What I questioned was what did the family unit really signify, and how did we connect that to social justice issues, as it relates to my people.

I braided stories of food and traveling with indentured people, immigrants, and migrants with my own stories of my journey to America as an immigrant which was in turn, influenced by my parents’ own journey as refugees out of what’s now Bangladesh during the 1947 Partition of India. 

The reason I did that is because all our stories are intertwined and informed by the traumatic event of the largest man-made human migration in the world in the 20^th century. It influenced what we remembered, what we ate, and how we kept a record—whether it was oral, lore, or passed down the generations as stories so fantastic it could be a myth or real and there was no way of finding out.

But my work has been informed over the years by writing from South Asian authors, be it fiction or nonfiction, primarily because of the way we tell stories. Brought up in the storytelling style of folk katha, or story, there is drama, there is fiction, there is even speculative nonfiction that gives each essay and incident the masala it needs. I used food as the vehicle to showcase what it means to lose everything and how we regain what we think is precious to us.

For years, my writing has been heavily influenced by these books, which highlight family, lyric writing style but also a nod to India lore, myth, and storytelling, be it through activism, social justice rally cries, science, food, or adventure, to create a fleshed-out exploration of what makes for a delicious insight.

Here are five books by South Asian writers that talk about family and belonging:

1. Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

The title of this precise book of essays by Chew-Bose in 2017 is from an entry in A Writer’s Diary where Virginia Woolf wondered whether what she wrote or said was anything of value that anyone would want to listen to. 

Chew-Bose explores culture and identity in this group, but what she also does is ask us what it means to be part of a family and what is inherent in this structure. She writes, “A family is more than it shows. That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, I reason, the hope.” 

This essay collection explores ways by which we immigrants assert our identity and what remains when one moves to another land in terms of culture. What happens to the family and how we hold together as a unit.

2. Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance and Social Change by Anjali Enjeti

Ambitious in scope, thoughtful, fierce and refreshingly direct, Enjeti’s book and her activism and passion for social justice has influenced my own writing for decades. In particular, the first section on identity informs us of what it means to be of mixed-race growing up in the American south, but also highlights her relationship with her doctor father and how he conducted himself while working under racially charged situations in the southern states. 

A reflection of what we think we understand as children of immigrant parents, and what we eventually do once we grow up, Enjeti’s work shows not only her mastery of the form, but helps us, the reader, understand how complex intergenerational South Asian relationships are. This in turn is an exploration of those relationships as they wax and wane in intensity over the years. 

But it is Enjeti’s activism and how she uses language that shake us into paying attention—a superb manner of waking us up, and asking us to react. In the title essay, she writes, “Like places, we too must take responsibility for our relaxed complacency and intentional obliviousness. We can be targets of racism while also upholding and benefitting from white supremacy.” We South Asians can be racists while we may also be victims of racial attacks.

3. Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. by Arundhati Roy

I consider Azadi, or freedom, a battle cry for the India we love. This call, a protest slogan used by Kashmiri activists to protest against what they consider Indian Occupation of their lands, is now a call used in all activist rallies throughout India to protest against Modi’s fascist and inherently Hindu nationalist government. 

This book isn’t a reflection of South Asian family dynamics but more a reflection of what has changed in my country of birth and why it’s imperative for us to keep asking the questions that have made it into an us-versus-them nation filled with zealous nationalists, pro-Hindu violent mobs. 

I still consider this writing about South Asian families, because it is about what’s happening in the country as we speak. In “There is Fire in the Ducts, The System is Failing,” Roy writes, “What we need are people who are prepared to be unpopular. Who are prepared to put themselves in danger. Who are prepared to tell the truth. Brave journalists can do that, and they have…And artists—beautiful, brilliant, brave writers, poets, musicians, painters, and filmmakers can do that. That beauty is on our side. All of it. We have work to do. And a world to win.”

4. In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

While Lahiri’s fiction is what draws most western readers to her lyrical style and masterful storytelling, I’ve always found her deep intense love for Italian and her navigation of that language fascinating. 

An American born of Indian immigrant parents, who moves to Italy to master Italian, writes in that language while challenging herself in asking what changes when one starts to write and then ultimately think in a different language. 

