Painful Memories – Kirkwood

Posted on February 8, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the Kirkwood City Hall shooting. It brought back memories of being in a church meeting at night, listening to hovering helicopters and sirens, going into lockdown, being fearful of an unknown menace a couple blocks away. Then cell phone calls trickling in from family feeding us news as it was released bit by bit on TV. Fear, shock, pain at the horror of a man possessed by evil executing loyal and loved city servants.

After the tragedy, members of our church and some residents of the community commissioned choral composer Joseph M. Martin to create a musical piece to promote healing and understanding. The resulting Canticle of Peace was performed by our choir at each of our four church services this morning. It was beautiful, the words gentle and comforting.

What could have resulted in hate, bitterness, anger, racial divisiveness – and those emotions did surface – was astonishingly turned into an opportunity to reach out, to try to understand, to love, and to heal together. What better way to remember an anniversary of a tragedy than to celebrate the goodness of the people who died and the way that good fruit can grow from blackened earth.

For anyone who is grieving a loss, remembering the good, remembering the love is the greatest tribute you can give to the one who has gone and surely the greatest pathway to healing. Remember the blessings, and let them temper the pain of loss.

“Peace, fall like a gentle snow.”

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in bad memories, death | Comments Off on Painful Memories – Kirkwood

Liar! Famous Memoir Fakes

Posted on February 6, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

One after another these days we are seeing high profile memoirs proven to be falsified. The first in this latest series was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces which was exposed shortly after I published the first edition of Cherry Blossoms in Twilight. I was angry. I had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure everything in my mother’s WWII memoir was true to the best of our knowledge, both personal and historical. Here was a man who seemed to have no qualms about passing off fabrications as the truth, looking Oprah (and her millions of viewers) in the eye and saying it was all real. Now we have Angel at the Fence by the Rosenblats who lied TWICE to Oprah, first in 1996 and then in 2008. Misha Defonseca can now write a memoir about how she faked her memoir about being raised by wolves (and who believed that in the first place?) and the lawsuits and the ridiculous circus of accusations ensuing. Other fakes include Love and Consequences (rich girl fakes being foster child running in gangs) by Margaret Jones, Augustin Burrough’s Running With Scissors (overactive imagination say the brother and mother), and UK lawyer Constance Briscoe’s Ugly which caused her mother to sue her for libel.

Of course, fake memoirs are not new. Go Ask Alice (1971) was said to be based on a real diary, The Education of Little Tree (1976) written not by an Indian but a white supremacist, A Child Called It (1993) by David Pelzer, called a “professional victim.” Why do they do it? Mostly for money and fame. A sensational true story sells better than sensational fiction. The Rosenblats wanted to “bring happiness to people” with their story and one might argue some of the others wanted to get a message out. The end result, however, is that all memoirs suffer from those who embellish too much in order to get published. All become tainted as readers wonder, “Is this one really true?” No one likes to be fooled into crying or empathizing over a fake. In the Rosenblat’s case they have provided fodder for Holocaust deniers.

While truth can be a difficult thing to pin down, there is a line in the sand which we should not cross. Is it the truth as you know it, as you have researched it, or are you being lazy in looking up the facts, or do you know in your heart that you are making something up. Life writing maven Sharon Lippincott explains this further in her blog post of January 11, discussing an Isabel Allende interview where she says that her memoirs “will always be somehow fictionalized.” In the end a memoir is how you remembered it to the best of your knowledge, hence the term “creative nonfiction.” Small details are not so important, like what you ate or the color of a room, and if you’re not sure about something bigger, simply write “As I remember,” or “I think,” or “I believe,” but please, don’t play us for fools. If you lie, someone will catch you.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in memoir writing | Comments Off on Liar! Famous Memoir Fakes

Snow Days – Are You Too Old to Play?

Posted on February 3, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

Culture Feast carried a Feb 3 post, “A Grown-Up Snow Day,” mentioning the initial thrill of being able to sleep late on those rare days when your office shuts down due to weather… until you have to get up and tackle the human snow plow activities of the day, and then household chores. “What do you do on snow days?” Jenny Hammitt asks.

Most of us above the Mason-Dixon line have seen plenty of snow this winter. While some folks have had to slip-slide their way to work anyway, others are able to work from home on bad days or the office actually does shut down. Some have to stay home with kids off from school. The kids sure know how to have fun in the snow, but do you?

Turn loose your inner kid! After you’ve finished the shoveling and rested with a cup of hot cocoa, tea or coffee, have a little fun! Don’t you deserve it? If you’ve got kids, join them in sledding or making snowmen. Personally, I like to make snow ponies for the kids to ride on, with yew clippings for manes, but recently saw a photo online of someone’s snow kitty – how cute! One year adults joined the neighborhood kids in a big snowball fight. It’s fun, too, to put on the boots and take a walk in the snow – providing it’s not thigh-high. Our lab-mix, Buddy, loves snow and loved to participate in snowball fights and chases and go along for walks in the white stuff. He’s too old now, but still enjoys sticking his nose into the whiteness, adding to his already white muzzle.

This reminds me of the old days when I was a kid and global warming was global cooling. We had so much snow in the Midwest that most winters my dad made an igloo for us, with stairs to a steep sled run on top. Ah, those were the days.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in seize the day | Comments Off on Snow Days – Are You Too Old to Play?