Women's Legacy Project

Our Lives Change The World

Permission to Write: Memoir Prompts

 

Women, Water, and the World

A TO Z, A to Z of 2024, Autoethnography, Permission to write

What was the first thing you remember researching, writing, and/or presenting?

For me it was a topic in 7th grade science class, and it talked about over fishing in the North Atlantic. That was the same year I read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. So I know that my interest in ecology explicitly goes back at least 50 years. Probably before that because A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter was one of my favorite movies as a little girl. Later when I figured out that Stratton Porter was crucial for the development of field studies in ecology and animal behavior I became acutely aware of the influence a single person can have on others and indeed the whole world.

I will go into Gene Stratton Porter in more depth in another post. Today I am encouraging all of us to write about nature, water, what we understand about how land and water have interacted in and influenced our lives. Perhaps you might want to talk about your relationship with nature in your memoir.

At this point I am not sure about what we can do other than write about memories and current experience with water.

It will all have changed dramatically for our children and grandchildren.

I’m doing something a little bit different here today as I need to confess. I should have done more. I learned about the likelihood of the world cooling, heating, dramatically changing many decades ago along with all the people who took bio-anthropology classes with me at Purdue University many decades ago. Desertification. Changing rain patterns. Crop Failures. It wasn’t just Al Gore who learned about this things at whatever college he went to.

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

The top strata of the Atlantic Ocean are warmer, fresher waters that flow northward, churning the waters with the help of the deeper colder waters and more saline waters that flow southward. These flows of warm and cold water impact the temperatures of the lands surrounding them.

The Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation is only one of the major ocean currents in the world. Southern Ocean overturning circulation is the other major current. All the Earth’s waters make up a global thermohaline circulation. The Pacific is less salty as than the Atlantic as the Pacific get much more rain.

If one of these currents changes dramatically or stops there will be massive temperature changes with the cooling of Europe by as much as 15°F soon after the ocean changes. Storms will increase in magnitude and frequency. Bread baskets will see drought. Some say it could happen next year. Others say it will be in the 22nd Century. Is seems we have gone beyond stopping it.

Does your journal mention what social action you take part in? I believe this will be one of the topics your descendants will be interested in learning about. What did regular people do and how aware were we of what the corporate concerns were doing to our planet?

Perhaps there will not be so many mistakes next time, if indeed there is a societal reforming after climate changes, if they know what we did and where we failed.

The serious as well as the fun parts of our lives are needed in story if there is to be balance.

Journaling about War, Part 2 (Vietnam)

A TO Z, A to Z of 2024, Autoethnography, Permission to write

I have written about this many times before. I am drawing links today to all the pieces I’ve written in the last many years about my brother who was a Marine in Vietnam in 1968 during the TET Offensive. Most of my war “experience” was filtered through the eyes of an overly analytical 10 to 11 year old girl. Me.

So what does this have to do with memoir? Bunches.

It connects my online writing, that I nearly always share with others, but were really an online journal written for me. Now I am linking them together into what might be stand-alone topical mini-ebooks or might be chapters in a larger memoir or might be part of a read for pay platform.

But for today, the letter V, this post, is for Vietnam and within it I embed links to some of what I consider my “best” pieces . I’m not sure all my “best” pieces should be so heartbreaking for me to reread.

Piece One

This first linked-piece is existential. It was written on the day that I came to understand that my brother was dying. I am not sure why I have a Magrit bowler with apples on a post title mentioning Kundera. In any case this is all about my brother and me, and surreal imaginary photographs.

A Milan Kundera Day

Do you like how I linked the three imagined images in the above embedded post, in a way that is similar, but not identical way, to the way I am linking at to posts written 10, or so, years ago? I think the recursive elements make the linked-story stronger. Perhaps it is a technique you want to try.

Piece Two

Memorial day and Veteran’s day always confused me. Which was for the living and which was for the dead? And what about the liminal space in my head linking them?

Sister of a Soldier – Memorial Day and Vietnam

Piece Three

Politics and war. Some of us are Political by Nature. I was political in first grade.

Be Kind When People Say, "I'm So Sick of Politics" – Part 1

Piece Four

Then I learned what politics translates into.

The Personal Nature of Politics

The following link is the one I think of when I think of my brother Roger and memoir.

Piece Five

A moment in time and everything changes.

