To write about my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of the rainbow.
– Maya Angelou
I am in week two of a memoir writing workshop. It is hard and frustrating. Frustrating in large part due to the tech platform used to run the course. But, the instruction is mostly good, even though sometimes I don’t like it. I don’t like it because it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it asks me to replace old ways with new ways. But discomfort is okay. Because most of the time, unless a bone or bleeding is involved, discomfort means you’re growing.
Here’s what I wrote to introduce myself:
I am Callie. I live in Seattle. Since I was in my early 20s, I have often been told, when recounting my life story, that I should write a book.
I feel that I have enough perspective now, at 54, to translate my story into something timeless and meaningful to others, not just myself. So I got serious about writing this year. Pandemics will do that, I guess. Make you serious.
I'm the youngest of five, born out of wedlock in Aspen, Colorado before it became a playground for the rich and famous. My father, a politician, ski bum and mountain beatnik, was friends with Hunter S. Thompson, written about in one of Hunter’s books. My mother's first marriage, 18 years before I was born, was to the heir of the Bemis Bag Company in St. Louis, Missouri. However, by the time I arrived, she had abandoned her upper middle class upbringing, married multiple times to men who abused or abandoned her (Lissa, Carrie and I have different fathers), eventually working her way into graduate studies at the University of Colorado, but dying of a malignant brain tumor before she graduated. She was only 45; I was only six.
My father denied I was his, so I was raised by the eldest of my siblings, my brother, and grew up bereaved and neglected in low-income housing and alpine tundra trailer parks. At 16, I was baptized into “The Message”, a right-wing cult, coerced into marriage at 18 to a man eight years older and nowhere near my intellectual match, became a mother at 19 and again at 22. At 26, after reluctantly moving to Washington state with my abusive first husband, I took my children and left him and the church, put myself through undergrad, married again at 36, got my MFA at the University of Washington in 2006, then built a successful career as a product designer in the tech sector.
The threads I am really interested in exploring through my memoir are the forces that shaped my mother's and father’s lives. How the Beatnik, feminist and civil rights movements of the 60s and prior shaped their lives and consequently, mine. I've discussed a lot with my older sisters recently and learned that after my mother had me, she wanted to go on birth control. We lived in Durango, Colorado at that time, and in order to do that, she had to go in front of a "morals board", e.g., a panel of White men who would make that decision for her: this was a mere generation ago. Our female freedoms are tenuous at best: hashtag her too.
I harbor a lot of anger toward the patriarchy based on my intergenerational trauma and feel called to explore it all through writing. For myself, my daughter, my granddaughter, and any other woman or girl who might find worth and strength in my stories. Oh, and for my mother. I'm doing this for my mother who, because of societal forces working so hard against her and so many other women, never reached her full potential.
Meanwhile, Melinda filed for divorce from Bill and the stories of White men behaving badly keep coming. They never stop. They never, ever, ever stop.
On a lighter note, I submitted a short story to the Raymond Carver contest like I said I would.
Anticipating.
Things That Nourished My Writing: May 4-May 20.
FOOD
Metropolitan Market’s The Cookie
Nigel Slater’s Poached Rhubarb with Caramel Sauce
LITERARY
Heartland by Sarah Smarsh
Roxane Gay on How to Write About Trauma interview by Monica Lewinsky
MUSIC
PLACES
When this damn pandemic is over, I will return to Napa Valley, one of my favorite places in the world.