On the radio, part 2.

Posted on by
Reply

NotebookPencil

The podcast from my interview on the Aging But Dangerous show is available — once you’re on their podcast page, click on the link for the 5/18/2013 show. We taped the segment in two parts, so I knew there was a commercial break. What I didn’t know was that the commercial was one of their sponsors, a gynecologist, talking about women’s orgasms. Cool.

You can see writing ideas and prompts for telling stories from your life at Aging But Dangerous, but I’m posting it here in case you came to my website first. And there are additional writing prompts on my site here.

Does Writing Your Life Story — your personal history — sound overwhelming, and maybe… not much fun? Then start with one story from your life, and if you like recording that, do another, and another. Try one of these ideas:
-  write about someone or something you loved with all your heart at age 10 –  or 16, 38, 67.
-  tell about a time you moved from one place to another. What did you miss? What did you like/dislike about the new place?
-  write about a trip you took. Did it meet, or fail to meet your expectation?
-  is there something you wanted but never got? What filled that space?
- write about your jobs in the order you held them, and how you learned what you needed to know. 

Writing can be a scary business. When we do it well, we place a little bit of ourselves on the page, exposed and vulnerable for anyone who comes along to see, to poke at, to prod, to question. This is especially true when we are writing for family members. “That’s not the way it happened!” we fear they’ll say. Well, they may see things differently from where they stand. You can only tell the story you see from where you stand.

So, a word about telling the truth: there are facts and then there is the truth. It’s easy to find facts like birth and death dates, who lived where when, etc. But the truth of the lives lived around those facts – including your own life – is the story you’re here to tell.

Oh, and by Writing Your Life Story, I mean get the story down in whatever way most appeals to you – write, record, draw, photograph, paint, collage. Add captions if you need to, but first and foremost – have fun!

Need help? Please contact me at judybudreau AT gmail.com. The Association of Personal Historians site has a wealth of resources, as does the Minnesota Historical Society.

 

 

I’m on the radio!

Posted on by
Reply

Saturday morning, May 18, 9:30 AM on KLBB 1220 AM in Mpls/St.Paul on the Aging But Dangerous show, talking with hosts Jean Ketcham and C. Suzanne Bates about how to get started writing your life story. Yippee! Had a blast taping the show with them this week. Podcasts are archived in case you miss the show. Check out their web site and upcoming events —  and join me at one of their monthly Swarms.

 

Teaching Rotarians to write poetry.

Posted on by
2

 

JudyDickSueAnneatRotaryMy fan club got up very early this morning to hear me tell my story about my writing and personal history work to the Lake Minnetonka Rotary Club, even though they already know the story. Seated left to right, my friends Anne and Sue, and my wonderful partner, Dick. Bonus: Today’s NYTimes article on how digital technology is making it easier, affordable and possible for folks to preserve their life stories, memories, photos and mementos.

I joined our local Rotary about a year ago, and have been welcomed with open arms. Not being a churchgoer, I like the weekly fellowship and camaraderie, and the emphasis on service above self, both locally and internationally. They’re a great bunch of people. I’m learning a lot from them and having the time of my life.

I talked about my writing, and about my work with the Veteran’s History Project. And then we did a writing exercise — writing a love poem.

Want to try it at home? Simple:

1. Write the name of the person (or pet, or tree, or place) at the top of the page.

2. Freewrite for 2 minutes — forget everything you know about spelling, punctuation, grammar, and jot down your thoughts as fast as they come to you — every word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of this love in your life.

3. Write “I love you,”. The comma is important.

4. Edit. Cross out anything you don’t want there, rearrange words if you like, clean it up a little. Read it to yourself.

5. After the comma, write the word “because” — and fill in the reason you love this person. Done! If you want to be really impressive, copy it over (handwritten is best – I mean, come on — this is a LOVE poem) using nice clean paper, maybe add a drawing or certainly, your signature.

And then take a deep breath and give it to the person you wrote it for. Guarantee you will make their day.

Telling a story.

Posted on by
Reply

JudyatRotary

This morning, I told my story  to our local Rotary Club about my work as a writer and personal historian. Then I came home to find this article from the NYTimes in my inbox, quoting three colleagues at the Association of Personal Historians, Sarah White, Mary O’Brien Tyrrell and Stefani Twyford.

The article is a spot-on look at how digital technology makes it easy and affordable for people to preserve their memories, stories, photos, mementos. Rock on, personal history!

Do-It-Yourself Writing Prompts

Posted on by
1

I promised a group of my writing students a list of my favorite do-it-yourself memoir writing prompts. Here they are:

Writing A Life
If you don’t tell your stories, who will?

 

Some Favorite Writing Prompts

What do you most want to say? Which one story best illustrates that?

 If you’re writing about yourself, try this:

-  write about someone or something you loved with all your heart at age 10 –  or 16, 38, 67.

-  tell about a time you moved from one place to another. What did you miss? What did you like/dislike about the new place?