This is a reflection of “otherness” and what it means to be foreign in so many different ways. She writes, “I write in order to break down the wall, to express myself in a pure way. When I write, my appearance, my name have nothing to do with it. I am heard without being seen, without prejudices, without a filter I am invisible. I become my words, and the words become me.”

This isn’t a social justice cause, but truly a reflection of what it means to be othered in America. What happens when you’re brought up knowing English and Bengali and yet, you’re foreign in America and when you go back to India, they speak to you in English because the assumption is why would you know Bengali? The othering happens in multiple ways and regions. 

How Lahiri challenges the expectation of understanding and knowing languages and why, as an immigrant, breaks many walls of preconceived biases, and notions.

5. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

There really aren’t words to explain what it is one feels reading Kalanithi’s memoir on his lung cancer diagnosis, as a surgeon and physician and his eventual demise. There is loss, and tragedy even before one reads this memoir, but his scientific objectivity even when he’s looking at his own MRI scans, biopsies, and liver enzyme reports tells you we are watching a brilliant scientist who cannot give up on his patient. And that patient is him. 

When Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy gives birth to their daughter, Cady, he writes, “The cancer cells in my body would still be dying or they’d start growing again. Looking out over the expanse ahead, I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I could go on.” 

The idea of death and dying in a family that welcomes a child at the same time highlights exactly what it is that makes us human, and how can we be objective about death at that time.

Madhushree Ghosh is the daughter of refugees, an immigrant, a woman of color in oncology diagnostics, and an activist. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Longreads, Bomb Magazine, Catapult, Guernica, The Kitchn, Serious Eats, The Rumpus, and others. Her work has been awarded a Notable Mention (Best American Essays in Food Writing), Pushcart-nominated, an Oakley Hall scholarship, and a Sirenland Positano residency (2020-21). Editorial roles have been in gastronomy (Panorama Journal) and international fiction (Del Sol Review). She actively mentors women leaders in science and hosts food and discourse events at her home in San Diego. Madhushree has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University. She is also certified in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from Cornell University as well as in Conflict Management and Global Negotiations from Thunderbird University, AZ. You can find her on her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post #5onFri: Five Books by South Asian Writers on Family and Belonging appeared first on DIY MFA.

Confronting the Past

My story begins with the sudden death of my brother, Lawrence. He was twenty-three at the time; I was fourteen. He had been my True North and all at once I was catapulted into the world without a compass. Shortly after his accident, I became a Christian and found hope and a path forward. 

A few years later, I graduated high school, moved away from home, and began taking a path of my own. I believed in Jesus, but following Him was a different matter. So off I went, doing my own thing. 

For years. I never lost faith. I believed. I just wanted to do faith my way. And I tried, and failed, time and again.

As I wrote, my memoir began to evolve into the story of my journey back to faith. I stumbled upon dark, painful memories that I had a hard time facing. I’d tell my writing coach that I dread writing this next chapter. I’d procrastinate, take naps, read—anything to avoid writing down the awful things I’d done. 

As I began to remember, I fell into shame. How on earth could I face my past, much less share it with the world?

I’d pray, and finally, type something into a blank Word document. Why am I doing this? Because I must. Still, shame persisted.

The Grip of Shame

I thought I knew a lot about shame. I’d been following Brené Brown’s shame research for several years. I’d read her book, Daring Greatly. I’d even taken her COURAGEworks class, where I spent weeks learning about shame. Brown defines it this way:

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. It derives its power from being unspeakable. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we’ve basically cut it off at the knees. . . . Language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.” (Brown, Brené, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.) 

So I began to push through those painful memories, one sentence, one paragraph, one chapter, at a time. 

I would finish an especially difficult passage and take a few days off. 

A week later, I might stumble on another unpleasant memory and think, “I can’t write this. It’s too embarrassing. What will people think?” Then I’d remind myself that I’d survived the last terrible thing I’d written about. I was still here, sitting in my chair, slowly chipping away at my manuscript. I’d survived.

