 are at 12.03. So hi. Welcome everyone to How to Write a Memoir from Idea to Publication, which is a conversation with Emily Freeman, Louise Nair, and Lindsay Crittenden. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And this event was produced in partnership with the San Francisco Writers' Conference and the Writers' Grotto, which are two local entities that I work with to provide learning experiences for the Bay Area literary community. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the public in California, a cultural event center, and a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. We are founded in 1854. Right now, due to the shelter in place, almost all of our activities are virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and with that, you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Before I introduce everyone, let me say that questions will be taken at the end of the talk, so please post them in the chat space and we will try to answer as many as time allows. Our speakers today include Emily Freeman, who will present her memoir, Failure to Appear, and two colleagues of hers that helped her along the way, Lindsay Crittenden and Louise Nair. I'm going to introduce Lindsay because she organized this discussion. Lindsay Crittenden has taught memoir for more than 10 years and is a regular instructor at the Mechanics Institute, the Writers Grotto, and UC Berkeley Extension. She is the author of an award-winning short fiction collection called The View from Below, and a memoir called The Water Will Hold You. She also has personal essays and short stories that have appeared in The New York Times, Spirituality and Health, Real Simple, and the Best American Spiritual Writing. So thank you, Lindsay, for joining and coordinating this. Thank you, Taryn, for the introduction, and I'm really pleased to be here with my colleagues and friends, Emily and Louise. I thought I'd start out by just giving a little bit of background before we each plunge into our particular piece of seeing Emily's book from idea to publication. Obviously it has to start with the idea and that's Emily's interest in telling her story as an activist in the peace and civil rights movements in the 60s. She was involved with others in burning draft records and fled a federal trial to spend 19 years underground after which she voluntarily turned herself in. It's a fascinating story and Louise and I each worked with Emily in different and similar ways. Louise and I both teach at the Writers Grotto here in San Francisco as well as other places and Emily met Louise, actually not not at a Writers Grotto class, but at a Book Passage class back in 2016, I believe, and they started working together on this idea Emily had to tell her story. How do I do it? How do I write her memoir? She worked very closely with Louise for more than three years, but for three years when Emily then signed up to take a class with me at the Grotto and that's when I met her and she was about a quarter of her way into the manuscript then and she took two classes with me at the Grotto and another class at the Grotto on when she was further along on writing a book proposal. So Emily is the author. We're all three authors. I've written, as Taryn said, a memoir and a collection of stories. Louise has written a memoir called Burned and as well as a book called Poise for Retirement and three other titles. So we're our discussion today will be about memoir writing, about, as we said, from idea of publication, sort of about the way we work together in the interplay of a teacher, a writer, and editor, those things. So what I'd like to do now is turn to sort of each one of us and tell our aspect, our piece of our involvement with the story. So the natural place to begin is with our author. So Emily, would you start us off? Sure. I think a good place to begin is why after so many years with extremely limited writing experience, I have business writing experience that I decided to write a full length book, a memoir, a piece of creative writing. And I think you have to start as to why. Why is really two reasons. One was I felt I had a history that I wanted to come clean with to talk about. That's number one. Number two, I felt I had something relevant to say to other people. And rather than kind of give you a long story about that, I thought I just briefly read you the dedication of this book, because I think it says what I felt about the relevancy of the book. The book is dedicated to all those who resist, persist, stick out, defy, think for themselves, show compassion to the most vulnerable, safeguard our threatened planet, abhor the forces of bigotry, hate, war, violence, and fear. Remember to speak truth to power and to hope. As hope is the basis of all struggle for change. Finally, let me be perfectly queer. My story isn't ancient history. Actually, it's more like same shit different day. So that summarizes what I felt about this book in terms of relevancy. Because it had a story of conscience. It had a story of steadfastness. It had a story of loss. It had a story of sexual truth for me coming out as a gay woman. And identity. Because when I was living underground, I had various names. So who really are you if you are living under various names? So I had a story. And particularly after the regime change when Trump came to power, I felt this was time to do something. I didn't know how to tell the story. I had no clue on how to do that. So I took a class on memoir writing and I liked Louise write off and I felt that she could help me. I think the difficulty in writing it from someone like myself was that writing it was one thing and sticking with that. But also the editing. The editing is a tough part of this whole process. Because you get enamored with what you have to say. And you have to be willing to look at this dispassionately and say, is this any good? Is this getting your point across? Because it is a piece of creative writing in my view. What helped me a lot in terms of guidance were three things. This is how my mind gets around a story. First off, I came up with a title. Failure to appear. To me that had epitomized what I had to say. And then someone else added a subtitle called Resistance, Identity and Loss. But that failure to appear triggered a lot of memories and story