 Before I introduce her, I just want to remind you that next week we have a wonderful person, Chris Graft, talking about our current situations and all kinds of things. So please be sure to be here for that. Is there anything else that we need to make an outfit about? You have ideas about topics, let us know. Yes. We welcome more help with OLLI programming and putting this all together. So if you're at all interested in any part of it, from refreshments when we're able to provide refreshments to programming, please let one of us know. And over here, just to acknowledge, we have Bob Roosevelt, Denny Callan, Michelle Champot, and somewhere in the audience is Priscilla Daggett, who does all our mailings. Right there. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Red. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. бор. Green. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue, Little Blue. Blue. Okay. Good, go hard for beautiful, beautiful, beautiful privy towers. and the complex history of the family. The title of today's presentation is Memory and Writing. She'll talk about her own work and that of other writers, including older adults, she has taught and helped to self-publish. I give you three. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's so nice to come out for this. This is my first program in person for however long it's been. Fifty years or so. Maybe just three. But still, it's odd. It's wonderful to be here. And I find even though masks are optional in Vermont, I go around and I walk into a place and I quickly put it on because some people cannot be without mask people. You're not getting us? Okay. Should I hold it? Let's see. Let's get it a little closer. Oh, that's good. Okay. All right. So it's wonderful to be out and about. And I talk about memory and writing because that's really all I've done, except for a bunch of children's books. I don't know, two dozen. So children's books, which I mainly did with Amy, or like my dear friend and fantastic editor. And they all rhymed because when I was teaching in Reedsboro, Vermont, second grade, many, many, many years ago, more than 50, I found that some of there were groups of kids who couldn't read at all and it was hard even to get started. But if you had a book or a poem or something, a picture book that rhymed, it just kind of came in almost instinctively. It was like one of those games on the playground with marbles or with jump ropes. It was just there. So love the Dr. Seuss books and the Margaret Wise Brown books. Any books that had a cadence and a rhythm for young children were, they just worked. So that's after I stopped teaching and had my own children, I started writing because of, again, because of Amy, I wrote kind of silly verses that were for children or just for fun or for my sister who was also a writer and just Ann Lindbergh. And then in my first marriage we lost a child, a little boy at the age of two, and very, very hard. And I found myself that first day, I found myself writing a poem about a farm in the dark and it's called The Midnight Farm. And I showed it to Amy and she said, this is a book. And I said, this is a book. And she took it to her editor, her own editor, who also thought it was a book. And they paired the book with that wonderful illustrator, Susan Jeffers. I was very honored to have her do that, the illustrations for this book. And then I started, I kept on going. I did some silly ones. The day the goose got loose, which is just a kind of wild, rambunctious taper on a farm where the goose gets loose and all the other animals go nuts. And then some just quiet ones. I did a Johnny Appleseed and some nighttime poems. I did some work with that wonderful Canticle of the Sun by St. Francis of Assisi, kind of sort of trying to transpose it for children. Just whatever came to mind that rhymed. I worked with them that way. And the last, most recent one was Nuts, it was 2012, a while ago, was called Homer the Library Cat in honor of basically the librarians I have known and loved many, many. And one particular cat belonging to one St. Johnsbury Athenian librarian who ran away and came back. And it was an exciting time for all the children in town. So that was a bunch of books. More of those, I've written more of those than of these nonfiction books for adults. I did a couple of novels, thinly disguised autobiographical novels when I first wrote for adults. And then I thought, well, maybe I'll try a memoir. I'll try something about growing up with my parents because it was something, it was hard to figure out. I'm not sure I still have figured it out. But I grew up in a family where both parents were very famous, but they did not want to be famous in the family. And so you had, we had a fairly, not too different, some different life with my three brothers and my sister and I in Connecticut on Long Island Sound. And my father who came and went all over the world and my mother who was mostly there, very quiet, always writing and gardening and being very connected to her children in a wonderful way. And I kind of still hear her voice when I have, when I have difficulty figuring something out, I can often hear her voice and that's a lovely thing to bring along through my life. I thought, the first book I wrote about the family is called Under a Wing, and I thought I would read, if you just read a little bit, little bits and pieces from that to give you a sense of what I was working with. I start with my father's time, my father's kind of impression in our lives. It was, he was very, very forceful and sure of himself and his ideas and also really a great deal of fun. He was very active. He would take us, he taught me to swim by having me hold on around his neck and swimming out into the low tide at Long Island Sound and I was never afraid. I was sure he would make sure I was safe but he kind of immersed us in many things and we were treated to his lectures. He had many lectures. What I remember