That’s when something began to change. Not only with my writing, but with me. First, I realized I’d been walking around with baggage I didn’t even know I had. Secondly, I began to see my shame for what it was: something that was keeping me small and afraid. Opening the doors of my memory released that shame and brought it to light, where it could no longer survive. In the process of discovery, shame lost its grip on me. 

The Power of Story

For many years I have been a fan of author and theologian Frederick Buechner. I’d heard him interviewed once about writing his memoir, Telling Secrets, the account of his father’s suicide—and it’s fallout— when Buechner was twelve. 

Quoting a meditation from his novel, The Final Beast, Buechner says, “I walked back through my memory, as though it was a long hall. I asked God to open all the closed doors, and bless whatever he found inside.” 

I’m a visual writer and I was captivated by that imagery. So I did the same.

Each day as I would sit down to write, I would close my eyes and ask God to walk with me down the halls of my memory, open each closed door, and bless whatever was waiting there. When I began asking God to enter with me into my shame, that’s when it not only began to be exposed, but destroyed.

The Gift of Time

What I’d find behind those doors wasn’t always heart-rending. To my surprise, I’d often discover a beautiful memory I’d completely forgotten. A hug from my mother. A moment of childhood bliss. 

This process became the path to my healing; these forgotten memories became gifts. 

“The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are,” said Buechner, “ … but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret … the saddest things can become … a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead.”

Madeleine L’Engle once said, “I am still all the ages I’ve ever been.” I believe that’s true. All my actions, and their associated memories, are part of me. 

But they are not me. The older, wiser woman who wrote Untethered is not the carefree—and willful—young woman I spent two years writing about. And there is comfort in that. 

We can certainly learn from our past. Writing about mine set me free. 

Tell us in the comments: How have you dealt with difficult emotions, like shame or fear, in your writing?

Laura grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of a journalist and a teacher. She has been an advertising copywriter, newspaper columnist, staff writer for an international relief agency, travel writer, blogger, teacher, communications director for several nonprofits, and personal assistant to a New York Times bestselling author. Laura is passionate about her faith, books, travel, nature (especially the beach), social justice, and her family. 

Her memoir, Untethered: Faith, Failure and Finding Solid Ground publishes on April 5, 2022.

You can find her on her website or follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The post Facing Shame: Healing through Writing a Memoir appeared first on DIY MFA.

What is forgotten, however, isn’t gone; our missing memories are stored somewhere in our brains. We just have to find our way to them. All sorts of chance things can trigger memories to break through. For Proust, it was famously the taste of a madeleine cookie dipped in linden tea. It could be a phrase of music, the smell of a cellar, or a voice. 

But a writer cannot leave recall to chance; you need to provide the trigger yourself. It would be dandy if you had a film you could just rewind to the formative moments of your life. Absent that, you have to make do with the next best thing, which are your family photos, letters, and significant objects. These are the primary source material of your life. 

1. Using Heirlooms to Enlarge Memories

When I started my seriocomic memoir, Don’t Say a Word!, I knew I wanted to open with the scene at the Thanksgiving table, when my frightening, business-executive mother pronounced the words that are the title. My mother used a silver bell to summon the cook, a job taken by my former beloved nanny when I was twelve and no longer needed childcare. That bell is in my possession now. When I tried to get deeper into that opening scene, I put it on a shelf over my desk, where it would always be in sight. 

Every day, I spent long minutes staring at it, imagining it beside my mother’s place at the table or in her hand. I remembered that particular Thanksgiving well because it opened up the mystery that led to my writing the book. But the bell took me back to the dinners of my childhood, the one time each day that I was in the crosshairs of my mother’s critical laser. Holding the bell, ringing it—which felt weirdly transgressive—brought back the anguish of watching my mother call my nanny to task, while having to hide where my sympathies lay. The bell opened up a rich vein of anxiety and guilt that was indispensable to the scene.

2. Getting to the Truth 

Fleshed-out memories are essential for recreating the past and also for getting to the truth. As children, we do our best to make sense of what feels wrong, with whatever limited understanding we have at that moment. And so we often come to false conclusions––most commonly that we are responsible for things that were in fact entirely out of our control. These mistaken ideas we then carry through life. By revisiting the past, we can seek out these misconceptions and correct them with the knowledge we’ve acquired as adults.