for me. The second was to do a structure. How do you structure this memoir? And Louise came up with that idea. Which was to structure it by my aliases. My original birth name, alias one, alias two. My name, by the way, is a construct of my original birth name and the third alias that I used. That broke the book down from a really difficult and penetral project to more bite-sized pieces. I could then say, okay, now I'm going to work on the birth name part. And then alias one section. So it allowed me to think a lot more clearly by getting the sections down. I could then start to think about dramatic chapters. I had to make an early decision because I had written and read other memoirs. I've never written one before, but anyway, I've read other memoirs. And a lot of them were written in what I call the reflective past tense. I decided not to do that. I decided to not let my older self get in the way of my story. What I wanted the reader to do was to live the story on the page with me. Which was difficult because then I had to go back to what I was when I was 24, when I was on trial in a federal trial in Chicago, while I was on the run in my 30s and my 40s. So this was difficult. But I felt it would tell a more dramatic story by having it be in present tense. The next decision was what were the chapters about? The chapters became dramatic scenes on this journey. And the incredible people that I met along the way. Some very heartbreaking moments, as well as some happy moments. So this book isn't just tragedy on every page. I also had to make a decision what type of book it was going to be. One kind of book would be an activist book. You know, a story of someone in the civil rights and the peace movement. Yes, that's part of my story. There's part of my story that's a lesbian story. My gay story. Yes, that's part of the story. But that's not the only story. But I finally decided to put all of this together into a very personal book. So people who pick up the book thinking they're going to get a history of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 60s, will get something out of it. Yes, there is that. But at the end, it was a deeply personal story. The hardest part of this, when you're not knowing where you're going, is to be determined to stick it through to the end. I felt that time was marching on in my case. And that I needed to have that persistence that I had in other parts of my life put that persistence to work now. Despite how hard it was going to be to figure out how to write this book and to accept criticism and to go back and revise and revise and revise, I was willing to do that. I was willing to stick it through to the end. And that's very important because you get times when you just want to throw this in the air and just say, I give up. And you get stuck. And you don't know what to say next. For me, what helped us go is to take long walks in nature, get away from the book for a little bit and go out. And then come back to it and set a time when I was going to write. Early on, I decided that I needed to engage mentors, people who could help me, first starting with Louise, who was, who will tell how she worked with me. But I felt it was important to have someone alongside me as I worked through the story. And as I got much further along, I engaged Lindsay to read the book itself. And finally, at the end, after many, a number of revisions, I engaged a professional editor in New York to read it again and give me an opinion. And finally, in my case, I had to consult with a literary attorney about personal injury issues, about names that I used in the book, et cetera, et cetera. So I got advice there. So I hope you, by the end of this, will get a good perspective from the three of us. But that's where I began. A story, not how. Figuring out these large issues very early in events. Having a dedication to stick it through and engaging some thoughtful, right people to whom I had to be open with and willing to take advice. So I'll turn this over to Louise. Great. Well, thanks, Emily. It's just a joy to have the book. It's done. You did it. And to the audience, you can do it too. You can, you know, if you really, really want to tell your story, you can do it. And in terms of working with Emily, it was a complete joy. And the things that she just said about herself, I'll cover, she was very determined and really, really wanted to get the story out. And she was also open to criticism, constructive criticism. And she wanted to learn. She really wanted to learn. I mean, she's an amazing pianist. And it took tons of years to learn how to do that. So it's a challenge. And there are obstacles in the way that you can do it. And one of the things I'd say to everybody that Emily touched on is to have a schedule to say, this is my writing time. This is the time I'm going to write. And because to be a writer, you have to do it. One of my students who is probably listening right now or hopefully, she just said that she was homeschooling her two kids. And now she has a little more time. And she's going to use that time to write. So the writing has to take priority if you are going to get to the finish line, not to say that things life doesn't intervene, or you might have to take time off or whatever. But it's always there, that goal and that desire. And Emily had that. Now I felt when I worked with Emily or when I worked with any student, that I was both a life coach and a craft maven. The life coach part is cheering somebody on, because it's not easy. You know, when Emily said sometimes, you know, you just want to throw the manuscript away or like, do I have to, you know, do it again or revise that sentence again. So part of my role was to say, keep at it. This story is amazing. It needs to get out. I also personally connected with parts of the story as somebody who grew up during that time. So that was helpful, you know, at a father who railed against McCarthy during the McCarthy era. And I went to a radical school in Greenwich Village. So, you know, there were there were connections there. But, you know, people can connect on all kinds of levels. When her belief in the book, or belief in her ability to learn everything she needed to do, waned, I was there to help shore her up. And I felt that the constant communication was wonderful. And by