was there was one on freedom and responsibility. There was one on, let's see, it was financial which was he wanted us to make sure that anything that was bought for us, purchased for us like roller skates or actually I think it was regular winter skates that you would write down. You didn't have to earn the money necessarily at that time but you had to know the cost of everything that was purchased for us that wasn't absolutely necessary. Let me see if I can find that. He used to have us come in to his office at the old house in Darien and he would have these lists and I could read them upside down because he had on his desk he had a list with each child's name and then you would look to see whether you had a long list or a short list. If you had roller skate price I thought that's okay. That won't take long but if you had freedom and responsibility or even worse downfall of civilization that was a big one and for many reasons for downfall of civilization sometimes it was our attitude that would lead to the downfall of civilization. Let's see. Most of the time when he was home my father's office contained him comfortably and predictably like a hermit's cabin deep in the woods or like the well-designed cockpit of a small airplane. His office was a small square space on one side of the family porch on the first floor. It had been built as a twin moonflower porch. She had a moonflower which she would she kept on a porch and she would call us all to see it when it blew which was I don't know once a year or something like that. But his was much more self-defended with thick arched windows in the places where the moonflower porch had screens and less easy access to the outdoors. The room had a single bed under the window with a Hudson Bay blanket spread out upon it and there were usually manila envelopes and boxes of onion skin typing paper arranged in piles too. His desk and chair were in a corner both smaller than might have been expected for a man his size. Though this was typical of my father he required a certain amount of room for himself and no more. And he didn't like to waste things toothpaste or toilet paper money or detergent time or space. He didn't like television. I disagreed with him about television to him was one of the downfall of civilization aspects. It held no terrors for me. All I ever watched was Howdy Doody anyway and who could be afraid of Buffalo Bob? I knew my own family would never have TV and I understood from my father's lectures that it was a bad influence upon young minds and that it would be better for us all to be reading books. I read plenty of books but I sneaked over to the neighbor's house as often as I could at the Howdy Doody show. I could see it was useful to be able to fly an airplane or change a tire or shoot a gun. I did not understand why it was so terrible to eat candy or unenriched white bread. Read Dick Tracy comics or watch television. I thought my father was too often both unfair and absurd. But I stood at the front door of our house with my sister once confronting a man while the family was having lunch. I didn't hear what the visitor wanted. A thin young man I didn't recognize and he said to Anne, I don't know what he said to Anne, but I heard her cry out and step back into the doorway and I saw her shut the door hard and fast heavy as it was in the stranger's face that immediately I heard my father running footsteps behind us. He opened the door again and stepped outside with the stranger putting his hands on Anne's shoulder and on mine as he passed us urging us back into the house but before we swung the door shut again I saw that he was walking down the path beside the young man and that he put a hand on the stranger's shoulder too and was talking to him gently and at length. On this occasion his face didn't have the grim closed down look on it the look fateful to duck hunters. He was very angry with the duck hunters in our coat. Instead I saw kindless on it confused to see that expression at that time. Kindness and the open loose featured patience with which he approached nervous dogs or very small children. He didn't have the cold eyes and stern expression of the family disciplinarian on his face or the grim besieged look of the defender of our property. Instead he had the look that I saw him with that look again once years later in another house gazing quietly down upon a stray bird that had just flown at full speed into our kitchen windowpane and lay stunned and twitching in my father's hand. It turned out that the stranger was one of the pretenders as Anne used to call them. A reference to Charles Stewart, the body's Prince Charlie who tried and failed to become King of England. This man was one of the dozen or more confused sad individuals who have touched our lives now and then over the years. Each one tells a different story each repudiates the stories of all the others all share the same obsession. Everyone of them is convinced that he and nobody else is the Lindbergh baby who died our own lost brother Charles. Yeah, I haven't I haven't heard from any of them recently and I think they may be gone. My my late brother John who would have turned 89 this summer. He had a renal cancer and died very suddenly. He was a couple of years younger than this the first baby whom none of us met. John was born after after he died and there all those men were all all about that that age and they were they all were convinced and would send letters and ooh and it was hard. I met one once when I got I think at the Aaron Space Museum he just came up and he couldn't even talk. He looked so sad. I was pretty sure who he was and he looked at me and I just gave him a hug. I couldn't I couldn't make what else to do and he you know he went off. He went but it was very hard hard to see that that what I think it's called delusions of reference. There's something where people almost project upon somebody else's story their own and I think it's it's it was unnerving