3. Using a Photograph as a Memory Aid

From a psychiatrist I used to see, I learned a technique that works wonderfully in this regard. If you spend a lot of time peering at an early photograph of yourself, you will find that you can connect with the state of mind of the child you were at that time. Through the expression and body language of your then self, you can recall how you were feeling, if not literally at that exact moment, then generally at that time in your life. And with an emotional connection to that child you can come your whole early world, with all its flavor and feeling. Such time travel can bring back all sorts of details, ones that may shift your sense of a family dynamic you’d never fully understood. 

The second half of my book focuses on my father who, after my mother’s death, wanted my help in finding a housekeeper who would sleep with him, a crazy demand I could not get him to give up. I didn’t need help recalling my horror at his metamorphosis from the dad I loved to an apparent sexual harasser. 

Studying this photo with him further reminded me of how much I owed him and of the father-daughter romance of my early imagination. It returned me to our repeated visits to the mummy room at the museum, where I’d hum “mummm, mummm” under my breath, while staring at the caskets of long-dead queens and holding my father’s hand, half-aware of the hum’s connection to “mummy,” the name I called my mother. The photo reminded me of how I’d always adored my dad and helped me understand why I’d felt compelled to make nice with the string of outrageous oddballs he hired during the years of his demented pursuit.

4. Correcting a False Narrative

Photos from the past can not only correct misunderstandings about yourself, but also about the important characters in your life and book. My parents fought continuously and furiously. They agreed on all the things couples normally fight about––friends, money, politics––but instead rose to the challenge of battling about nothing. They fought about the date of a trip on which they’d gotten a flat tire, the previous address of a favorite restaurant and whom they were meeting the night a certain joke was told, the pronunciation of a word. Their rage over these disputes led me to think that their marriage was unhappy. 

But later, pouring through old photos after their deaths, I saw dozens of images of them dancing or dining or just gazing out at some scenery, in which their harmony and pleasure at being together is obvious. How could I have failed to see this when they were alive? Did I want to be fooled by the fighting? And what was this fighting really all about? A whole new inquiry opened up at this realization. 

5. Saying Yes to Prying and Exposing

Among the papers that passed to me after my parents’ deaths were letters my father had written to my mother during World War II, eight years into their marriage. Initially, I resisted reading them; it felt voyeuristic, like looking through a keyhole into my parents’ private life. Whatever I learned could never be unlearned. I broke into a sweat when I opened the first crinkly letter to hear the voice of my father in his prime, 13 years younger than I was at that moment. The letters revealed an extraordinary embarrassment on both my parents’ parts about acknowledging their love for one another (which my father admitted to seeing as giving my mother a “fearful power” to hurt him). Seeing the insecurity of my intimidating parents made me realize I had totally misread them. 

But could I write about this? Was it fair to show what my parents had spent their lives trying to hide? In my view, we write for the living, not the dead. And revealing people as more human just makes them more sympathetic. Only the full truth is worth writing––and reading. 

Heirlooms, letters, and old photos are precious relics. Use them as a ticket back to the time before you were born and to the emotion-packed moments between then and now. Seek out the details that make you catch your breath or your stomach clench. Therein lies the hidden gold. Be brave. What you have been avoiding may prove to be essential to your book––and to a deeper, more constructive understanding of your own history.

Elizabeth Marcus grew up in Manhattan, the only child of a dentist and a Macy’s dress buyer, the Zeus and Hera of Apartment 2B. After escaping to Boston, she ran a small architectural office for 20 years, when she wasn’t traveling to far-flung places with her psychiatrist husband and rambunctious children. Eventually, she decided to concentrate on writing, which allows her to pursue the many, quirky questions that fascinate her: Why are butterflies called ‘butterflies?’ Why can’t she recall the taste of wines? Why are first-love memories so potent? Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Boston Globe, on online sites like Cognoscenti, and in essay anthologies like Travelers’ Tales. “Don’t Say A Word!”: A Daughter’s Two Cents, in 90,571 words, is her first book. She posts essays related to the book at www.eLizWrites.com; she posts essays about everything else at www.archive.eLizWrites.com. She lives in Boston. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post #5onFri: Five Ways to Unlock Memories When Writing from Your Life appeared first on DIY MFA.