the way, you can work with a friend, a family member, somebody you meet at a workshop, you don't necessarily have to hire writers. There are many ways to do it. Also, Emily had natural gifts. I mean, she might say, oh, I didn't know how to write at all. She was a good narrator and she was great at dialogue. And I just wanted to give an example. When she and her priest friend escape, he says to her, from now on, you're Margaret Wilsbach, only when we're alone will we call each other by our real names. It's a short sentence, but so powerful and compelling. So she was great at that. We worked every week. In the beginning, we met, of course, it's COVID time, so you can't actually meet at a coffee shop. But that was great. And I would make comments, and she would right away revise. And sometimes she said, I get your comments, she'd feel overwhelmed. It's like, oh, my gosh. And then she take a walk, which she mentioned, she took a lot of walks and like would cogitate and think about what she had to do. By the way, revision, it has a word vision in it. It means re-seeing. So it's not just tedium. You're really recreating. You're making something better. So for everybody who writes, revision is part of it. The other thing is it takes courage to write, you know, to go deeper into your story. And I remember sometimes I would push Emily about writing about certain people, and she wouldn't always want to. So I would back off. So it's kind of also a dance. You know, you say something, you back off person, you know, then does a little of it or not a little of it. So definitely the relationship is really important for whoever you're working with. The also the craft part, which we're going to talk more about later, but I have some things here, sensory detail. We needed to see the room where her friend Steve had died of AIDS. She wrote, the room is so quiet, the only light coming from a floor lamp, it's halogen ball turned towards the wall. And then later I talked all the time about show, don't tell. And I pointed it out a lot. Instead of saying I'm afraid, she looked at the fluorescent light that was flickering. And that showed her fear. So she used images, adding context to your story. You know what it's about. But not everybody actually knows about Harvey Milk and Moscone in the shooting. So she had to add that. And in terms of scenes, instead of putting in tons of scenes, you want to expand the ones that are really important, and then take out the ones that aren't so important, you have to, they say, kill your darling. Sometimes you don't want to get rid of things, but you need to. We talked about arc and transformation, but in the end the important thing is your memoir that you're writing is about you. So everybody who worked with Emily said, put in more of yourself. That's what we want to hear about you. That's the person we're rooting for. So we worked for three years line by line, chapter by chapter. It was actually a total pleasure to work with Emily. And I felt I was living her story. And yet it was her story and her way of writing. And after she worked with me, she was able to get wonderful insights and help from Lindsay, who helped her hone her craft even further. So now I'll turn it over to Lindsay. Thanks, Louise. Well, yeah, as I said earlier, when Emily came to my class, she was already about a quarter of the way through and she'd been working with Louise already for three years. And what struck me right away when Emily showed up in my class at the grotto was as both of them have spoken to her, her commitment to getting this story out, her perseverance, her dedication to her work, and to making it as good as she could make it, and to just keep pushing that envelope. When I teach memoir writing to students, I like to talk about, I like to start with a quote from Cheryl Strayed, you know, who wrote The Memoir Wild. There's what happens to you. And then, oh, no, what is it? There's what happens in, there's what happened in your life. And then there's what your life's about. Or that's what, there's what happens in your memoir. And then there's what your memoir is about. So in other words, you need these two lines, right? You need what actually is happening on the page. What's, what's, as Emily said, you know, these different aliases, what's happening to the character during the story. In Cheryl Strayed's case, she's hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. But you also need the about, right? You also need the larger thematic underpinnings. What's this story about? It's not just about a woman living underground. Yes, it's about that. But it's about coming into her true self, both as a gay woman. And, but, and then ultimately, you know, after 19 years living in these different aliases, saying, no, I have to, I have to come at it as my real self, as who I am. So that, I think, is something to keep in mind. You know, and you may not know, as you begin writing a memoir, chances are, you know what happened, right? Because it's your life. You may not know exactly what piece of your life you're going to be focusing on. I think, for Emily, it was very clear what piece of her life she was focusing on. And the aboutness can take a while. Sometimes you have to do some writing. You have to generate some material before you can begin to see the aboutness. You may have a very clear idea. Oh, this is about intimacy, or this is about learning to trust. But you also in the writing process want to stay open to what the writing process may reveal. So, so when Emily came to my class, as I said, her story grabbed me. And what I remember working with her mostly on, and I remember this very clearly, it was from the first alias, Margaret, and Margaret's living with the man she fled Chicago with, and they're living in Birmingham, Alabama. And she's working as a waitress and she's walking home, walking to where they're living, in this safe house where they're living, from her waitress job. And she passes a music store. And she starts thinking about her piano teacher when she was a child. And I can't remember the original language in it. But what I said to her was I said, slow down here and let us feel the associations in the narrator's body. Give us the sensory imagery, the concrete imagery to give us more of the narrator on the page. Because here's a place