-  where were you when (Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination, 9-11) happened? What were you doing? When did you realize what the event meant?

-  write about a trip you took. Did it meet, or fail to meet your expectation?

-  is there something you wanted but never got? What filled that space?

 

If you’re writing about someone else, try this:

-  did the person emigrate from another country? Why? What did they miss about their old home? What did they like and dislike about their new home?

-  who left for, came home from or stayed home from a war? What did this mean to family members?

-  think of an object you associate with this person, and describe it in detail. What does it say about the person?

-  what do you wonder about this person’s life? What would you like to ask if you could?

 

To add details and depth to your stories:

 

Think of family sayings, regionalisms, etc. and how and when they were used.
Think about the place where your story happens: a room, town or region. What did you (or the person you’re writing about) absorb from that place? What didn’t you absorb?

Think about some of the things you or your subjects took for granted, but that readers might wonder about:

Food – cooking, eating, buying, growing, likes/dislikes, plates, pots, washing up

How did they get from one place to another in their daily lives?

How did they deal with the weather?

What would they have said about themselves?

How did they get news?

What objects were admired? What ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

Ideas to help you get to the end of your story:

 

Begin and end your story with the reason you’re writing it.

 

Write about your homes in the order you lived in them – home can be a house or a town. Or begin or end with your favorite.

 

Write about your children or your siblings in the order in which they were born. Each person is a chapter.

 

Write about your jobs in the order you held them. Or begin with your favorite.

 

Divide your life into decades and write about each one. This can work well as an outline or timeline, especially if you have some photos to work with. What happened in each of your decades? What does it mean to you?

 

Further resources: Many of these writing prompts are inspired by Bob Greene’s book, To Our Children’s Children, and from Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Non-fiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, and from Sara Mansfield Taber’s forthcoming book, Writer’s Field Notebook, and from class exercises at the Loft in Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota.

 

 

What I Know About Writing

 

Writing can be a scary business. When we do it well, we place a little bit of ourselves on the page, exposed and vulnerable for anyone who comes along to see, to poke at, to prod, to question. This is especially true when we are writing for family members. “That’s not the way it happened!” we fear they’ll say. Well, they may see things differently from where they stand. You can only tell the story you see from where you stand.

So, a word about telling the truth: there are facts and then there is the truth. It’s easy to find facts like birth and death dates, who lived where when, etc. But the truth of the lives lived around those facts – including your own life – is the story you’re here to tell. Transforming memory to story is a priceless gift to both reader and writer.

Need help? Please contact me at judybudreau AT gmail.com

There’s a toilet in my living room.

Posted on by
Reply

The portable commode was delivered this afternoon by our new best friends at Merwin Medical. Jeri gets tangled up in her oxygen cord at night, which makes it hard to get to the bathroom in a timely manner. Our other best friends at Methodist Hospice suggested the commode at her bedside for night use, with a shorter walk and all.

But Jeri was napping in her room when the commode arrived. So the delivery guy set it up in our living room, gave a demo of the two-part bucket system, and instructions for cleaning. And, etc. which I don’t need to detail here.

Half an hour later, my friend Anne stopped by with a tin of Christmas cookies (shortbread with raspberry jam and meringue). Anne came through the entry hall into the living room to see the Christmas decorations, stepping around the commode. We visited for a few minutes, and then she had to run. After she left, I realized she hadn’t said a word about the commode.

Oh. My. God. I now have the sort of life that my friends don’t even blink when they see a toilet in my living room.

Yikes.

Cheerleading, and Jesus, and Paul.

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been three months since Dick’s mom came to live with us, and the enormity of the responsibility has sunk in. Jeri’s wonderful hospice team is arranging a volunteer for an afternoon or two per week, and we’re hiring help for several days each week. Dick’s brother and sister and their spouses aren’t in a position to be of very much help (I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to call them my in-laws, because we aren’t actually Married in the Eyes of the Law. Or the Church.) I met the extended family only once in the year before Dick and I committed to sharing a home, and caring for their dying mother probably isn’t the ideal way for all of us to get to know each other.

Dick’s sister-in-law told him recently that she prays for us every day, asks Jesus to strengthen and encourage us. So we have that going for us. It’s good to have cheerleaders, I guess. But I haven’t seen Jesus hanging around when it’s time to fix meals, or help Jeri with her personal needs, or attend to her laundry and medications and questions. Dick and I are the only ones here, doing what needs to be done. In return, we get the gift of connection, available to any of us when we stick around for the tough stuff. If Jesus wants to cheer us on in that, good on Him.

So. Thinking of the relative merits of cheerleading made me remember my son Paul’s high school football days. Playing college football is a tradition in his dad’s family – the meme is that males who turn out to be somebody all suffered/enjoyed the rigors of college football. I know this wasn’t the primary reason that Paul went out for football as a high school freshman, but it was there in the background.

