{"id":620,"date":"2011-06-12T13:17:29","date_gmt":"2011-06-12T17:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=620"},"modified":"2011-06-12T13:17:29","modified_gmt":"2011-06-12T17:17:29","slug":"writing-what-we-know-and-a-special-book-to-give-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/writing-what-we-know-and-a-special-book-to-give-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing what we know — and a special book to give away"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We were in the throes of change: selling a house, moving in with my parents, buying a house, fixing up a house, moving into that house, giving up on fixing up the house, deciding to tear the whole thing down instead, moving back in with my parents, building a house. In the midst of these prolonged real estate dramas, we suffered the strain of pulling up roots in a place that we loved and trying to sink roots down into another that we barely knew. I lost my job. My husband started a business. Meanwhile, we were also trying to parent two wildly different boys, one of whom thought we had ruined his life forever by leaving our \u201cperfect\u201d neighborhood, while the other yearned for a chance to shed his old reputation as the shyest kid in school and start fresh in a new place.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should write about this,\u201d friends would suggest, as they watched me flail and struggle and try to make some sense of it all.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo way,\u201d I\u2019d say. In fact, I was trying to research a book about the pressures of the college application process on today\u2019s over-scheduled, over-burdened teenagers. The problem was, the only teenagers I knew well enough to write about were the two I happened to live with — and I\u2019d already begun to suspect that neither of them would follow a straightforward, predictable path to higher education. When I tried to make broad statements about anything outside of my own experience, I felt like a fraud. I noticed that bits of my own everyday life kept creeping into the manuscript. Pretty soon, as my notes gathered dust, I found myself writing about what I was thinking about: how I wanted to live, what mattered, what made me cry, what I loved about being a mother of growing boys, what I already missed about the days that were over, what I was trying to cherish in the here and now.<\/p>\n

Frustrated, discouraged, fearing defeat, I sent a batch of pages off to my editor. \u201cI\u2019m not too excited about all the facts and figures and academic stuff,\u201d she wrote back, \u201cbut I love reading about your family.\u201d<\/p>\n

I threw away a hundred numbing, belabored pages and finally admitted to myself that, like it or not, I seemed to be writing a memoir.<\/p>\n

How I wish I\u2019d had Marion Roach Smith\u2019s brilliant book, The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life<\/a>, to tell me how to do it. And by \u201cit\u201d I mean both the writing and the living. For what makes Marion such a remarkable guide and teacher is the fact that she knows full well that the writing and the living are inextricably bound together, that the \u201cbig stuff\u201d scares us all, both in life and on the page, and that it always comes down to a choice, as she says, \u201cto either flee the room or shove the fear aside and fill the space with something better.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was barely an hour that passed as I slogged away on my book that I wasn\u2019t sorely tempted to flee the room. But the thing was, there was barely a day during those years that I didn\u2019t also wish to flee my life. Both the writing and the living felt so hard!<\/p>\n

Marion, in her wisdom, reminds us that just because it\u2019s hard, doesn\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t bother. In fact, as her own vividly told personal stories and examples make clear, only by staying put, only by hanging in there through the tough stuff, do we find out what we really need to know and what we really have to say. \u201cYou have to be present to win,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Could this disarming, compellingly readable little book possibly be a manual for how to live<\/em> your life, disguised as a manual telling you how to write about it? I\u2019m not sure, but I do know that you needn\u2019t be a writer to find useful instruction in these pages. For aren\u2019t we all tempted, every single day of our lives, to flee the room? And isn\u2019t it true that only by staying put and doing the work — whether it\u2019s feeling our feelings or speaking our truth or writing our story — do we begin to grow in faith and strength and wisdom?<\/p>\n

Marion Roach Smith not only shows us how to \u201creplace the fear with something better\u201d and get our stuff out of our heads and down onto the page, she also reminds us that our stories matter\u2014whether we\u2019re writing an anecdote for the school newsletter, a eulogy for a friend’s funeral, or a memoir to share with the world. In fact, our stories, all of them, matter enough to be worth crafting well. \u201cLearn to write with intent,\u201d she predicts, \u201cand you might learn something about your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t able to avail myself of Marion\u2019s expertise as I was trying to figure out what my last book was about, but she has already helped me ask the right questions as I embark on the next. And I am delighted to have become online friends with Marion through her sister Margaret<\/a>, whose memoir And I Shall Have Some Peace There<\/a> remains an all-time favorite. When anyone asks me for writerly advice these days, I simply say, \u201cGo buy The Memoir Project<\/a>, make a pot of tea, and then treat yourself to the most cogent 96-page lesson in writing what you know that you will ever read.\u201d So it is a great pleasure to be able to combine forces with Marion and Margaret to celebrate the publication of this essential book by giving away two copies here.<\/p>\n