where the real, the real person, living as an alias, right, living under an alias, working as a waitress, but the real self who'd learned piano is emerging in this moment. And let us really feel that. And Emily kind of looked at me, okay, and I think what Louise said about Emily sometimes not being resistant to doing it, but sort of, well, how do I go about doing this? And then, okay, but she would come back the next week and she would have done it. She would have pushed herself and she would have done it. And maybe there was still another push or two. But she really worked at that level of the craft of bringing the narrator onto the page and, you know, of making those, as Louise spoke of, those dramatic scenes really hold their own and come to life. The other thing that I wanted to mention is, you know, every writer has his or her their own style, right? And the job of a reader, of a good reader, of a teacher is not to change that style or not to impose our own aesthetic on the writer's style, but to really look at the writer's strengths and help them cultivate them. Louise mentioned dialogue and scene setting as two of Emily's natural strengths. And of just a very straightforward, honest, we know right away we trust this narrator, the voice was always very strong. There were these areas, like I said, of imagery, where, you know, bring us bring bring us more imagery. But that isn't so much about asking the writer to change his style as just letting us inhabit more of what the character's experiencing in the given moment. So when Emily finished the class that she took with me, which I think was a four or five week class, we, she approached me and she asked me if I would read the complete manuscript when she had it. And I said, sure, I'd be happy to. So maybe it was six months, maybe even a year, nine months later, I can't remember exactly. She sent me the complete manuscript. And it was in good shape. But one thing to Emily was really struggling with at that point. And one thing I think I helped her with, she can clarify this, although I think she told me, was the question of backstory. And backstory is a huge thing for a memoirist, right? Because you're telling your story during these years of your adulthood. But you've got to get in some of your past, you've got to set up the past. And Emily had these two very, very vivid scenes from her younger years, from her years before the incident in Chicago, for which she was arrested. One was as a girl in the backseat of her parents' car, just feeling, just feeling in her body that she did not belong with this family. And looking at another car and seeing in that other car, I think it was kind of a flashy car with fins or something, seeing some opportunity, some other way of being than the very narrow, restricted life she was feeling in her family of origin. So that moment, I said, we need that moment. Give us that moment. And the other moment was when as a student at Berkeley, she told her father that she'd fallen in love with a woman and wouldn't be coming, going home that summer. And he basically disowned her. And I said, just end your chapter with that, you know, if we know that your father's disowned you, you can just, you can just go from that to, you know, to Chicago and maybe give us a few sentences to fill in the difference. But so helping her kind of whittle down all that backstory. Yeah. So I was like, as Louise said, it was a real pleasure working with Emily. It was a real pleasure working with someone with that much commitment to her work and really willing to roll up her sleeves and go back in and do more work. More happened after the version I read. She had this editor, she spoke of paid editor, and then she had the legal read. And then I got news that her book had been accepted and was coming out. And it's just, it's so wonderful and compelling and really, really beautifully told. And I'm just glad to have played a part of it. So I thought what we'd do now is maybe the three of us have more of a conversation and focus more on the craft. So I'm going to ask Louise and Emily, and I don't know who wants to answer this first. You can, you can whoever speaks up first. What do you see as sort of the most important aspect of the role of an outside reader to a writer? We talked a little bit about it, but can you elaborate a little bit more? Is it that sort of life coach? Is it that craft maven? Is it just having someone who's waiting to see more pages? What is, what is, what is the role of an outside reader? Okay, well, I can start. You know, I think first of all that the cheering section is very important because as writers where we write, we're isolated, we need somebody that we know is there that's going to listen. And I, you know, for me, I mentioned, you know, this is the specifics, but the sense, I'll go back to the sensory detail, because if you don't write and pull your reader into, to a room, to a moment, to a physical feeling, the writing is flat. So I felt that a lot of what I was doing was saying, you know, show us, let us taste it, you know, use all the sensory details. And then, you know, other things that I talked about were objects. She has a plaid suitcase that she takes throughout the whole book. And the suitcase represents kind of being a nomad, you know, having no anchor, having no family and friends that she could, as you were talking about, Lindsay, reveal herself to. So things like that, you know, kind of create a structure, not just a structure, but you're there in the book. And there are many, you know, other aspects too, like starting right in the action. You know, that's something we started, we talked about a lot with the chapters. And, you know, Emily has, I just, you know, I was looking at the book again, and just amazed. And she talks about being in jail. And this is how the chapter starts. Has it been minutes or hours since we classed each other's waste, singing around the fire? So that's a beginning of the chapter after the burning. So we worked a lot on that and suspense, but I'll let Emily talk a little bit now and fill in what she thought. Well, you know, from my perspective, it was, I needed to have someone who could see a lot further than I could at the time, who could be honest with me about what I put on the page and what I left out, and could stick