for us but much much harder and the story of the lost baby of course is the kidnapping in 1932 I well he died in 32 yeah in the early 1930s of my first brother Charles who was taken in I believe early in the year and was found dead in April and then with the rest of us came and I really didn't hear much about Charles during my childhood I did I did hear I learned about him when my own little boy died my mother was wonderful she said and she said well you have to you have to you have to die a little bit with it with him and then you're reborn in other in other in your other children and that was really true but she was completely open at that time but they didn't talk about it they didn't talk about it while we were growing up until my father took us flying sometimes I write about his taking me out flying from the airport in Danbury Connecticut they rented a he rented a little little Aranka and he would it was a two-seater and he would be flying the plane and you'd be behind him and then he would have you have me you know use the rudder to lean the plane this way and that or nose down or nose up and we always stuck cotton into our ears which he didn't approve of but it was really really loud and I've actually I've been in one of those a couple actually of those replicas of the spirit of St. Louis and it's deadening it's so loud those early aircraft unbelievable and I think many many pilots of the day were rendered a little deaf long before they would have otherwise my father was no exception but but the so we all we all did that we all were taken up and floating around and and my couple of my brothers learned to actually fly the plane I couldn't even reach the rudders but I could go back and forward up and down and all that and and then he had he had us experience weightlessness and I think he went up and then down fast something like that and his glove would go up in the air and he'd say see it see the glove that's weightlessness thank you but so my brother John did he did some parachuting he did quite a quite a bit of jump right out of the airplane altogether and I was I was thrilled that he could do that he would just jump out of and my father was not impressed he said he said as many of them do he said you never jump out of a perfectly good airplane so not interested in skydiving he didn't think that was well he had to when he had to jump out of an airplane it was usually it it was going down and he had done it he was a male pilot early in the day and he would fly from st. Louis to Chicago and if the weather was really bad and something there was something that was you know was not going to work out with the airplane or stalled or he could not land it anywhere and he would he would jump with the parachute and once the plane came around he thought it was going to cut off the parachute straps but he made it but those guys did they didn't they didn't think it was play they did not want to go skydiving oh my so that was a that was an exciting time and once I was the only one of his children who was in an airplane with him when when he had he had to not crash land we had a forced landing because it was an automatic choke and that was very new to him he had always done everything by hand and in this aircraft that it got stuck the mechanism was stuck he could not and the engine stalled and he said well put your head down between your knees and hold your head and he said we're going to have to land because we can't get back to the airport in time and I thought in time for what but so I had no clue but we went down we bumped into this cow field a cow pasture at the time in Connecticut and it was nothing bad happened he didn't wreck the plane it maybe bumped a little on the rocks there were rocks the cows didn't seem to be too upset but they had to take the plane apart to get it out and but I watched him when he was coming down through the air and kind of back and forth and you could feel it and I've heard this from pilots that you're at a certain point you're not flying the airplane you're being the airplane I mean you sort of like you put it on and I've heard that from very modern day pilots in really high quality jets and of course war planes of various types and they say you just have to put it on you have to wear it and then you become part of it and that's how you do it which I hadn't thought of until I saw my father landing that plane oh my goodness all right well my mother was mainly with us when he traveled she was with us and it was ah it was such a relief and he would leave for a while and you think oh and but she was pretty good at running that household even without him coming and going and you know having all his lists and so on and we had a sense of her extraordinary connection with all of us and I was just talking to my brother my now 84 year old brother two days ago and we were talking about growing up with them and he said I don't know how she put up with it and so and yet they were wonderful partners they were very much connected for all the flying years they flew together to establish the early air routes for aviation and they and they were partners in writing as well they would sit together with a manuscript set out between them and just go over whether it was her book or his book and if it were his book she'd say well Charles I don't think that that word is used this way I think she was the English major and the Smith graduate and she she knew and he would change it and then when he was working with her books he would say well um in this part about the clouds you know actually a cloud pattern the cloud bank would not be would not be that way and he got the cloud he wanted he said you know got your seras you got your cumulonimbus and then he would correct it all the things that he knew from his his early aviation experiences my mother was very um very connected to whatever it was we needed to do and she always told my sister and me that she thought we should write write it down she