Week 8 ~ Memory Lane: Are we what we remember?

This week we're going to be talking memories and how they shape us. I’ve been keeping journals since I was in my early twenties. So that’s at least 30 years of journaling. In my earliest journals what preoccupied my mind was events from my childhood. I think children are particularly alert to unfairness. Something deep inside us, even as adults, believes that things ought to be fair, and childhood at times can seem like one long, treat-deprived exercise in unfairness. But I’ve found that it’s only by writing through the childhood experiences in my life from the perspective of as adult that I’ve really come to not only accept and heal past events, but learned to parent myself to a better adulthood.

Reliving your childhood can be fraught with unexpected emotions, both good and bad, even if you believe you had a happy childhood. In fact, in all my conversations with people about their childhoods (and I ask a lot of people, mostly out of curiosity), almost no one thinks they had a “happy” childhood. The closest most people come is “happy-ish”. To be fair, I did meet someone who thought they had a happy childhood, but their earliest memory was age 12. 

So, when exploring the past you need to take it in small bites. Writing about one experience at a time is a good start. I like to start from one prompt. Think about what that prompt brings up for you, Be with it. Don’t judge it. Examine it from all sides. Look at it from your current position, but also see yourself as you were when this prompt affected you most. Protect that younger self, but also allow that younger you to have whatever feelings come up. You’re in a better place now. You’re wiser and stronger now.

Try to see the situation from the other people’s point of view. For example, my parents were very young and almost immediately after they married (aged 19 and 16) they moved away from their extended families ~ all the way across the country.  They had no support group, and very few resources. When I play out some of what happened in my childhood against that backdrop, I can see how overwhelmed they were by their circumstances and how they didn’t always make the best choices as parents. Seeing that allowed me to be more compassionate about my early life.

There are also times in my life when I’ve needed outside help. Ironically (given what I’ve written above) one of the most notable was when I moved to Vancouver from the rural center of BC where I grew up. I underestimated my own need for a support group and resources. I thought it would be easy to make friends and connect with new communities. It wasn’t. So I looked for some counseling ~ and found it, and things got better.

If during your exploration of your life’s past experiences, you start to feel overwhelmed or too emotional, I advise you to pull back and to ask for help from someone you trust. Either friends, or peer support, or mental health professionals. Your goal is to work through things, not to go back there and be “worked over” by them. Be compassionate with your present self. Give yourself what you need. For your convenience, Here's most of the stuff above, as a handout:

Lynda Barry's book: What It Is is one of the best books I've come across for thinking about how the events of childhood can stay with you long after you're "grown up". If her childhood experiences are not my own, they're similar enough that I felt some kinship with her. It's also where I learned it's possible to have your heart broken and healed at the same time. 

Lynda Barry's What It Is is about so much more than writing ... 

What It Is is so much more than an exploration of childhood memories, or writing, for that matter. Interspersed between glimpses of her early life (in graphic novel form) are collaged pages with deep, probing questions about how memory works and how images make us feel. The collages are playful, seemingly spontaneous and casual, made with pages from childhood books, stickers, and the kind of handouts your teachers gave you in Grade 4. But she's asking serious questions: Do memories have mass? What happens when we read a story? What is playing?

It may be because Lynda and I are quite close in age (I was surprised to find she's only 4 years older than me) that her collages seem so familiar and comforting, sliding into my subconscious like I made them myself. It may be that we both have an analytical mind ~ wanting to understand the Meaning of Life (oh dear!) that makes me love all those deep questions, and loving that someone else is also asking them. More about the book ... the first 136 pages are as I describe above, but what follows makes it even more amazing. The next 30-odd pages are all about her writing class: Writing the Unthinkable, including, step-by-step, the writing exercises she does in the class, followed by another section which includes instructions and writing prompts for you to copy and cut up. The book ends with 10 or so pages of her rough notes. In a world where there is some pressure to only "show the good stuff", it's refreshing to see her essentially playing on the page and sharing her process. If you can only get one of Lynda's books, What It Is is the one I recommend.

I was lucky enough to take an abbreviated version of Lynda's Writing the Unthinkable class when she was here for the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival a few years ago. She pretty much had us writing for the whole four hours. Or as she put it at the time: "I am going to work you like rented mules". Which she did. Being someone who really wanted to write - I loved the intensity. But there were plenty of people in the class who didn't think of themselves as writers who loved it too.

She has a way of cutting through what we expect she wants us to write and getting straight to the goods ~ the thing lurking in us that wants, and needs, to get out onto the page. I wrote stuff in her class I didn't know I had in me. And that was just four hours. But more importantly, I learned you can write about anything from your past in a new and useful way by going back there and seeing it again.

She has a specific exercise, which is included in What It Is, and also in her other excellent book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, which we did in the class. Before you start the exercise, she asks you to get out your pen and paper, and number down your page from 1 to 10. Now write a list of 10 cars that you associate with some memory in your childhood. When you've done that, choose one from the list that seems the most vivid to you, and now follow the instructions on these handouts:

BETTER YET! (I feel like shouting because I'm *so happy* this is possible!), have Lynda guide you through the exercise herself. Yep, you heard me right. She's so much better at it than I am.

So, here's what happened in class ... after we'd all written our "car stories", we shared them with each other. As people read, I realized some interesting things:

• Every story I heard brought up more car memories that I hadn't put on my list that would have made equally good stories to the one I'd written.
• I could have gone back and written a story about every car on my list and none of them would have been boring. 
• Just like my experience with Lynda, I found even if I hadn't had the exact same experience, I'd had something similar in my life that made me feel closer to the person who wrote it.
• It reminded me that we're all incredibly complex beings with histories no one would ever guess ~ and I really really wanted to hear more stories from each person.

In our class Wednesday night, we only worked with one word, the one in her book: CAR. Imagine if we'd chosen another word. For example, in the class I took with her, one of the seed words was: HAIR. Hair?! Seriously?! What can I write about hair? But you know what? I came up with a list of 10 things about hair. And I wrote a great story about one of them. Not "great" as in something a publisher would pay for, but great as in I *was* there, and reliving it, and retelling it. It let me see something that happened early in my life that has affected the relationship I had with my sister for years (i.e. she was a beautiful, blonde child, I was not). That experience and insight alone may have been worth the price of admission. From a "how fabulous is this technique?" perspective, at one point (when we're looking around us) I saw, actually SAW!, a particularly ugly lamp my mother used to own when I was four years old. I can't think of any other way this memory could have come back to me except through this exercise. If you're a writer, knowing how to get back these kinds of details (and the feelings that come with them) is useful. As a person wanting to understand my past, having the ability to "re-see" things from where I am now, to gain insight about them is amazing.

There's lots of Lynda on the web because she's generous with her sharing. She's taught an extended version of Writing the Unthinkable at the University of Wisconsin for a few years now, and  her book Syllabus is essentially the class textbook. She's currently leading the Image Lab at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery. She also posts wonderful and weird stuff for her students quite regularly on her tumblr blog if you want to know what she's up to. The contents can be a real mish-mosh: music videos, intriguing info she finds online, and (of course) homework and assignments for her students. Recently she also presented a short version of the class at NASA, how cool is that? 

One of my favourite articles on her pretty much describes the experience of taking her class, and is aptly titled: Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe in Yourself. I love the photo they use in the article, because this is what she did as we read our stories out loud. She'd told us before we started that her only words of critique would be: "Good! Good!" (and that's all she ever said), but she knelt by our desks, and listened like our stories were the most important stories in the world. Because they were. Because they are.