with me through the project. Sometimes you get someone maybe to help you who wants them to, you to become them, you know, and she didn't, Louise didn't do that. I have a very lean writing style. I have a certain voice. I wanted that voice on the page. I had to figure out what that voice was. But that voice was there. But I took her advice, but I put it in my own way. I didn't ask her to write it for me. I wanted to have an idea of where I'd gone off the rails, like there was too much backstory. There's not enough me on the page. The chapter needs to have a more suspenseful end to link the reader to the next chapter. But she never got in there and said, here it is. She left it for me to figure that out in the way I could process that. And I think that's important in whoever you work with. But you, some of these big things were said over and over to me. And finally I got it in my, you know, thick head that I needed to go deeper, to use short images to express how I feel, what's going on inside. That suitcase image was a good one because I kind of, that was sort of the, you know, if you look at that suitcase in the corner was the price of my conscience. But, and so it represented both tremendous loss and conscience at the same time. But I had to get away from certain pat phrases as well, which are easy ways around, you know, deeper writing. So I think for me, the process of having a sensitive mentor made a whole lot of difference. But in the end, you're going to have to write it yourself. You're going to have to do it yourself. And you're going to have to believe in yourself, which many, many, many, many times you wonder is this worth it? You know, at the, I knew in the beginning, there was relevancy here, and there was a hidden life I needed to speak about. So these were compelling things for me to be willing to do it. And each of you has a compelling reason to write your memoir. And kind of going back to that original reason when you get stuck is a good thing. Yeah. And I just want to jump in and say, I think one thing that it's also in this sort of seems basic and kind of almost like it goes without saying, but I think it bears, bears, bears saying, and that is, you know, our story is our story. We are the person who lived the events on the page. The narrator is the author. The narrator is the character. And you're sort of have these three persona. So as the writer, you're making the writerly decisions, right? But your narrator is almost a different, I don't want to say a different entity, but a different persona from you, the writer who's making the decisions. But you're the same, you know, it's your life you're writing about. So I think to Emily's point earlier about choosing to write in the present tense, you know, that becomes especially acute because she's writing it, she is writing it from the future. She's writing it where she knows how the story ended. She does have narrative distance, but she's telling it in the present. So we're living it with her. And I think because because in a memoir, we are telling our own story, we know it so well that an outside reader can be enormously helpful in pointing out those passages that it didn't even occur to us that we needed to explain something or that we needed to clarify something or that we needed, you know, because we know it. And that's where an outside reader can can really help as well, I think. I just want to say one more thing about mentors. I look for someone with experience who's written, obviously, memoirs. And you know, I read Bernd Louise's memoir, you know, so I wanted someone who was good at this craft. But ultimately, it was kind of instinct. You know, I felt I could work with these people. I felt I was comfortable with them. You know, you can find someone who's an expert at doing something, but your personalities and your, they just clash or your style. But I felt comfortable with Lindsay and with Louise and the editor that I engaged in New York. And I think that's an important thing is to have that trust with each other while you're going through this process. Yeah, no, and I would say, and by the way, the editor in New York is Anne Horowitz. We haven't mentioned her name. And she's really wonderful, really, really wonderful person too. Definitely, it's a relationship. And like, you know, and, and you need to nurture the relationship, you know, as the, as the quote, teacher, I mean, I was, you know, giving Emily my skills and making sure that, you know, she did certain things and cheering her on. But I was also learning from Emily, you know, I was in the middle of her story. And I think when Lindsay talked again about, you know, the person who's writing, that is, you know, his or her story and style and everything and a good editor will step away. It is the work that's important. And I, you know, one thing that I just admire so much about Emily was she was focused on the work and getting the best help she could. And she was open to criticism. And I think that's a major thing. You know, even if she didn't like it, or even if she didn't take everything that somebody said, and that's fine. She was open to listening. She was a learner. She wanted to learn. She wanted to get better. And she was such a quick study and she'd say something like, well, don't use tag lines too many. He said, she said in dialogue, and then she just do it. You know, it was like, whoa, this is quite amazing. So it's not as if, you know, I mean, all of you who want to write and finish your memoirs, you can do it. But finding the time being open to criticism and focusing. And we haven't actually talked about the publication part. So I'm wondering if this is a good time, you guys think that well, yeah, I just wanted to mention one more, one more thing before we move on to that. And Emily alluded to this earlier. And we talked about this a bit sort of offline, but, you know, this idea of having these two stories on the one hand, it's an activist story on the other hand, it's a story of a woman coming to her own as a gay person. And in my mind as a reader, that was one of the enormous strengths of the book because of these metaphoric and literal layers of failing to appear, of all that identity means and all that it would mean to live under an alias and and and and then coming into who you really are and all