His Birthday and the Long Death of My Brother

Piece Six

Then he was gone, I started to adjust, and then his home was up for a tax sale.

Closure Is Not Comfort

Do these all work together, with a few more bits and pieces, as an ebook? Maybe they fall together as a chapters in a book. I am not sure, yet, but I know that these stories are parts of my story.

Grouping older writings together is fine. Try it. Rearrange them. Add Transitions. Dig, mine, and harvest old writing.

Journaling about War, Part 1 (Ukraine)

A TO Z, A to Z of 2024, Autoethnography, Permission to write

Memoir often breaches the topic of war. Sometimes the author has a very personal view or experience of war as they live in area that is at war, or were sent to fight in a war. Sometimes the world itself seems to be at war because a war anywhere in the world sends information into the air, land, and water of the Earth. The media bombards us with coverage of certain wars and not about others. Though I live a third of a world away, the war in Ukraine seems like it is happening very close to home. Some of that is media. Some of it is because, for some reason I remember a woman I worked with in the Financial Aid Office my first year at Purdue. She spoke of the Balkans, The Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the other states that had been pushed and pulled between Russian and European entities through the early 20th Century powers and then the Soviet Union. She had family that lived near beautiful beaches where her parents had played as children. Her family obvious still had strong connections to South-eastern Europe. I had never met anyone with such strong ties to countries that had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union. Kiev in my mind was much like Prague. They were both cities I would most likely never see.

I grew up with the Cold War, proxy wars in SE Asia, and a very real fear of a nuke starting WWIII. I loved history. In my mental maps of place and family, I can point out a person who volunteered and served in a war in every generation of my family back through the Civil War.

Bronze Age War

I will write about more of my personal connection to a war tomorrow. For now I want talk about why I feel women need to write about their views of what is happening in the world. For too long men, and in my county and most of Europe, white men have fought over land, boundaries, ownership, and resources. This is not anything new. Women were not writing memoir 3,000 years ago to give a different perspective on what caused ancient battles.

In the Tollense Valley in Pomerania (Poland / eastern Germany) is thought to be the site of one of the earliest and deadliest battles or massacres in the ancient world. Somewhere from 400 to 1400 people were killed, approximately 1300–1250 BCE, 3300 years ago, in some sort of major, violent event. There was a well designed and constructed bridge near the sight of the massive battle. This was around the same time as the battle of Troy, and when the Hittites were under siege from the Sea Peoples. The Mediterranean and what became Northen Europe apparently were not peaceful Bronze-age people as the old archeological stereotype depicts them to be. The people who live in this area today are not peaceful either. So old white men have been battling Euopre for thousands of years.

I wish we had journals of what the women of 3,000 years ago thought of the escalating violence and whether they saw other options besides slaughter.

The Ukraine

We do have diaries of Ukrainian girls from 2022. If everyone whose heart hurts for the Ukrainian people would write a bit about their understanding of the problems that lead to Putin’s attack on the Ukraine, and of the war perhaps these data points, if preserved, might help us understand how “regular” people’s reactions fed into support to disagreement with their government’s actions, and how different or earlier action might have swayed people and governments.

Holodomor and Poltava

But how far back do we try to discern causation and places where peace might have been possible. What about the Holodomor of 1932-33 when Stalin starved Ukrainians. No one should forget this. Perhaps we should turn off our media streams and write about what our parents told us about the wars and genocides of the early mid 20th century. Or should we go back to to Battle of Poltava in The Ukraine (with The included it means borderlands and makes it a region between other places with no autonomy) which is where Peter the Great and Charles the XII of Sweden fought for dominance in the early 1700s. Peter the Great won control over the region and pushed Sweden out of much of eastern Europe. Eventually the Swedish navy was crushed too.

I suppose this is what Putin refers to as The Ukraine being Russian. The Battle of Poltava in Russian Historical Memory paints a different picture in which the worsening of relations between Russia and the Ukraine brought Poltava back into the Russian people’s minds with governmental and media coverage taking advantage of the 300th anniversary of the battle.

Women and Nuanced Stories of War

We can tell stories of how we women pay attention to stories of war and conquest and how history can be rewritten to serve political positioning to move us toward war.

I am writing about this and an example of how people alive today can record their views of events in journals, memoirs, and family histories. That is one of the reasons I write about such things. If Putin steps foot into a NATO country all of Europe will erupt into battle. The NATO treaty demands all signatory countries come to the defense of any violated NATO borders. My take on current events in my future memoir that discusses this time period is firm in the support of how Putin has to be stopped from taking Ukraine so we (the U.S.) do not have to send troops to fight in Europe.

