One of the most fun things I’ve done lately is teaching a memoir-writing class at the senior living center where I now live. It’s a hoot!
We’re blessed with an activities director who loves to keep the residents engaged, having fun, using their time wisely, and enjoying each others’ company. I suspect people like Wendy are few and far between, but she’s a gem. As my husband and I have met people here from all over the country, all over the world, really, and we’ve shared our experiences, I usually end those conversations with, “You should write about that! Your children would love to know that, or wouldn’t it be fun to write an anthology of these stories?” And the germ of an idea was born and now is becoming a “thing. here.
I’ve taught kids how to write for forty years; why not, I said to myself, share those experiences and the creativity with these folks? So that’s what I’m doing. I urge others to do the same, or even better, to volunteer at schools to create new writers?
I began with several caveats: be kind to yourself; perfection is just a ten-letter word; start with one experience you want your children or grandchildren to know about; write your obituary–no one knows you better than you!; write a letter to someone (living or dead) expressing what you admired about that person; describe the first house you remember; don’t be surprised to laugh out loud, or to shed a tear or two; embrace the five W’s: who, what, where, when, why; Get all five senses into your story: what you hear, see, smell, taste, feel– colors, shapes, temperature, weather, aromas or stinks, bigs and littles, shadows and lights; write about a family event or a simple conversation at the dinner table, a wedding or funeral, someone you miss, a childhood memory; etc.
Already I’ve read a pastor’s wife’s story of the ten or so “dirt poor” congregations she and her husband served–the story about the flooded basement that put the furnace out when she had just brought her newborn home from the hospital, and how the congregation housed her and the men cleaned up the mess, hauling buckets of mud to higher ground. Utterly priceless.
We all have stories to tell, to leave as legacies. i still delight in reading my grandmother’s diary and hearing the family genealogy stories my sister has discovered. These will be lost if they’re never written.
If this sparks even one of you readers to get to it and get writing, this blog has been purposeful. If I can get someone else to start a group, well, that is indeed perfection (more than a ten letter word.)
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