of that. So that aboutness I was talking about before. But but it is true that when you go to put your book out in the world, and Emily can speak more to this personally, maybe for the in the publication piece, you know, agents publishers are going to want to know where to shelve it on the shelves. Where does it fit? Is this an activist story? Or is this a gay story? And you know, in my mind, one of the strengths was that it worked as both. So I just wanted to mention that. So so yeah, so let's talk about publication. Emily, you had a draft, you had various drafts, you had many drafts after after you had a draft that you felt and others had confirmed was ready to sort of go out into the world. How did you how did you go about it? How did you how did you pursue publication? Yeah, I had to get to a draft that after all of this that I believed in that was the best possible draft I felt I had. I had to feel that myself. You know, people can tell you stuff, but you've got to feel like it's now ready to send to the world. In my case, it was very important to have a literary attorney because there were pieces of this book that has to do with, you know, burning draft files and doing stuff like that, you know, you know, an underground life. So I had to really sort through with a literary attorney who was living who wasn't living whose names are the names they originally had whose names weren't. So I sorted that out got that got that advice. Basically, I'm publishing, you know, I'm just a researcher. I mean, I researched things. I found Annie Horowitz by researching her. I looked around and also because I'm Jewish, her last name Horowitz in New York, I thought we probably could bond together, you know, probably would understand each other pretty well. But I researched and I in a literally there are three ways to go. There's an agent, there's a going directly to a publisher and they're self publishing. I had to make the determination in this because this is a hard process as well with lots of discouragement that no matter which way it was going to go, I was going to get the book out that that that has to happen in my mind that I said, Okay, if it's this way, it's that way, that whatever way it's going to be, this book is going to get out and do a lot of research. In case of the agents, I had a difficult, you know, I had no illusions about agents. You know, I don't know what Lindsay and Louise will say about it, but I think of them as like real estate agents. They only have their time and they want to invest it in something that's going to make the money. You know, here I am a relatively unknown person, you know, kind of unknown person, you know, I'm not a celebrity in their eyes telling a story with with with difficult content in it, you know, lesbian, activist, burning draft files, all of that, but a very deeply personal book. So I felt that the process of getting an agent was going to be tough, but I researched and I came up with a pitch letter. I had had Annie Horowitz read it and wrote a book proposal after taking class and and got on that. But the agent thing never worked out. And and I wasn't surprised in the end that it didn't end. Understanding as I understand very clearly that they want to bet on something that they think will would be a sure winner for them. But I researched the variety of press that were likely to be interested in the themes in my book. You know, the civil rights, the peace movement, the activist side of myself, progressive books, university presses, all of those. I looked at small presses. I also looked at gay gay press as well. So I did a lot of research. I asked people if they could give me recommendations and he gave me some names and places. And I needed patience in a any tough skin. In my case, the publisher who decided to publish my book, had a reviewer committee that read the book. And they said, publish this book. But I would say to you that it helps mentally go through this process, because it's very discouraging along the way to say to yourself, if you believe in the book, you believe that's something to say to others, be willing to consider all three routes of ultimately getting it done. Good. So I'm wondering, there's a bunch of questions coming in. Taryn, do you want to do you want to field some of the questions at us? Yes, I do, because we had some that came in at the very beginning that we should probably take a look at. Don has a question. How much fiction can be actually incorporated into a memoir before it's really no longer nonfiction? I can speak to that a little bit, because when I wrote Burned, in some ways it's written like a novel, and people would say, well, how do you remember that? And the reality is that it has to stay true to the happenings of the story. You don't want to be like the author Frye, a million little pieces, who said he was in prison and he wasn't in prison. But on the other hand, when my father, after being burned and gone for nine months, came to pick up my sister and me at the farm where we were living, I said we were playing Monopoly, and my sister had just a cheat gotten park place. I don't remember if that was exactly happening, but we did play Monopoly, and we did do that. So you can, you know, there's a thin line between what you might call embellishment and staying true to the story. You have to create all the dialogue because you're not running around with a tape recorder all the time. So I would say, yes, you can write, use tons of the elements of fiction, but you have to stay true to what actually happened. I would totally agree with that. Another piece of fictionalizing can sometimes be conflating in writing a memoir. You may have, I don't know, five or six scenes in real life that reveal something about a relationship. And in real life, it happened, you know, five or six times. For the sake of your memoir, maybe not five or six, let's say two or three. In memoir, you can conflate them into one for dramatic, you know, if it's a similar enough scene, if it's the same upshot, we don't want scenes that are repeating themselves. So you can conflate things. Yeah. Along those same lines, Mindala asks Lindsey regarding your point that the narrator of a memoir is a different persona or can be a different persona than the author. Can you elaborate a little bit about how this