1. Be clear on why you’re writing it.

People write memoirs for many different reasons: therapy, vindication, revenge, or merely to tell a good story. Before beginning to write, ask yourself what you hope to accomplish. As I’ve said, I had no intention of writing this memoir, particularly because it delved into a painful chapter of my life, but others convinced me that the story was critical to my own development and that sharing it might help others. 

Now I personally believe that the publication of this book was part of a spiritual agreement between my ex-husband and myself, that it was something I was destined to do. The paranormal aspects of the story definitely make me vulnerable to skepticism—possibly even ridicule. 

That’s another thing about memoir: when it’s published, people will not only judge your book, but it will feel like they’re judging your life and behavior as well.

2. Real life can be as subjective as fiction.

When you write a memoir, your major source of information is yourself: your memory, your perspective, your version of events. Mary Karr, known as “the boss of memoir,” provides a helpful checklist, which includes the advice to “Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory.” This can often be achieved with a perspective of reflection from the future, when you might feel differently than you did in the moment, or when you see the error of your previous thinking. 

In The Ghost Marriage, I used phrases like “Was it ignorance or fear that prevented me from asking deeper questions, demanding more details?” and “If I’d been older, or wiser, or had children of my own, I might have pointed out…” to show that I, the writer, didn’t necessarily condone my own past behavior.

3. Just because you have a voice doesn’t mean it works on the page.

 Voice is critical to memoir. It’s such a personal genre, readers need to love your voice in order to keep reading. However, our spoken voice isn’t necessarily our written voice. I recently read a memoir by someone I’ve met. In real life, she’s funny and brazen and sarcastic. But on the page she was wordy and grammatically correct and, well, lawyerly (she’s a lawyer). She was so used to writing briefs, crossing every T and dotting every I, that she couldn’t relax on the page. 

There are so many memoirists whose voices I do love: Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed, Glennon Doyle, Mary Karr, to name a few. Their humor and personality are all the more admirable because I know how hard it is to convey that on the page.

4. Your characters are real people who will be affected.

They say to write a memoir as if no one will read it, so you can be as honest and outrageous as possible in your first draft. But the closer you get to publication, the more you need to think about the real people you might be implicating in your story. In my case, I was blessed in that my antagonist—my ex-husband—had died. I could say what I wanted about him. But my children, my step-daughters, and my friends were all still very much alive. For that reason, I changed everyone’s names and left out certain events that I thought would be just too painful for them to read about. The two names I didn’t change were my ex-husband’s and my married name (I’ve since returned to my maiden name). 

When I finally told my children about the book, when I was very close to publication, my son asked if I was still using the family surname. That was their legacy, he said, and an important final layer of privacy. I have to admit that it hadn’t even occurred to me. Fortunately, I was able to do a universal change at the last minute and goodwill was restored. 

Anne Lamott famously wrote, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” While I agree in principle with this sentiment, I also know that I don’t want to lose my family and closest friends over a book.

5. Your life isn’t necessarily as interesting as you think.

Memoir is not biography. It should focus on a period of your life during which something happens to fundamentally change you. That said, you might need to provide some backstory to put that period into context. 

My story didn’t really begin until my marriage began to fall apart, and I struggled to summarize the previous 20 years in just two chapters. Then, when I submitted my 134,000-word memoir manuscript, my publisher strongly suggested editing it to under 100,000 words—trimming 34,000 words meant cutting 25 percent of the entire book. This was not a task I was up to myself. 

After cutting only about 3,000 words, I threw myself at the mercy of a professional editor. Whole scenes and hundreds of pages of dialogue and description that I thought were essential to my narrative ended up on the editing room floor. 