I have seen members of my family ruined by being sent to faraway lands to wage war. Every one of us needs to find family history and personal reasons to take up the pen to fight and politically pressure rational negotiations and agreements at all costs so as to save our sons and daughters. Perhaps then our memoirs can become less about reflections on war.

The Taste of Time Travel

A TO Z, A to Z of 2024, Autoethnography, Permission to write

Memory, of course, is a sort of time travel.

Every time I make potato salad I engage in time travel. Part of my self is a kid briefly elevated from Mom’s scullery maid to an assistant chef chopping onions and marinating them with apple cider vinegar and celery seed. Potatoes and eggs are chopped. I’m listening to Mom tell stories about her grandma who had specific instructions for peeling very thin curls of skin from potatoes. She gave equal time to recipes from Dad’s side of family, the ownership of the potato salad recipe was attributed to Dad’s mom who passed away two years before I was born. Every story from my home seemed to be about family history. The tang of biting into an onion releasing a bit of vinegar and the savory taste of celery transports me back to a time when a home and family, who are now all gone, made up my here and now. It is more than memory when textures and flavors flood my senses.

I close my eyes and I am back in the kitchen of the farm house in which I grew up. The kitchen table, aluminum legged and vivid yellow formica top has small cut glass bowl of homemade cranberry sauce on it, always. It was Dad’s favorite side dish and end of meal digestive aid. This flash of memory reminds me that Dad was left-handed and the sauce was just to the left of the table setting for Dad.

I remember so many little things about family and gatherings when I taste travel.

The future – visualizations and dreams are time travel too. Memoir is not just about the past. I am still creating the experiences about which I write, or will write. I firmly believe that visualization of different paths I might walk help me make decisions and know the right path when I find it the beginning of it.

Seeing my mother’s handwriting on a recipe card conjures the cinnamon scent of her snicker doodles. Recipe cards are the ignition switches of gustatory time travel. A friend’s handwriting and blueberry stains on a card transport me back to a time when we were setting up our first kitchens and discovering and creating what would become our trademark dishes. Every friend’s kitchen held a cookbook from an upstate New York restaurant that taught us about vegetable pies and killer cheesecake. Oh, the friends and food that surrounded our tables back them.

The Meaning of Synchronicity

A TO Z, A to Z of 2024, Permission to write

Synchronicity is about personal meaning. A coincidence is just that, two things happening at the same time, that are worth a shrug and a, “That’s weird” comment. Synchronicity evolves from a similar sort of coincidence but it is filled with meaning for the person who experiences it.

You might force a connection on how things fit together in your life . Or you might believe things are nearly always unrelated. But if you find meaning in stumbling over a coin minted in you mother’s birth year on her birthday and it elicits a smile or a shiver at the time, then have endowed the two things with a meaningful relationship.

Synchronicity happening between two people seems quite important for bonding. I did not search out the literature again but early childhood bonding with parents is thought to include this. Running into a person you haven’t seen in years and deciding to go for a coffee where you learn you still share a large number of hobbies and passions might be seen as fortune smiling on both of you. But if you believe it means something and the other person does not, the skew in attribution might be a delusion of reference if you believe it is a sign of something, while the other person does not.

Writing about times your have felt a an incident to be a guiding event can help you identify events that were especially meaningful to you when you compare that incident to quite similar times that were far less meaningful.

An example I experienced was when my youngest brother and I were standing outside my father’s hospital room just after he died. It was Christmas Day. Mom was still in the room. My brother turned to me and said, “Well, he finally did it. He ruined Christmas.” For me Dad’s passing on that say was not great timing, but I did not attribute great meaning to his passing on that particular day. To my brother is had great meaning. I never found exactly what he saw as meaningful, but it probably related to his belief that our father had ill-will toward the rest of the family enjoying gift-giving, and special foods, and traditions. I did not see it the same way. To me it was coincidence, to him it was synchronicity; purposeful and meaningful.

At that moment I realized that we had profoundly different views of Dad and that he attributed sinister motive where I just saw agnostic belief.

Incorporating such varying views in a memoir can capture deep differences between people that cannot be easily captured in other ways. A variance in perceived motive, an attributed meaning, can be illuminated if you can identify specific instances where people have attached meaning to a co-occurrence in distinctly different ways.