Football in Minnetonka is a cherished institution, with all of the benefits and perils of any other institution. Friday nights, everyone in town comes to cheer the home team. The stadium is full of middle schoolers roaming “the Hill” above the end zone, classes congregating in their sections (all standing on seats and risers, thereby doubling capacity), the marching band and their shining instruments and uniforms. Families come early for burgers. I served lots of those burgers and I loved every minute of it — seeing my kids and their friends, other parents, teachers, school board members. The coaching staff made a point to stop by to thank volunteers for the support.

Minnetonka has good cheerleading squads, athletes in their own right. Their work on the sidelines makes us all feel like we’re on the same page, at least for four quarters. But it was Paul and his teammates who did all the work, every day for four years. Practice at 6 AM, and again at 4 PM in the heat of August. On the fields for weeks that went from a humid 98F to below-zero snowstorms. Grueling weight training every week, all year, every year. Competing with players younger and older for coveted starting spots, and rarely getting them.

Paul and his friends are better human beings not because they had the privilege of wearing blue on that field, or the hoped-for glory of a few minutes of playing time while we all cheered from the overflowing stands. It was the work that did it — doing the work in the cold and the dark, the mud and sweat and blood and heat. Paul and his teammates made that choice. So do I.

The cheering, nice as it is, is beside the point.

What Heaven Might Look Like.

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve been talking about heaven at our house lately, ever since Dick’s mom and her hospice services joined our household. Jeri’s plan, once she’s past the pearly gates, is to sign up to be guardian angel to her great-granddaughter, Kendra. Kendra could use the help. She’s a bright and charming and energetic 7 year-old who likes Farkle, and fingernail polish and her yellow-Labrador puppy. But her home life is more chaotic than a great-grandmother, or anyone, would wish.

I think that’s a pretty good project, signing on to be someone’s guardian angel, and who am I to say her application won’t be approved? In fact, who am I to say I know what heaven is, or is not? Jeri clearly has trouble believing that heaven, and the way there, is accurately described by her Catholic faith. I have trouble believing God Himself, or whatever name an ultimate divinity goes by, is accurately described by the Protestant tradition I grew up with. In fact, I’m fairly certain that the conversation at the pearly gates goes something like this:

Newly Deceased: Well. Here I am, at Heaven’s gate.

Gate Keeper: Oh, geez, have you got this wrong. There is no heaven here. Your time on Earth? That was heaven.

ND: (looking around the misty clouds) Ummm… angels?

GK: There are no angels here. The people you mistreated on Earth? Those were the angels.

In The Lovely Bones, author Alice Sebold works with the idea that we each have a personal heaven. Heaven is whatever we want it to be, whatever most suits and comforts us. Of course, there’d be inherent conflict when one person’s idea of heaven contradicts another’s. Come to think of it, that’s the central conflict of being human isn’t it? The road to unhappiness is paved with trying to please everyone. And it’s the central conflict of all humanity — your tribe can’t have what it wants if it wipes out what my tribe wants.

So I think heaven, if it exists outside our time on Earth, must be sort of a Venn diagram of overlapping realities, pleasing to everyone in the overlap. And no one pays attention to the places that don’t overlap; they simply cease to exist.

I grew up believing I’d go to hell for thinking and talking about God, religion, heaven and hell the way I do now. But who am I to tell a dying woman that what she wants to imagine is wrong? I’m going to tell Jeri that heaven is anything she damn well wants it to be.

 

Weeds.

Posted on by
Reply

I’m in Madison this week, sequestered in the library at the Wisconsin Historical Society, making headway toward some writing deadlines. On one of my mid-day breaks, I walked up to Overture Center for the Arts to see Greg Conniff’s exhibit, 30 Photos. Beautiful stuff.

In his essay about his work, Conniff talks about why he photographs weeds, and the ordinary places weeds grow, seeping into controlled landscapes, rising at the edges of cultivation. “Weeds will inherit the earth,” he says, and he thinks that’s a good thing.

One of my favorite images in the show is a cornfield, row upon row undulating over a hilly field, a copse of ash trees in the far background, and in the foreground, dry cornstalks (you can hear them rustling) with a single Joe-Pye weed waving just above them. In this photo I feel, but do not see, a century or two of the Midwest weather that’s floated above this field, the changing light each season brings. I see the farmers who planted the crops, the farm children whose job it was to bring water jugs out to the field. I see the people who crossed this field when it was a hill on the prairie. And I see that the Joe-Pye weeds were nearby all the time, and stuck around long after Native American healers and early settlers used the plant to cure fevers. The weeds were, and are, the larger part of the ordinary in this ordinary landscape.

I’ve been thinking about the people I work with writing their life stories, and how they almost always start out thinking their story is too ordinary to be of any interest, to matter in the grander scheme of things. And how they’ve taught me to see, and come to see themselves, that being ordinary, living in the background, just being present in a particular place and time, matters very much indeed.