Kirsten Mickelwait is a copywriter by day and a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction by night. Her memoir, The Ghost Marriage, has just been released by SheWrites Press. Kirsten has been passionate about reading and writing for as long as she can remember, but her love of literature was really ignited as an English major at UC Berkeley, where she discovered James Joyce and the expatriate writers of 1920s Paris. She has a few short stories in print (her story, “Parting with Nina,” won The Ledge’s 2004 Fiction Award) and an ambitious first novel, set in six historical periods, sits in some forgotten drawer. She’s an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and several other writers’ workshops. Kirsten lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently at work on a historical novel featuring several members of the Lost Generation. 

The post #5onFri: Five Things I Learned When I Wrote The Ghost Marriage appeared first on DIY MFA.

Family dynamics are difficult enough to grasp, let alone write about. But when properly explored, they make for powerful stories.

Here’s a few rules I follow when writing about my family:

1. Empathy, Always

My number one rule for writing about family dynamics is: always do it with empathy.

Human beings are seldom monsters. They do harm each other because of unresolved trauma, emotions they were never permitted to feel, and pressures that were too much too soon. When we fail to acknowledge this in our stories, we’re only telling them by half.

You don’t have to dive into the details of Grandpa’s PTSD and subsequent struggle with substance abuse to explain the nuances of your father’s self-absorption, but Grandpa’s inability to be emotionally present with him must be a part of your explanation of who he is as a human being.

You don’t have to reprint every malignance Grandma used to whittle mom’s soul down so that she always feels less than. But if you’re going to tell us that mom perceives everything said to her as some thinly veiled slight meant to rob her of confidence, you have to explain why.

Empathy is the practice of standing hand in hand with our characters—allowing them to be human and relatable—and no story about family dynamics is even decent without it.

2. Write Angry, Then Refine

Families aren’t designed to be fair. They can be infuriating, and they can leave you feeling bitter and bruised. When we deny we’re angry, we kiss our truth goodbye. 

I always write my rough drafts with as much anger as I can muster—even if I know it’s irrational—because I believe anger is respect for self. And without self, you just don’t have a story. When I refine that rough draft, and edit out the irrational bits, what’s left behind is just the right amount of vulnerability.

3. Avoid The Clinical

If you’re writing about your family, odds are you’ve already sought therapy to deal with them. You may have picked up diagnostic terms from your therapist. Don’t use them.

It’s all well and good to know your Aunt Grace is codependent with her son, your mother is slightly borderline, your Dad is a narcissist, and your brother has bipolar disorder—and it can be comforting to lean on a therapist’s knowledge when the holidays are nigh—but fact is: clinical diagnoses are boring, unemotional, and reductive. People are more complex than the collection of traits they embody when stressed.

Your Thanksgiving story packs more punch if you simply retell what you saw and felt. Your mother threw a tray of green bean casserole at your father over a perceived slight, and your father was more upset over the stain on his expensive shirt than the emotional impact the outburst had on his loved ones. Your Aunt Grace launched into a rant because everyone upset her nearly 40-year-old son who still lives her basement, and your brother laughed maniacally at it all because he was stoned on pills and had been awake for three days straight. As a result, you felt [insert emotion]. That’s good writing.

4. Dig Deep

What do you really want to say about your family? Don’t ask your prefrontal cortex. Ask your gut. That’s where the answer to that question really lies.

How did your gut feel when your mother threw the beans and huffed off? What went on in there when your dad stormed out the back door to go play with his toys like an infant?

So often we control the way we feel with our thoughts, rationalizing them into something more acceptable (and controllable) when the real story is roiling below. Nobody wants to read the acceptable story. They want the meat. Give it to them.

5. Follow Your Fear

Have you ever written about your family with nausea in your stomach, typing out sentences, deleting them out of fear and then typing them again? Have you ever thought, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly say that. You’re not supposed to say things like that about family.”

Good. Who gives a crap about what they’re supposed to say?

Family dysfunction feeds on our secrets. It is nurtured by our silence. It rolls, storm-like, through generation after generation—feasting on souls and leaving a wasteland in its wake—and the only thing that stops it dead in its tracks is truth.

If there is fear in the pit of your stomach when you write about your family, then follow it. Honor it. That fear means that what you’re writing about is honest and therefore relevant. And if you’re not interested in relevance—if you’re only interested in saying what has already been said—then don’t bother writing about your family.