R is for Retrieving Memories with Objects.

A TO Z, A to Z of 2024, Permission to write

Sometime it can be fun to mix up your elicitation tools or prompts and try something fun. It is in that spirit that I am focusing on the types of rug I remember, who they belonged to, and what I remember about them.

This of course this could be any type of item that you remember encountering in almost all the significant houses and apartments you’ve entered at different times in your life. Lamps? Paintings? Bedding? Hats? The focus can be any common item that you tend to notice, and memorable ones you have encountered.

What do you think this says about you? Maybe there is an aesthetic you are drawn to. Maybe it is the engineering and the appreciation you have for the structure of the items. Are they nice things? Scary or unusual things? Out of all the ones you have encountered in life, which one or type is your favorite, which one disturbed you the most?

My Responses. Cue: Rugs

Woven Rag Rugs

These are my all time favorites. These are what my mother and grandmother used. Made from “scrap” or discarded cloth, the material is cut into strips, about an inch in diameter. The ends were folded over and sewn together, and the resultant long strip is wrapped into a ball, like a ball of twine. That is as far as I have seen the process done. At this point we would take the balls of fabric to a community group, church group, or individual with a loom to be woven.

There is something very comforting about having the sturdy blue denim of old blue jeans woven into a long entranceway rug that welcomes each footstep entering your home. The orange and brown work socks of my father were made into small rugs that were placed by bedsides to protect toes stepping from warm bed to cold floors.

Room Size Rugs vs. Wall-to-wall Carpeting

In the old farm houses my close and extended family lived in, the 8 x 12 or 10 by 12 area, machine-woven rug was the standard floor covering. These did not stand out as unusual to me. They were probably our family standard the had not quite given way from the early 1900s to the wall-to-wall carpet that became the norm in mid-20th century homes.

Canvas

Painted canvas always signaled avant guard, artistic vibes. It wasn’t common. In the more eclectic regions of my youthful travels I saw these in lofts and apartments. They have now become more common as permanent dyes and washable canvas are used for inexpensive floor coverings.

Hand Woven or Loomed or Hooked

The creme de la creme of carpet. I only saw these in museums and wealthy people’s homes until well into adulthood when I moved to the western U.S. and diversely populated urban areas where carpets from the middle east and Indian subcontinent were status items that many purchased and collected. Few people had artist signed persian carpets, but seeing one still makes my eyes pop with wonder as to the thousands of hours it took to make it and the known artistry of having a specific master weaver’s work shop.

And there is the beautiful craftsmanship found in American ceremonial and utility rugs and horse blankets made by tribal groups in the central plains and western U.S.

Hooked Rugs

Hooked rugs tend to have intricate designs, be smaller in dimensions, and be soft to the touch. I always think craftswoman, or man, when encounter these.

Crocheted Rugs

My mother crocheted rugs. The initial methodology was the same as as creating balls of fabric for woven rugs, but rather than being made on a loom, she would finish the rugs by crocheting an oval rug.

Material, Method, and Memory

Like most things you write about in memoir, your stories start with an idea: Aunt Ethel’s hysterically funny stories about her brothers and sister’s escapades decades ago. But what gets you to that idea? Stories from Aunt Ethel might be visually linked to the memory of sitting on the floor of your Grandmother’s living room. Tracing the design of a reddish-maroon leaf patterned rug, I can still see the sensible and sturdy, lace-up leather heels she wore, and the slightly baggy nylons that jiggled as she tapped her foot on the slightly worn carpet showing threads here and there.

It is only a few second memory of the carpet on Grandma’s floor but it connects you to mid-century design, clothing changes (baggy nylons?) and whether your aunt had thin or thick ankles. These are all things you can add to scenes and stories in your memoir that you wouldn’t have remembered without taking a few moments to thing about childhood memories of rugs. These bits are just things you can think about to bring back memories that surround the item. That carpet and shoe take you back to your life in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s that help you write from reality.

I guess I didn’t look people in the eye much, I looked at floors, and shoes. But these items told me a bunch about the finances, health, and style of my relatives; things no one ever told me but I could deduce from threadbare carpets, swollen ankles, and the jazzy design on a carpet.

Give the technique a try. Flatware or silverware. Window coverings. You might be surprised what memories these trigger.