told us whenever we said something that particularly interested or touched her write down that sharp insight that funny story that especially appealing turn of phrase she taught us that any experience worth living through was worth writing down but beyond this she made us feel that the act of writing about it significantly affected the experience I did not know whether writing enhanced an event transforming it into something more important than it would have been had it gone unrecorded or whether writing just made it more real like the testimony of an observant bystander who can confirm that yes something has indeed happened here I am a witness and this is what I saw from my mother the relationship of writing and living was like the philosophical conundrum about the tree in the forest if it falls to the ground but nobody's around to hear it does it make a sound and my mother's philosophy the question would have been written experience truly exists at all does it even matter my mother was as wedded to her identity as a writer as she was wedded to her father and for that reason perhaps she gave herself little credit for being his co-pilot navigator and radio operator during the early flights around the world or for being the first woman in America to earn a glider pilot's license those were aspects of her life that had to do with her husband's career not hers she was a writer first and foremost we children accepted the success of her 1955 book gift from the sea as a natural thing and no more than her do we began by being blasé about it but soon became fiercely partisan I remember how vicious my feelings were in sixth grade when Norman Vincent peels the power of positive thinking edged ahead of my mother's on the New York Times bestseller list well this is I just go on and on about all of that and the what it was to be with them and the last part of this book I say in some ways my parents were very different but I have always believed it was their similarities rather than their differences that brought them together and kept them together for so many years certain shared independencies of character and spirit that each knew in himself or herself from earliest childhood and recognized instinctively in the other qualities of solitude and stamina reflection and determination their mutual recognition must have been profound and this I think was the foundation of the world they were able to build together for their children within that unlikely marriage over the difficult years in spite of the tragedies on the newspapers out of the public eye and against all odds my parents built from their similar characters and shared spirit a family structure that became the strongest elements in their lives it remains I'm very sure the strongest element in mine so that was the first one the first the first memoir and I did I did I did one about my mother when she when she lost words it was at the very end of her life and she was living with us in Vermont my father's death and she she didn't speak so you never she was very very quiet she was sometimes seemed to be agitated or upset as happens with people who have will have she didn't have Alzheimer's she had those little strokes TIA frontal strokes and sometimes she would she would sit quietly and talk to you and then she would say after a while are you my sister and at first I say no no I'm your daughter and remember and then after a while I said oh sometimes yeah because that's what it was I was different people in her life and things would happen she had I had baby chicks I thought she would love those I brought them up to her and had a little box in the floor and she had put them away she didn't want the baby chicks once we went driving over the road from St. John'sbury to Littleton, New Hampshire which is beautiful kind of a high beautiful landscape all around it and we were very quiet because she didn't talk and I wasn't talking I was driving and she said I'm afraid and I said oh what is it is it getting older or losing friends or life seeming different and she looked at me and she said it's your driving so she was both there and not there and she was with us until the end she died in the house and the family came and had been coming for a couple of years that she was there and it was not always easy but it was indeed a privilege all the same we did I did a little tour and that was about turning 60 and oh I don't know I had various things happen and I think I'm thinking I wasn't going to read I wrote a book about turtles I found a chapter about turtles because I had an experience on my husband's birthday I saw wild geese flying overhead morning and evening and a turtle plotting manfully or womanfully it's hard to tell with turtles but along our lane as I turned off the main road from town I was delighted I stopped the car a birthday turtle from my husband Nat he loves turtles and so do I we've always hoped to have a lot of them in our new pond which is out behind the house and it was dug for by an excavator and he says it's not really a new pond because a previous pond had existed in that same spot in earlier times what earlier times I asked about sun standing knee deep in the shallows women in sunbottos carrying water in wooden buckets I was way way off in terms of anthropology it would be neolithic, in terms of geology it would be a hollow seed about 10,000 years ago so another day I saw what looked like an especially pretty painted turtle so I got out of her car and walked over to it picked it up and the turtle didn't like this much but it drew in its head and the seat next to me the feet disappeared and I brought it home and my husband was so pleased, what a beauty he said and we took it to the pond and the new turtle this new turtle that I got on his birthday it was just kind of slowly walking along what's known as the river road the Pesamsic River on the way to St. John'sbury and it was like a big rock and when I walked back close to it I got out of