We don’t need to read it.

Over a celebrated twenty-year design career, Erin Tyler has designed book covers for multiple New York Times bestselling authors, such as James Altucher, Ryan Holiday, David Goggins, and Tucker Max. She is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently the creative director at Scribe Media. Erin is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Bad One: A Memoir About Growing Up a Goat.

The post #5onFri: Five Tips for Writing About Family Dynamics appeared first on DIY MFA.

Negative critics jabber away in our heads, often with real concerns for the people we write about. I was disclosing a deeply held personal secret that I thought for years might ruin my father’s reputation. Memoirists have all this personal and emotional stuff to process and for most of us, that takes time. 

My debut memoir, Poetic License—about my relationship with my Pulitzer-Prize winning father, Richard Eberhart—will be published on August 4^th by She Writes Press. It will have taken nearly twenty years. Many times, I threatened to put it down for good. Instead, I’d browse a bookstore (back when we could) to find a writing guide to inspire me. Here are the five that got me through.

Bird by Bird by Anne LaMott 

Published in 1994, I picked it up in 2000 just as I was beginning to jot down snippets of memory about living in the literary swirl of my father. I’d grown up believing my family’s myths that we were special and that the accolades heaped on my parents made ours an idyllic family. When I began to express my own lived experience on the page, sometimes in opposition to that public view, my inner critics got loud.

That is until I read LaMott’s line, “a critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded.” With that, I told my inner critics to leave my battlefield alone. When they persisted, I turned to LaMott’s seminal line, “You own what happened to you… If people wanted you to describe them more warmly, they should have behaved better.” Bird by Bird became my first Bible.

Still Writing—The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro

Around the time I picked up Shapiro’s book in 2013, I was really stuck and at a loss for what to do next with my memoir. Twenty-plus rejections from good editors and publishers, each starting with “beautiful writing and a compelling story” and ending in short shrift with “but [fill in the blanks].” Maybe they were right. Their reasons chiseled away at my faith. 

I opened Shapiro’s book to a quote from David Salle, speaking of his writing process: “I have to get lost so I can invent some way out.” Ah, I thought, I’ve been lost before. I just have to invent my way out. Shapiro provided a path. “There is no magical place of arrival. There is only the solitary self facing the page. Stay there, if you can,” she continued. “Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away.” Running away had never been my MO in life. I would not let it take over now.

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr 

Published in 2015, Karr lays out the great difficulty of writing a memoir with her observation that “everybody I know who wades deep into memory’s waters drowns a little.” Where as writing fiction might leave you a little buoyant at the end of your writing day, Karr says memoir leaves you drained and exhausted. She laid out ten excellent reasons to quit before pulling me back from the edge. “To tap into your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful stage of mind where your head isn’t defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little.” If I ignored my bruised ego, maybe I could bloom enough to wrap it up. Still, I wasn’t sure I’d really nailed my voice.

Good Naked—Reflections on How to Write More, Write Better & Be Happier by Joni B. Cole

In 2017, this slim volume by the woman who founded our local writer’s center summed up everything I needed to keep going. Cole’s crisp, smart, and soothing essays were a balm. Her emphasis on providing positive feedback was refreshing after feeling beaten up by rejections. “Most writers,” Cole summarizes from long experience, “seem to do better when we are cheered on along the way, particularly because most of us are lousy at doing this for ourselves.” She was speaking directly to me. Her essays pushed me onward as if she had a kind hand in the middle of my back.

That same year I was invited to submit a twelve hundred-word essay capturing my full life story to be read in front of a live audience. The short deadline, the need to capture a full-length book in a brief essay, and the pressure of going public with my story, coalesced into what I could finally claim as my truest voice. I was elated after the reading and knew immediately that I’d need to re-write the whole book in that newly found voice. I pinned Cole’s statement, “I wish I knew what to do when writers fail to finish the worthy works they have started,” behind my laptop and kept it there until I was done.

