Word of the Day August 28

To my delight, today’s word-of-the-day from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “veridical.”

veridical\vuh-RID-ih-kul\

What pleased me most is the sentence the dictionary used to showcase the word:

“All psychotherapies are based on the fact that memory is not veridical, that unconscious desires and fantasies exert their force on us all…” (Henry Kaminer, Weekly Standard, July 31, 2000)

Same goes for memoir writing, which is entirely dependent upon memory and perception — two unreliable powers. A writer’s voice and memory is filtered by emotion. We insert facts and omit others, corrupting the form. Memoir writing is how we make ourselves up — shaping raw experience, identifying cause and effect in events, connecting the dots to conquer experience.

Not only do individuals create their own stories: whole communities, whole countries revise and rewrite their histories so that citizens can live with the country’s identity and historical legacy. “History is what people write down afterward,” one author said recently, “what really happened is something else.”

If perception and memory are so faulty, why write memoir? Because the telling can illuminate something in one’s own truths, it can transform experience into meaning — because as Rabbi David Wolpe blurbed on my book, Motherland, “how we remember determines who we are.” What’s remembered becomes reality and identity.

We do not simply have an experience, William Maxwell wrote in So Long, See You Tomorrow, we are entrusted with it. “We must do something – make something with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.”

Memoir comforts us by bearing witness and creating meaning…even though memory is not veridical.

To listen to the interview, go to http://www.theauthorsshow.com/

Crumstadt, Germany

My mother’s cousin, Elisa Levi, recently sent this email after reading, Is It Night or Day?. When Elisa was a child, she and her family fled Crumstadt, Germany for Uruguay. My mother and Elisa have corresponded and visited each other since 1938, the year my mother left Germany.

Dear Edith:

I finished reading Fern’s book. It made me relive all the sorrows and fears I experienced in Germany in school and on the streets of Crumstadt the year before my departure. I also remember the first months in Montevideo when my mother read us the letters from your mother, which talked about your trip to the US and your relationship with Aunt Mildred. Even though I was unable to say it then, I felt for you and I suffered with you.

I think the book is profound and touching. I sense there is a deep feeling between you and Fern. I can imagine it. You certainly must have suffered a lot again.

Love,

Elisa

My new web site showcasing my school presentations has gone live at AIVS (Authors and Illustrators who Visit Schools). Please visit: http://www.authorsillustrators.com/schumer_chapman/schumer_chapman.htm

In a dream last night, I stumbled upon an interesting image of my work. Each book I write is a footstep, marking where I am at that moment in my life.

As American lawyer, orator, and memoirist Rufus Choate once said, “A book is the only immortality.” Books are my way of announcing, “I was here.”

SLOW LOVE by Dominique Browning

I suspect I came to this dream/thought because yesterday I was reading Dominique Browning’s new memoir, Slow Love, an account of how she rediscovered herself after losing her high-powered job as a New York magazine editor. In it she writes: “I begin keeping notes about how I am feeling, what I am doing. Writing has always been my way to absorb things; I often write out my troubles.”

Me, too. And through that process, I define who I am.

Right now, I am trying to decide where to place my foot next.

The Sunday New York Times Book Review reports that, according to surveys by the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry, 47 percent of 18- to 24- year-old w0men and 24 percent of same-aged men say most of the books they buy are classified as young adult. The percentage of female Y.A. fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years. Today nearly one in five 35 – 44-year-olds say they most frequently buy YA books for themselves.

Here is the link to the complete article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/review/Paul-t.html?_r=1&ref=books

French President Jacques Chirac

Fifteen years ago, in July, 1995, French President Jacques Chirac gave a speech finally acknowledging the French role in the July 16, 1942 “Velodrome d’Hiver roundup.” Here are his words:

July 16 and 17, 1942, Paris, France

“These black hours will stain our history forever and are an injury to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupant was supported by the French, by the French state. Fifty-three years ago, on 16 July 1942, 450 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders, obeyed the demands of the Nazis. That day, in the capital and the Paris region, nearly 10,000 Jewish men, women, and children were arrested at home, in the early hours of the morning, and assembled at police stations…France, home of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, land of welcome and asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Breaking its word, it delivered those it protected to their executioners.”