1-24-11

Dear Fern Schumer Chapman,

Olmsted Falls Middle School, Olmsted Falls, Ohio

When I started reading Is it Night or Day?, I really didn’t care about World War II. After about a quarter into the book, I felt as if I was living with Edith and the things that happened to her. I can relate to Edith in many ways.

Edith had many outstanding qualities that I liked. The one thing I admire most about her was she was very strong throughout the book. Also, she was independent. Your writing about how independent she was really helped me out with tough times with family and friends and relationships.

Edith had some experiences that many girls at my age (13) can relate to. For example, when Edith sees that boy she liked from the boat, Julius, she feels sad and angry and definitely confused. But every girl at some point feels that way. I felt the exact same way while I was reading this book.

Your book really talked to me. Everything that happened to Edith is so realistic and exciting – and sad. But reading Is it Night or Day? made me want to read more books! Especially realistic fiction. I can never stop reading your book or other realistic/ non-fiction books.

Your book inspired me to read more and to read about more important things that have happened in history. This is such a relateable book, which I think is better than all fiction. Since it’s relateable to more and more people, I will recommend it to others to read.

Cathy Drury

8^th grade Olmsted Falls Student

Cook Memorial Public Library District Community-Wide Read 2011

(from the library press release)

No matter its size or composition, every family has a story to tell.  Join the Cook Park and Aspen Drive libraries as we celebrate Family History Month with our third community-wide read for adults and children! United We Read: Everyone Has a Story - What’s Yours? will feature local author Fern Schumer Chapman’s books Motherland (for adults) and Is It Night or Day (for youth).

Fern tells her mother’s story in these two books and we invite all families to tell their stories by attending our community-wide read programs.  We want to hear your story!

Featured Events:

United We Read: Kick-Off Party with Jim May, Master Storyteller
Sunday, October 2   2pm  Aspen Library
Don’t miss the kick-off party for United We Read!  We’ll be handing out free copies of both titles, laughing at renowned storyteller Jim May’s fabulous stories, enjoying refreshments, and much more.   No registration required.

Introduction to Using Ancestry.com Library Edition
Tuesday, October  4    7pm  Aspen Drive Register
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced researcher, the Ancestry Library Edition database is one resource everyone needs to know and master.  Join genealogy librarians Arlene Lane and Sonia Schoenfield as they explore the ins and outs of this resource.

The Young Victoria: an evening of film and discussion
Thursday, October 13   6:30pm   Cook Park
Every family has a story — even a royal family! This is a coming of age film about the turbulent early years of Queen Victoria’s reign and the start of her loving marriage with Prince Albert.  Starring Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend  105 minutes /rated PG. No registration required.

Is It Night or Day Family Book Discussion
Tuesday, October 18   7pm  Aspen Drive  Register
Parents and children are invited to join us for a lively discussion of Is It Night or Day by Fern Schumer Chapman. We’ll share some of our own family stories, make something special to take home and enjoy refreshments.

Tea and Talk with Author Fern Schumer Chapman
Saturday, November 5   2pm-4pm  Aspen  Drive Register
Enjoy tea, cakes and conversation with Fern Schumer Chapman, author of the acclaimed Motherland and Is it Night or Day.  Listen to Fern tell her latest heartwarming story of how her mother Edith was reunited 72 years later with her long lost friend and traveling companion, Gerda. This is an incredible story of love, loss and recovery. Book clubs and families are encouraged to attend.

Your Life Is Your Story: writing your family history with Jim May
Tuesday, November 8   7pm  Aspen Drive
Writing your story is a wonderful gift for family, children, friends and loved ones.  Join nationally acclaimed storyteller Jim May and let him help you create original stories from family heritage and personal experience.  Families are encouraged to attend. No registration required.

http://discover.cooklib.org/content.php?pid=238026&sid=1972254

“Why,” students ask me, “do you spend so much time writing and telling your mother’s story?”

I tell my mother’s story for both personal and political reasons.

My personal reasons were captured perfectly in a recent New York Times review of a new book called, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. “Memory is intricately tied to identity; we are a product of our own experiences. What we perceive is shaped by what we have perceived before; what we learn is bootstrapped on past learning. Amnesia seems to many so horrifying because it robs us of our own autobiography, and thus, it seems, ourselves.”

