Memoir Writing Class

Digression into the present -

So now I am attending a memoir writing class.  When I enter the classroom on the second floor of the Fine Arts building at the College of Marin, I see a lot of white and gray mostly female heads with peekaboo scalps. You can tell the men from the women because their heads are mostly bald. Also there aren’t nearly so many of them. 

“It's me and a bunch of old ladies,” I tell Sandra over lunch later that week. Sandra is a writer too, a poet I’ve known for forty years when we first took a class in Berkeley. Later we resumed our get-togethers sporadically. Now she has a book of poems coming out and she complains to me about the slowness of the publication process.  Me, I’m stuck in a memoir writing class with other “Emeritus” (read over 55) students and we don’t even get college credits for it.   

“I assume they’re mostly retired,” I say to Sandra, unless some of them are self-employed like I am. She asks about the teacher. “She gives us writing assignments; we’re supposed to bring in thirty copies so all the other students can have one. Then she calls on a few people to read theirs out loud.”

Why do we have to make thirty copies, I wonder, when we could just email our stories to thirty students?  Wouldn't that be easier and better for not destroying trees, wasting paper, and the time it takes to physically make thirty copies, jamming copier and all?

The teacher has a philosophy that reminds me of kindergarten. No hitting, play nicely. Stop rolling your eyes. Share.

So we are instructed to only give constructive criticism, there are three approved methods of feedback:

1.    What did you especially like about the story (the ones that are read aloud by the author, which average about one and a half pages each.  Easier to copy I suppose and definitely to listen to, besides more people get to share)

2.    What would you like to have learned more about?

3.    What was unclear to you?

The first story is about a woman's trip to Florence and what she ate. Also that she walked around alone at night and did not get molested.  

Anyway, she survived, had a great time and even touched the foot of David, the statue, not some young guy in the plaza, which seriously might have made for a more interesting story.

Slowly the students start to speak up. Some liked the way they could see the diners in the posh restaurant, smell the spicy Italian food going by as the waiters made their way among the cramped tables, hear the cutlery against the fine china. Even feel the foot of the statue David.

The teacher Sandra and I had back in the day also did not want to hurt the students’ feelings, but that was because many of them were from the Inner City, all were young, and most of the poetry, if not good, was dark. I don’t think even then we had to make thirty copies. It would be too depressing. Anyway, no one had been to Florence, just to Oakland.

I remember another class I took when I first moved to Cambridge in the sixties, at the Cambridge Adult School.

The teacher’s name was Ken and he was not into constructive criticism. He was into sneering and if you wrote a piece of adolescent drivel, he said so. “Well, so you think you're a writer Miss LeMieux?  Why then do you turn in a piece of adolescent drivel like this?”

Try again.

I'm not going to say this made me a better writer.  It mostly made me hate Ken and his perfectionism and obvious lack of literary taste.

But I did go back to my portable typewriter on my “desk” made out of a door and some old concrete blocks beside my mattress on the floor. I typed out draft after draft as I struggled to rise above myself.

I was determined to reach the heights of adult drivel, at the very least.

Now I am attaining old age drivel with thirty other would be memoir writers. I know memoirs are all the rage, but mostly they are being written by young people, with colorful recent pasts filled with drugs or other addictions of various sorts. Many of them write about abusive parents or binge marriages   And they are mostly famous already for daring TV series or walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls.

Me I'm just an ordinary person, still trying to eke out a living in my sixties and I’ve never been to Florence.