 Short Stories: October 10, 2012 Issue [#5297] |
  Short Stories
This week: Gone but Not Forgotten Edited by: Shannon  
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Welcome to the Short Stories Newsletter. I am Shannon and I'm your editor this week.
This week I'd like to talk about the importance of personal essays and memoirs--stories culled from our daily lives that bear witness to our unique place and time in history.
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"When a person dies, a library is burned." ~ Edmund White
My grandmother passed away several years ago. She was 89 years old, and these are just a few of the things she witnessed during her amazing lifetime: WWII; the discovery of King Tut's tomb; the debuts of Mickey Mouse, Elmer Fudd, and Bugs Bunny; the opening of the Empire State Building; the Korean War; the Vietnam War; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Nuremberg Trials; the Hindenburg disaster; the first edition of the Peanuts comic strip; the opening of the first McDonald's; the erection and fall of the Berlin Wall; the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr.; the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge; the erection and fall of the Twin Towers; Woodstock; women's suffrage and racial segregation; Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon; the Beatles; Elvis Presley; the Aids epidemic; Sally Ride; Love Canal; Chernobyl; Mount St. Helens; Hurricane Katrina; the 9.2-magnitude Alaskan earthquake of '64; the Lindbergh kidnapping; the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds; the Great Depression.
I think of these things, each one a monumental event of the 20th century, and I mourn the loss of all the first-hand accounts that died along with my grandmother.
I was born in Alaska in 1968 and remember seeing the destruction caused by the earthquake of '64. To this day if you drive from Anchorage to Soldotna, the town where I was born, you'll see a decrepit cabin on the right-hand side of the road that remains half-submerged in the surrounding tundra, its roof like an old swaybacked horse waiting to be put down.
Growing up in Alaska can be tough, but I loved it. My dad worked on the slope. He was a supervisor on the construction and operation of the pipeline and we rarely saw him: gone for nine weeks at a time and home for two, my mother, my three brothers, and I would pile into our station wagon and drive from Soldotna to Anchorage (approximately 150 miles) every nine weeks to pick him up at the airport only to turn around two weeks later to take him back. It was on one of these trips home from the airport that I first heard about Skylab. Mom was driving, my brothers were sleeping, and I leaned against the right rear passenger door listening to the radio in the dark, terrified. Skylab was falling. They expected it to reenter Earth's atmosphere in the next few hours. The men on the radio were joking about it and even made up silly songs about its descent ("There's enough Skylab for ev-ree-one!"), but when you're a child and grown-ups tell you that something from space is crashing to earth, suddenly you're certain it will hit your car and wipe out your family and life as you know it will cease to exist.
Why am I telling you this? Because although millions of people from all over the world knew about Skylab, no one experienced it quite like I did. My story is unique, and so is yours.
Keep a journal. Write down the events of your life. Have you ever smelled a perfume or heard a song that instantly transported you back in time? What did you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel once you got there? Be specific. Close your eyes and journey to that exact moment, that exact experience. Start free-writing about what you remember; it can be a sentence, a phrase, or a single word. Let's say you remember your mom wearing a red dress to your 8th grade graduation. Describe the red dress. It was long and fell to mid-calf. It was the color of cherry Kool-Aid and glimmered in the afternoon sun. I remember the zipper that ran up the back and how the dress was so tight it puckered about the waist. She wore black low-heeled pumps, and there was a run in the left stocking just behind her knee. The dress was low-cut and I could see her cleavage, which embarrassed me, but my friends thought she was beautiful.
You might be surprised by what springs forth.
Whether you incorporate your memories and experiences into a safe historical fiction story or bare your soul in a personal essay or memoir, the result will be better for the keen details. Nothing rings true quite like the truth.
Thank you for reading.
"Death is often the sad reminder of all the questions never asked, the tales lost for good." ~ Lynn Lauber
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I hope you enjoy this week's featured selections. Please remember to do the authors the courtesy of reviewing the ones you read. Thank you, and have a great week!
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I am always surprised by the diverse responses I receive after writing a newsletter. We are all individuals with differing ideas, thoughts, feelings, and opinions, which is what I was trying to convey in last month's newsletter. While one person may think nothing of a particular comment, someone else may take great offense, and each person is right because we are all entitled to our own unique perspectives. It is because of this that instead of responding to each item of feedback I received, I've decided to let the responses stand on their own. Thank you all for taking the time to read and comment. 
The following is in response to "Short Stories Newsletter (September 12, 2012)" :
Lunarmirror  says, "It was understandably an odd comment but I guess sometimes we don't understand what we are saying and at times we do not want to acknowledge we made a mistake."
drjim says, "Indeed so! Thanks for writing up this ever-imaginative newsletter, filled with the stories nearly all can relate to! Turns out that after having camped in no less than 40 States via my recollections, reading your work was loads of joy! Electric filet knives notwithstanding, they do not work as well if...er... one doesn't have an AC/DC outlet @ one's camping site. And also, dear Shannon, thanks for including my story in your 'lineup' as well! Turns out that I have been less attentive to WDC (but doing other projects) - and will remedy this ASAP! Keep writing!!"
Rustgold  says, "You do realize there were white slaves. The slave comment may be stupid, but not for the reason you suggest. Anyway, it's amazing how queer everybody in the world truly is; in so many different ways. Normal, what's that? You haven't even scratched the human surface if you believe anybody's normal."
platinumbwords says, "An insightful article. Thank you for sharing. Something to add: What happens to the face, i.e facial expression (eyes, mouth) when one is talking, and learning how to describe that in between comments in a dialogue scene, is just as important. Did the woman's brow furrow when she warned against the racist comment? Did someone less sensitive sneer? Did someone raise an eyebrow, or cringe? Learning to describe the body can make for more interesting reading, because it avoids having to directly state feelings. It lets the reader figure it out for him/herself (or interpret words and body language as the reader wants)."
Quick-Quill  says, "I agree with the power of words however media has detetmined wwhat we think is PC and we cant seemed to get past that. If no one commented on what he said you might have thought about it later but really felt as bad as you did? I think not."
D.L. Fields says, "I agree that we should think about what we say before we say it. And it's surprising that racists often use the phrase 'I'm not a racist, but...' The woman's anger was justified, he was an asshole. We sometimes have to write characters that in real life we wouldn't have anything to do with. Sometimes it's uncomfortable to write a character that doesn't share your world view; but just because they're a jerk doesn't mean you are. Learn to separate the two."
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