the car I could see it was a snapping turtle even though I hadn't seen one before they're unmistakable this animal was probably 10 times the size of my husband's birthday turtle and a bigger as big around as a platter for a good size Thanksgiving turkey it was not one bit pretty except maybe to another turtle it had a thick ridge tail that reminded me of a Florida crocodile and a scary looking almost prehistoric head and a mouth like the beak of a very big very bad bird but I wasn't doing very much it was very peaceful and I knew how happy the birthday turtle had made my husband and I vaguely remembered something he had once told me that some Native American fisherman on the Hudson had told him many years ago about snapping turtles not biting if they were out of water or something like that anyway I noticed this turtle as I studied its progress seemed slow and sleepy so I picked it up one hand on the other each side of its shell the turtle turned its head backward with a half hearted logy hiss and a snap but that didn't daunt me I put it in the back of my car I drove it to the home of Ralph and Sue Bollard our neighbors and she had asked me to pick up some milk and I gave her the milk and then I opened the back of my vehicle to show her the turtle seemed a bit more animated and I said to her, oh my, said Sue sounding just like my mother what my mother would have said under the same circumstances by the time I arrived at my own house I decided it made sense to get a pair of gardening gloves which I did and picked up the turtle put it in the bathtub left a note for Nat and my son Ben I knew they'd get home before I did I was going to a program like this just as he came into the house and with a telephone in hand he walked into the bathroom oh my god, he said I was very pleased Reeve, you've outdone yourself I was so happy he said, how did you pick him up? I told him, modestly and his voice changed Reeve, they can lunge the full length of their bodies their necks are as long as their shells they've been known to break broomsticks he told me the Native American fisherman that snapping turtles don't bite underwater not out of water and besides he thought they were just kind of baiting him, you know but anyway, he was awed at what I'd done I was magic, I thought I had turtle magic and was a turtle whisperer and we did we took a big canning kettle we kind of got the turtle into the kettle and took it out into the pond and actually it disappeared we haven't seen him again that same evening I heard my husband describing this to a friend over the telephone and I heard him say Marilyn Monroe meets Godzilla he still sounded awed and a little frightened and I hoped I was Marilyn so so that was a that was a fun one, I had a good time with that I had a had a completely unexpected brain tumor and I wrote a little bit about that it never hurt at all and they took it out and it was okay as I said Don Malignan and I wrote a chapter about it and I wrote a little a little poem and it says my little brain tumor lives in my head they say it's not nasty or else I'd be dead it's in my meninges or a snail with a tail or a small small rorschach blot my little brain tumor showed on the scan I was asked can you see this? I said yes I can I can see I can speak, can count backwards from 10 I can walk a straight line and then walk back again I can name 15 animals all in a row subtract from 100 by 7s, that's slow I can write, I can work I can wonder about, I can drive but I don't just in case I pass out if you've had a seizure, which I did that you don't drive for a year usually until they have it controlled with medication and so forth so I would get rides with Fred's and that was a small prize I didn't want to run into somebody I can let's see, I can name 15 animals all in a row subtract from 100 by 7s that's slow I can walk about, I can drive but I don't just in case I pass out my little brain tumor doesn't look scary it's smaller, should roundish the size of a cherry it may have to go though it's shown little malice but if I can keep it, I'm calling it Alice and I did that until we took it out that was weird and difficult but it turned out okay and I just kind of blabbled on with all the different things that I had to say about living here and my family history, a bit of that and I had also a more recent book from 2018 which again had to do with family but it was called Two Lives and it really was about having my life at the end of the dirt road in Vermont, which was very muddy last week when I say I often think I have two lives one in the foreground, the other in the background each life taking its turn I have a real or normal life in the country where my husband and I live on an old farm at the end of a dirt road we wear comfortable clothes, write books, raise sheep and chickens our active and community life with our children whenever they come to visit there's also an entirely different Lindbergh life which requires putting on somewhat less comfortable clothes and traveling to places away from the farm where I attend meetings and give talks and where there are no chickens except for the kind on the menu followed by words like chicken, chicken, chicken I'm thinking in the second life I stand up in front of people and talk a little about the books I've written for children and adults and a lot about the logs of my late parents Charles and Anne-Marie Lindbergh I've spoken about my parents on college campuses and Air Force bases and museums and libraries and schools to children and adults around the country for several decades when I finish, I come home to Vermont change clothes and emerge from the limbo of travel and from my Lindbergh life dogs, the sheep and the chickens immersing myself in farming community until the next time when I put on my other wardrobe again and out I go it may be a strange way to live coming and going and switching focus between one life and the other but I've done this for so long it feels like