For years, my mother coped with her losses by cutting off her story. In doing so, she inadvertently deprived me of an essential personal narrative to understand her and myself. It was her maternal impulse to insulate me from her own painful history. She believed she was protecting me; instead, I felt alienated from her. Now that she’s shared her story with me and I’ve recorded it, we both feel we have an autobiography.

Still, it’s difficult to balance the past and the present… but it’s critical. Sometimes, I feel the past has overtaken my present and I want to leave it behind me. I simply want to fully experience each moment without worry of my responsibility to tell this story. Yet, when I distance myself from the story and my own history, I feel I have shirked my responsibility to my mother and her family and I have lost part of myself.

Politically, there is an even greater mandate to tell the story. Of course, there is the old adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. So that drives me. More importantly, I recognize that it’s important to be one of the many voices that interpret the past.

George Orwell summed it up best: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

So I keep telling our story.

"Black Painting" by Stephanie Serpick (sserpick.com)

A local book club selected Motherland as this month’s featured work and invited me to participate in the group’s discussion today. Each reader found her own way of relating to the story.

One woman talked about how her mother was raised by adoptive parents who were alcoholics. (Her biological parents died when the girl was five.) “My mother didn’t really know how to be a mother and I was reminded of that challenge when I read your book.”

Another said that her son and daughter-in-law are considering a surrogate egg donor for fertility treatments, but the couple is concerned about the child’s confused identity. “Your book made me think about how each of us determines our own identity.”

A third book club member asked me whether I thought an experience she had constituted trauma. (Of course, that depends upon the individual and his or her support system.)

Another reader brought up a book she had just finished called Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire. It tells the story of a Cuban boy who was sent by his parents to America during the Cuban Revolution. “Your mother’s experiences reminded me of his story.”

I came away with the feeling I have when I go with a group of friends to an art museum and view an all-black painting. Each of us sees something different and what we see reflects who we are. Each viewer or reader brings his or her own experiences to the art.

Author William Maxwell

Just as words can replace memories, (see previous blog) pictures can replace and distort memories, too. William Maxwell put it vividly in his book, So Long, See You Tomorrow:

“I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track if there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meant a moment, a scene, a fact, that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.”

Writer Dani Shapiro

Writing brings form to experience. It provides an order to life and, in the process, writing alters memory.

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section, writer Dani Shapiro states that readers “often think that writing a memoir must be cathartic. But, if anything, I found that it embeds the story more deeply in the writer. The story becomes frozen, in a way, by crafting of it. Memory is mutable and the relationship between the writer and the story at the particular moment the story is written becomes the story.”

Writer Annie Dillard

Writer Annie Dillard has made a similar point: “After you’ve written, you can no longer remember anything but the writing. My memories — those elusive patches of color and feeling — are gone; they’ve been replaced by the work.”

Rabbi David Wolpe wrote a blurb for my book, Motherland, stating that “How we remember determines who we are.” I would add that what we write determines what we remember…and who we are.

Author Tim O'Brien

In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien writes about the challenge of writing about his traumatic experiences in Vietnam:

“I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words…and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening…The bad stuff never stops happening; it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”

Movie poster of "Get Low"

If I were teaching a writing class right now, I would require all my students to go see the new movie, Get Low, with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray and Lucas Black. Sure that’s an all-star cast, but that’s not the reason for my insistence.

For those who study narrative drive, this movie is masterful in its storytelling.

My writing guru, Sol Stein explains in his book, Stein on Writing, that readers (viewers) are like dogs on a trail; they have picked up a scent. It is the writer’s job to keep “the dogs” sniffing by dropping crumbs of information in the unfolding mystery.

Driving the Depression-era fable of Get Low is the question of why Duvall, who is known by the locals as eccentric and mean, became a hermit living alone in his isolated cabin in the Tennessee woods for forty years. Throughout the movie, we get glimpses of the early, defining experience that made him, but we have to wait for the last ten minutes of the film to learn the full story. (The director’s one misstep is the ending; he should have cut the last two minutes, which did not add power to the story.)

“Writers are troublemakers,” Stein writes. “A pyschotherapist tries to relieve stress, strain, and pressure. Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to give readers stress, strain and pressure. The fact is that readers who hate those things in life love them in fiction.”

And that is the ‘Get Low’ on storytelling.

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/