is true and how what the difference is when it, how it plays out in your writing? Well, I guess what I mean by that is, is that you as the writer are the one making the decisions. And you have the ultimate authority. You're writing the book. The narrator is a construct, if you will, to tell the story. So you as the writer, for example, Emily made the decision to tell her story in present tense. So as the writer, she made a decision that her narrator, the I voice in the story was going to be very close to the events, was going to be living the events as they happened. That narrator is maybe 19 at the beginning of the book, 20. You know, and the author is, I don't know, older than that. So it's not that you're, yes, you're the same person, but you're, you're where you're, as the writer, you're creating the narrator as a voice to tell the story. So you're making decisions about, about tone, about narrative distance, you know, how close is the narrator to the events? You know, some, as Emily mentioned earlier, some more traditional quote unquote memoirs, you know, take the long view. I remember when and in the years since that I've reflected many times over that day. And I've come to realize, you know, that's a very different narrative voice than being immediately in the action. But the author is the same regardless. Yeah, I just wanted to add just to what Lindsey just said. It's often called the, the musing voice, you know, what Lindsey just said, you know, it's taken me 30 years to understand my mother or my father, and that can come in to play. And so you know that there's perspective because you're writing as an older person about, you know, the, the musing or reflective voice, which people use a lot in memoir. In my case, you know, I rejected that sort of idea of using the past tense because I wanted that youthful person to step forward. I wanted the person I was at the time to step forward. And I wanted the scenes to be, to be suspenseful, where the reader will say, well, what happened next? What happened next? What happened next? And I found by doing that, I got out of my way. You know, I felt that I tried it in past tense and it just, I felt like I was over explaining and in the story bogged down. I mean, some people will find past tense to be fantastic or even blend them. But I, I, it just totally didn't work for me in the case of my story. And each story is, is different. I had a question about a literary attorney. I just want to make a point. It wasn't just the names that I had to consider, but their identities. If someone had to be disguised, then their identity needed more than just a name change, but, but more changes than that, if there was any possible issue. You mean you had to really disguise so the person couldn't just say, oh, well, that's obviously, yes, blank. I started the memoir class started, I think in 2016, I think from start to finish, I'm publishing it took three and a half years, three and a half years total from, from start to end. I wanted to jump in and just tag on something Emily said about past and present, because I saw a question in the chat about, about moving between them. And yes, you can move between them and many memoir writers will choose present tense for certain moments. There's an amazing essay, short memoir, an essay called the fourth state of matter by Joanne Beard. And in that, she, she chooses to tell a certain piece of it in present tense. And if you go read it, you'll understand why there's also a wonderful craft book that I want to recommend that Louise and I both use in our teaching. And it's called writing the memoir by Judith Barrington. So she talks a lot about the use of tense and can be helpful too. So you might want to check that book out, I'll put it in the chat line. Okay, great. Okay, thank you for answering some of the questions as we go, as you, as you've gone through, because a lot of them kind of have the same, same thrust to them. There was a question and I forget who asked, but if you had any, any idea of how to avoid saying he said and she said, do you have any tricks up your sleeve about how to convey conversation? Please do not use a fancy word. Do not say he expostulated. She just indicated, you know, if you're going to use a verb for speech, said or asked or told. But I think, I think, I mean, Louise can speak to what she exactly meant, but I think sometimes if you have two people speaking in conversation, you don't need to repeat the he said she said for every back and forth, as long as we know who's speaking. If you have five people talking, you're going to want to name them. But I'm assuming that's what Louise meant. Yeah, yeah. If it's clear, if it's not clear, you need to put in he said she said, and I think what Lindsay just said, you know, instead of he said nervously, you can, you know, something you can show that he's nervous. He's tearing up a piece of Kleenex and his in his lap and show the nervousness. So, yeah, dialogue needs to be succinct. And that's really important. And I just wanted to say about the tense thing. I know that Julia Shears, who's a grotto member, wrote a book in present tense, and then she used letters in italics to show the past. So there are different ways that you can do it. The present tense is very immediate. You feel it more, but sometimes it's hard to get the past in. So there are different techniques. Her book was called Jesus Land, by the way. What I did with the he, she and he business said, entire book and look for he said, but I decided to do more of what Louise suggested, put some sort of action or reaction or physical part to it that said is such a dead word. I had, I learned the concept of dead language. And really went through each word in this book and looking for that dead language. And that's dead language. So I substituted things that had more action or more reaction. Something that advanced how the dialogue was going and found that I could totally get away from it by using techniques. Yeah. Well, I can't think of a better reason to read your book because it sounds like you've employed some really creative means to get your thoughts across. Wendy has a question. She's curious if you can recommend some memoirs that explore different, different tenses. Is there any that you thought, wow, this is the model. I'm going to, I'm