just another part of my routine like going to the farmer's market or taking care of one of the dogs to the vet one of the chief differences is that in my Lindbergh life there are different questions to answer about how long has she been limping or do you want to beg for that what's your favorite memory of your father or did your mother teach you to write or what can you tell us about the kidnapping or did your father really have other families if he did so those questions are now so familiar they don't trouble me much so I can remember when some of them did before my father's death and my mother's they spoke for themselves they didn't speak at all most of their communication with the world was done in writing between the two of them they published more than 20 books about their lives and reflections over the years he did some speaking here and there and there was rarely a question period afterwards but my father disliked being questioned to begin with and he had been uncomfortable with what he called the press ever since his flight to Paris in 1927 my mother said that once when they were embark on one of their early survey flights together a reporter begged her husband to reveal at last at least excuse me to reveal at least which direction they were planning to take on their journey and my father responded solemnly up I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in living two lives I think most people do this to some degree when a person gets up in the morning goes to school or to work he or she leaves a at home self behind salespeople have sales lives office workers have at the office selves any teacher has developed a teaching self a teacher needs to be on in a certain way just as an actor is on for the theater film, television when the school day is over or the cameras have stopped rolling or the stage lights have dimmed then you can be off just yourself I'm not really ever off even when I think I'm completely free of it Lindbergh life seeps into my everyday existence at most unexpected moments then I find I have to move from a kind of low key daily consciousness concerned with things like laundry shopping, working in my garden asking people to bake pies for the baked sales of the library to another way of thinking entirely a state of mind blended from instinct training and long experience and that's how I confront my family past I used to pester A. Scott Berg with questions when he was writing Lindbergh his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of my father I was writing my first memoir under a ring which I just read to you a bit and he asked me questions very discreetly and politely once probably because I had expressed a astonishment at hearing how many boxes of material he proposed to go through the Lindbergh collection at the Sterling library at Yale in 1700 he said he almost complained to me about the material he discovered items that had been saved by my parents and sent to the university to be stored there in perpetuity was it really necessary he wanted to save carbon copies of handwritten notes to our teachers excusing us from school for dental appointments small squares of blotting paper probably made by cutting one of my mother's large desk blotters into smaller pieces each square covered with the indecipherable reverse blottings of words from letters or diaries or grocery lists did I know anything about this and I told him because I couldn't resist that at our house during my high school years there were always two cardboard boxes sitting at the top of the stairs to the basement next to the basement was the attached garage where my father kept the station wagon he also drove this car to New Haven when he carried documents to the Yale archives one box at the top of the basement stairs was labeled Yale for the station wagon the other was labeled dump do you think the labels could have been but there was a great deal of saving and a great deal of very very careful meticulous documenting of everything that he did and really everything that he fought and it was you know I didn't realize I didn't realize that other people didn't live this way and as I got older I thought this is really interesting and very strange and so I went through I spent some time in those archives and we put together a memoir my mother published five I think books of her diaries and letters from the time she was about 14 at Miss Chapin School just after the Second World War so that from 1945 when I was born to the time she died in 2001 just before it was February before 9-11 there was nothing nothing in public so we worked on the family and good friend to gather that material from the times that and and there was an enormous amount of material and it was all very interesting and we published it with her publisher they were interested and it was really fun it was we would go through this stuff and you'd find some brother found his kindergarten paintings and he said now these are important you should be carefully saved but you'd find a little funny little thing little tickets from 1952 that just it was sort of looking at artifacts that weren't they were just, it was just a ticket so I didn't have the proper reverence for all this material but I loved reading things that she had written at length and really never shown anybody who were able to put together and offer the world that I guess that was in about 19... 