Guest post: Author Pam Petro delves into the motivations for memoir...
My occasional guest posts are especially for the writers among you. Here Pamela Petro, author, artist and educator, talks about why we write memoir - and why we read it. Her own just-published The Long Field is, by the way, a masterclass in the artform.
Annie asked me to think about memoir. Why do we write it? Why do we read it? One easy question, one hard one. Guess which is which?
I think we write about memoir to understand ourselves and the world around us. (See? This is the easy one.) That may sound corny, but it’s true. Most of the time I walk around with my brain in reptilian mode. Hot: back away. Cold: add clothes. Danger: run. Ice cream: more! Most days I don’t come near to digging down to the cause-and-effect, motivation level of life on behalf of myself, others, or the world at large. Only writing can do that for me.
Bear with me while I back up a moment to think about this beast called “writing.” I tell my students—I teach both undergrads and MFA postgrads in the States—that there is no such thing as “inspiration.”
“I really, really need an extension,” one of my students will moan. “I’m just so uninspired this month. I don’t know what to write.”
I always give the extension, but I also always give a little lecture. Which almost no one under 30 understands anymore, because it refers to a time before cars had computer brains. But I give it anyway, because I like it a lot.
Inspiration and effort
“You know this thing, inspiration,” I begin (cue student eye-roll), “well, it doesn’t exist.” And then I bring up my car analogy. “Writing, for me—and it’s like this almost everyday—is like trying to start a car with a nearly dead battery. You put the key in the ignition and the engine won’t turn over. You try 10 more times and then you start swearing and panicking. But then you conscript a few friends; you get behind the wheel, turn the key, put the car in neutral, and ask them to push. After maybe 10 feet or so, more often than not, the engine catches and the car starts up. And then you’re off!”
Get it? I’m sure you do. Only by moving does the car’s engine catch. Only by writing does “inspiration” catch fire. Only once you’re writing—writing anything at all, the purest tripe, even; and by “writing” I mean the verb itself, hands on keys, pen in fingers—do you have a hope of getting anywhere with your work. And that takes effort and courage and a firm belief that better words will come, and that those words will be pointed and sharp, and that they’ll dig away the reptilian muck of your mind, down, down, down to where the understanding lies
I mention this because I’ve found it to be especially true of writing memoir. In my new book, The Long Field -- A Memoir, Wales, and the Presence of Absence, I had only the vaguest clues scrawled into a notebook as to things that might be meaningful or valuable to my story. Just guesses, really. They only began to make sense once I actually got over my fear that I’d somehow start in the wrong place, or take a wrong turn, and then everything would go to Hell in a handbasket, and took the plunge and began writing. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have understood why I instinctively felt I needed to climb Mt Snowdon with Annie and her partner Caroline.
Climbing Snowdon
I sensed the climb might be important—or at least provide a picturesque backdrop—but it turned out, once I began tapping out words, to be far more meaningful. Before I started each chapter of the book I’d create a messy Word file intp which I’d toss events from my life, facts about Welsh history, historical figures, quotations, you name it, which seemed only vaguely to go together. Or maybe they didn’t even seem to go together at all. And then—painfully, engine sputtering—I’d try to connect the dots. By writing out the links between those dots in the Snowdon chapter, I came to understand something profoundly important about myself. After Annie and Caroline and I had returned to sea level, when we were back at our hotel, exhausted and quaffing champagne, I got an email from a friend who’d written, “You’ve climbed Snowdon! You must be well and truly Welsh now.”
Pam, flanked by Caroline and Annie, climbs Snowdon
I realized as I quoted her in my manuscript that I didn’t need or want to be Welsh. I needed to be something more than American, yes, but not entirely Welsh; I needed to be in between, in a creative place of my own making. A place described by the Welsh word hiraeth, which is the lens through which I’ve looked at Wales and myself throughout my book. Hiraeth is famously hard to translate. (It can mean, literally, “long field.”) It refers to a bone-deep longing for someone or something--a home, culture, language, a younger self--that you’ve lost or left behind or that was imaginary to begin with, hovering always in the future. It’s a name for the presence of absence.
So that’s why I write and especially why I write memoir: to learn about myself and the odd things I do. As to Annie’s other question—Why do people read memoir?—I’m stumped. Perhaps that’s one for you to answer!
Pam’s long-awaited memoir, The Long Field, is available now from bookshops and online. Order it here, right now!