Writing Hard Stories—Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma by Melanie Brooks

Also published in 2017, I didn’t find this wonderful book until I’d begun the final year of manuscript overhaul with my editor, in 2019. I had the main plot points, but some scenes were out of order and I’d not yet cemented the start or end of the book. Melanie’s conversations with memoirists while getting her MFA and considering her own possible memoir allowed me to sharpen my voice and cross the finish line. 

As if alongside Brooks, I sat with Andre Dubus III at a college office in New Hampshire; met with Kyoko Mori at her home in Washington, DC; listened to Brooks cell-phone call to Abigail Thomas from her car; and split a molten lava cake with Monica Wood in Shay’s Pub in Portland, Maine. Each memoirist invited me into their world as if they had endless time, as I reorganized scenes and found my beginning and end. When a beta reader said she saw herself in my book, I heard Wood encouraging me, “take that as a compliment.” After twenty years, I’d fashioned a coherent story and found my own triumphant voice.

These five books appeared just when I needed them. I could open any one of them, read a paragraph, and be inspired to master mine. Solo in my writing room, I felt the community of generous authors around me through two decades of family, career, the deaths of my parents, retirement, and writing my first book. May you find like inspiration as you complete your own worthy book.

Gretchen Eberhart Cherington is the author of Poetic License: A Memoir (She Writes Press).  In the vein of Small Fry by Lisa Brennan Jobs and Famous Father Girl by Jamie Bernstein, Poetic License explores the life of a Pulitzer prize-winning poet’s daughter: how she confronts her family’s myths and her beloved father’s betrayals while finding her voice and establishing her own legacy. It’s an extremely engaging account of growing up in an academic family that had a constant stream of famous poets and writers through their door, and the winding journey to understanding how her own father’s early childhood trauma plays out over generations.

Cherington grew up in a household that—thanks to her Pulitzer Prize-winning father, the poet Richard Eberhart—was populated by many of the most revered poets and writers of the twentieth century, from Robert Frost to James Dickey. She’s spent her adult life advising top executives in changing their companies and themselves. Her essays have been published in Crack The Spine, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and Yankee Magazine, among other journals and newspapers, and her essay “Maine Roustabout” was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. Cherington is a leader in her community and has served on twenty boards. Passionate about her family and friends, she most enjoys spending time with them at home or in wild places around the world. Learn more at https://www.gretchencherington.com.

The post #5onFri: Five Books To Propel Your Memoir Writing appeared first on DIY MFA.

Joe is a bestselling writer, novelist, and a dad. He leads The Write Practice community, an award-winning community of creative writers. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Talia and three kids and enjoys coffee and corpse reviver no. 2s.

In this episode Joe and I discuss:

• The inspiration behind Crowdsourcing Paris
• A small, but powerful trick to overcoming writer’s block 
• Finding awe in the ordinary
• Structuring a memoir
• Creating risks and stakes in any story
• Developing a writing practice

Plus, his  #1 tip for writers.

About Joe Bunting

J.H. BUNTING is a bestselling writer, novelist, and a dad. He leads The Write Practice community, an award-winning community of creative writers. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Talia and three kids and enjoys coffee and corpse reviver no. 2s. You can follow him on Instagram, and check out his websites Joebunting.com and TheWritePractice.com.

Crowdsourcing Paris

Joe Bunting thought Paris would be the perfect escape. But now he might not make it out alive.

When a cautious writer realizes he’s just $600 short of his dream trip to Paris, he chooses to raise the money by writing a book about the experience and crowdsourcing 12 adventures, crowdsourced from his readers, to accomplish in Paris.

But when the adventures lead him inside the illegal catacombs beneath Paris with only the smallest flashlight in the world, he honestly wonders if he’s going to die there, 60 feet beneath Paris, next to the bones of 6 million of Paris’ dead, all for a book.

Crowdsourcing Paris is the real life adventure of a cautious writer who decides to move his family to Paris for a few months. Witness a side of the City of Light you’ve never seen before as Bunting learns, at last, that the best stories always come from adventure.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

(Right-click to download.)

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The post Episode 305: Adventure, Awe and Writing Practice: The Art of the Crowd-Sourced Memoir – Interview with Joe Bunting appeared first on DIY MFA.