2012 as well so that was a real history a family habit of these memoir like writings and I found that it helped me a lot to be able to put them down in writing and I was at the same time working with a group of people in say, Johnsbury locally who wanted to write about their own lives in one place or another once at the senior center and then when the pandemic came we couldn't go in there it was too scary for people so we went to the upstairs of the library and social distance and people would read their well their stories they're really in every case it's personal stories that are set down and just so interesting to me there's a man who grew up in Barry on let's see Millstone Hill I think it's called and he wrote about he's slowly writing his childhood and he's about my age so he to me it's really fun to hear a little terrifying to hear all these boys in the summer these kids would go not allowed by any other parents they would go and dive into the water and quarries and tell nobody died but it's really hard to believe because he would explain how I would climb and who dared to go up to which height and the kid would build a barrel, raft and everybody jumped on it but the girls were allowed and lots of stories tough childhood not so easy my sense of the way he grew up was that it was in some ways quite harsh but he certainly had fun with all his friends and quarries and around town and he brings a life that the town of Barry in the mid 19th century another woman she couldn't she was sent to Canterbury Inn as it used to be well I'm not sure that's the right name but it was assisted living in St. John'sburg and she would just write about what was outside of her window and what it reminded her of and she would go back through her own life which I loved and yesterday we had the same writer's meeting where we had the man read about Millstone Hill another young woman I will say to her she's only got 10 years older than I am but I think of her as about 20 she's so full of life Marty she brought it back growing up in Hanover, New Hampshire and sneaking into all the buildings of the college and the stuff they did they would climb up on the outsides of these buildings this incredible stone the crenellations of these various various edifices and they would dare each other to walk around and go around the side I would just kill my kids if they did that they probably did but her stories are terrific and it's something that I've found when people get together and start and they've written some little little thing about their life as it is now or as it was growing up and some are so shy about sharing the wonderful woman Rose Veer she's still with us and has written a pandemic log of what happened at the assisted living place but she wrote about her growing up up here wonderful stuff and it's the old town things like the town of Waterford was basically flooded and gone for the reservoir where her grandmother lived in one of those farms and she knew that place really well and she said I can tell you where that farm was where that farm was and you just think of these farms way down under in water and what lives there were people were not present when they flooded the places but there's so much of that around our country there's so many places that have disappeared for one reason or another so she wrote about that another woman I know wrote about harvesting ice big ponds and how she helped the men she and her mother it flew to the guys who were coming out the ice and putting it in the ice house and one guy fell in he'd been wearing this big bear coat I don't know if it was really a bear raccoon a big coat and they hauled him up and got him out of the coat because it was very very cold and for the rest of that winter the coat was just there on the porch of the ice shack but story after story after story and for me it makes me realize that we all have so many stories and some of these people they wouldn't even read them out loud they'd say would you read this do you think it's alright and it was wonderful of course I read it but people were so shy about their own their own stories but boy they're important and of course some of these stories the library in St. John's room the Athenaeum was very happy to get these stories about the old times in St. Che and the where is this one that I love so a woman from she grew up in Arkansas I think and oh I don't know if I've got this I meant to bring it and she just remembers everything from the 30s she'd take the shopping in the 1930s and talk about the straight and the packages being wrapped and how they bought bacon and how her mother said her home was this or that from the store and it's just gone that whole way of shopping that whole relation to the staples you bought to stay alive basically but I love the intersection of writing and memory and how it documents us and binds us together whether it's my family with all the craziness and complication we're still held together I think by a whole lot of love and commitment and connection or the lives of my friends who were here when they were harvesting ice on a harvest night and these are stories that are right here they're just all part of us but what happened talking for a long time sorry keep going and going but I would be happy to answer any questions yes ma'am what advice do you give to somebody to get started there are people who talk about doing it but they don't you just have to make yourself do it I mean that's the only thing I know how to do is to sit and sometimes I don't even write in a diary for months at a time I want to get something done I have to sit I used to say you can't get up until you've written a hundred words and it helped it helped because if I'd written a hundred words I would keep a careful track I'd think ok 25 50, 60 I can put a little dot next to the 50th word and then I keep going and sometimes it would get me started and I would go on to pages sometimes it didn't but that was the only way I could just keep it slow or if I have an assignment if somebody says could you do an introduction to somebody oh yes, oh yes I would and then I pan it and then do it because I have to and that's a big rehab I know people must have inspiration coming to them beyond but I don't I get some little thing nudges at me and I think that would be really fun and then I eventually get started I have to be very disciplined which I can almost think of a million other things to do which is always yeah what brought you to Vermont I came to Vermont in 1968 yes just barely married my husband had applied