going to go with this. Well, the Jesus land was one that I just mentioned, which was written in present and used italicized parts for the past. You know, I think most memoirs are written in the past when I think about it. So yeah, something's not coming to me yet is. I know one. There's a memoir by Monica Wieselowska called Holding Sylvan. And that's a mother's basically the narrator loses her child at an infancy. And it's entirely told in present tense. But you know, I think in terms of models, it's really an individual thing. I think, I think look, read memoirs, look at what appeals to you, look at what seems to work, experiment with different things. There's no one way to do it. And I think also in terms of publication, what Lindsay was just saying is find some memoirs you like and look at the acknowledgments, you know, you'll see the name of the agent or the publisher. And then you can discover people to send out your book proposal or manuscript to. I saw one question about backstory. And I thought I'd just give you just a little quick insight about backstory. Backstory for me was essential. I had to figure out how to do it without stopping the whole narrative. And just have here's the backstory, you know, kind of page and page and page and page. I figured out what backstory was absolutely essential. And then what Lindsay referred to in the beginning and the prologue in my book was so difficult to write, that set the tone for the rest of life. One was what happened in the car, you know, when I was five years old looking out the window and thinking, can I be over there? And secondly, you know, the conversation with my father and it was essential backstory because that I went from a comfortable kid to someone totally on their own struggling to finish college. So I found where that what was essential in my backstory and finally where to where to put it or where there was snippets of backstory that related essentially to a memory back then of something that is going on in the present tense that's in the scene. And that took a while for me to figure out how to do all of that. Wow, it's hard to keep up with all of these comments and questions. Terry asks, if you considered self publishing, obviously you're able to find a publisher of some kind, but how did you weigh the direction you were going to go? It was agent first. And then think about three quarters the way through the agent search, I realized that is not going to be productive. Even with all the research that I've done of trying to see what agents have published work with writers similar to me and all of that good stuff. So I explored press publishers directly as I figured out that agents weren't going to work. Meanwhile, I did some research on self publishing, understanding that at the end, if it didn't work out that I could get a publisher to take the book, that I had research then enough to understand cost and process and all of that to the self publishing side. So in my case, I viewed self publishing as my third and last resort. But I kind of kept three balls in the air, if you will, during the process of sending the book out and waiting for responses. Any other questions? Tara, did we lose you? Oh, there's she is. Sorry. I had a zoom moment. Looks like we have answered primarily most of them. There are a few questions that really dive deep into people's individual projects. But I think that we can hold those and maybe consider asking you all to host a class for us of some kind. Just one thing, I think you put in the bookstore link, but the book is available on Amazon as well. But my author website is up there and I think Louise and Lindsay hopefully put theirs in as well so you can see the other things we have on there. Hopefully this is helpful to people darling into this. Yes, and there are a lot of good books. Someone mentioned Mary Cars, The Art of Memoir, which is also a very helpful book. In addition to the Judith Barrington, there are memoir classes. In addition to the Writers' Lunch and other events here at MI, you can check out classes at the Writers' Grotto, which Louise teaches a memoir class, I think that meets over two or three Sundays. I teach an eight-week memoir class that actually is just finished. But there are classes out there. Most of all, I would like to underscore what Louise said in the beginning of just finding a time to write and doing it. You will have a lot of questions. When I wrote my memoir, it took me of, you know, Louise helped her find the structure early on and that helped enormously. When I wrote my memoir, I had no idea what the structure was and I just had all these stories and it can take a while to find the structure and that can be frustrating, but you will find it. And there are a lot of questions along the way and that's all part of the process. Someone once told me you write a first draft to find out what your story is about. Someone once said that to me about novels, but I think that's also true about memoir, that in the writing comes the discovery. So keep that in mind as you write. And I just add and be patient with yourself. It can be a long process, but a very exciting process. And have patience and be good to yourself and take care of yourself through it, especially if you're dealing with, you know, difficult topics and situations. And you can do it. I just want to add to what Louise said just that if you stick it through, all the way through, despite your own disbelief that this can happen and you get it, it gets published one way or the other, amazing things might happen in your life. Amazing things. In my case, people contacted me that I haven't seen for 50 years who met me when I was a draft counselor in Chicago, who I met for 45 minutes, who I had an effect on their life. It just is something when it gets to the light of day, you will find unexpected rewards to it. And plus you'll have the feeling yourself that you've had your say, if you will, in the world, in the universal mind. There you are. That's great. Great. Well, thank you all for sharing your knowledge and for sharing your your experiences. I think we've all learned something. Thank you, Taryn, so much. And thanks again to Louise and Emily for doing this today. And thank you all for coming very much. Good luck with your writing. All right. Have a great afternoon.