problems of inaccuracy that might lead others to be suspicious of your writing or downright reject your stories as a bunch of tall tales or lies (see the Feb 6, 2009, post Liar! Famous Memoir Fakes).

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in memoir writing | Comments Off on Researching Your Memoir

Everyday Memoirs – How to Write About Your Boring Life

Posted on February 13, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

“99.9 percent of people lead boring lives. But every single one of them is trying to make some sense out of his or her existence, to find some meaning in the world, and therein lies the value and opportunity of memoir.” So goes a January 09 Reader’s Digest article entitled Great Tips on How to Write Your Memoir. This is a wonderful piece that includes anecdotes from Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) and comments by Jeanette Walls (The Glass Castle) who says, “I’m constantly urging people, especially older folks, to write about their lives.”

As the article says, you don’t need trauma, misery, abuse, war to make your life interesting. I am working on a short memoir of the early lives of an elderly couple, 90+ year old neighbors with everyday stories that play out like a movie set in “the old days.” They entertained me with tales of jumping on “bag swings,” swimming down the street in a stream of water from a draining swimming pool, walking miles to get home. They described small town life during the Depression years, what New York’s 42nd street was like on VJ Day. They are living history, life and times from the 1920’s on.

For most people, lifewriting means writing down the facts of one’s life. While in itself interesting, that’s more like a textbook of your life, not a story. Beyond the facts and events, what really makes a story is the extra dimension of personality, putting yourself into it with feeling – and you do have some feelings about your life stories, don’t you? Turning a series of stories into memoir involves working those stories into a bigger picture involving reflection, growth, a message, a meaning, your “takeaway.” What impact did these facts and experiences have on you? They may have been everyday experiences, but your spin on them reveals who you were, who you became.

My neighbors may not realize it yet from the first draft in their hands, but there is a theme that runs through their stories and a philosophy of life that shows through. Their life stories will easily turn into a memoir. My job now is to ask more questions, to use the draft to draw out more history, more stories, more thoughts and feelings. Memoir writing to me is like playing the 50-questions game about every draft paragraph, except yes/no questions aren’t allowed. The goal is to create a three-dimensional person. After all, you want to let your great, great, great grandchildren know who you were, not just what you did.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in lifewriting, memoir writing | 3 Comments