for and gotten a job in Whiteingham High School in Whiteingham, Vermont and he was he was just the age of Vietnam age and he went to the graph board and he would oh is he going to go is he going to go to Canada and he he turned out he had a leg length discrepancy that he didn't even know about and that was from Polio that he wasn't aware of as a child so he didn't go my second husband was a platoon leader in Vietnam and did go and has never gotten over it he said he's written a book about about that time Father, Soldier, Son which is beautiful but it's either way it's hard but he was teaching there and I got a child teaching in Reedsboro a little school taught second grade there were 10 kids the first year in my class my second grade in 12th next year and then after that we moved north we moved to the St. John'sbury area to Peachon and that's been in that part of the Northeast Kingdom ever since that's how it happened long ago yes I have a comment about memoirs and then a question for you I was lucky enough to have my mother who was 41 when I was born tell me many stories of her child which was very different in New York, the immigrant areas and I wrote them all down for my children and I think that's an easy way to start that's a wonderful way if you want to write for your children and they love it so my first thing for you is about your family I grew up in New Jersey and my stories were about the missing immigrant of course I don't think I was very driven because we were not famous in New York were you scared at all some of them you were too little, I'm good that mystery was ever solved oh yeah it was for money and the man was Richard Houtman and he was in fact electrocuted which was very much my mother was so against her it was horrible that that happened that was what was done that was the punishment and I think much of it came from the publicity and so on and there were all kinds of theories conspiracy theories as they call them now it's pretty clear that that's what it was and who it was and people have told me stories and oh it was Marie Sendak it was it was also writing with Amy and he told me a story met him at an event and he told me that when it was very, it made a huge impression upon him because he was a little boy at that same time and that was the inspiration for where the wild things are and came out of that that story and others he said as well yeah that's right well that theme does go through there's a child gone yeah I'm curious this is a more technical question I'm curious whether you write in one hand do you write it with pen and paper or do you compose on it I start on pen and paper because it feels less it doesn't scare me as much I'm sitting there writing along and I can cross things out and usually I get a couple of pages in or more and then I start to put it on the computer because boy it's great to be able to change words and all that so quickly yeah I've noticed that you use a lot of detail when you're writing things are very rich oh I love detail and I wonder is that do you go back and revise and say oh yeah I forgot this that happens if I'm thinking back they asked me to put another they said you don't locate yourself in this book somewhere along and under a wing and I thought well I'm just going to start by coming in the door and maybe I can do it and so I started writing about the door and I remembered what that big oak door was and it kind of looked like a huge wasle and then I came in and I remembered what the coat closet was like and it got a little carried away but I did I do take myself back to somewhere and it happens anyway as you're walking along or thinking something comes back to you from a long way and that for me those are, that's cool if I can remember it could be as true as it possibly can sometimes I'm sure I don't have to write so I can say well as I remember it and then one of my brothers somebody else will say well I don't remember it that way but that's fun it's your story this is the question about memory and writing do you just write your memory to the extent that you can read all of that and then that still I try to figure out from objective evidence of just letters or diaries or whatever I haven't really done that I sometimes will call a sibling and they're well there's still another two of them left there were five of us and there are three of us now but I'll say well who's this and often they're over and so they'll say well actually it was in the garden of our grandmother's house in Detroit and sometimes they'll get going and talking about it and I always give them credit my brother said because their memories need to be credited I think so let's it's just writing like any other thing that you do is creative should not discipline externally I find it's so easy to run away from it and I heard a story that was at Margo Fontaine one of the wonderful LA artists wrote in her memoir which I have not read about how hard she would run away you know she would do everything she'd do all the laundry she'd run down the street to pick up a newspaper and she would mend the socks and she would do whatever until she ran up against the wall she didn't have something else she had to do and she'd start to write yes a follow up to that is have written several memoirs do you ever go back and read something as you did today and in the present tense have a different recollection in other words do you sense that your memory had evolved or changed over time? it probably does but ok this first one was published I think in 1998 and the last one was 2018 so that would be in 20 years so far these still ring true to me if I went over again if I had an editing job to go over again then I might have new ideas or new memories or just analyses that would be different I might but I haven't done that it's an interesting question you're so nice to be here you ramble and babble on thank you very much my pleasure are you available for a minute? I'm here for a little bit yeah