Journaling Across the Isthmus

 

As I’ve mentioned before, diaries, journals, and other personal experience accounts are my favorite research materials. I’ve found a number of journals documenting the trip across the Isthmus of Panama on the way to the California gold fields in the mid-1800s, but there’s a problem.

All eight accounts were written by men who traveled without their families.

There are enough references to assure me that women took the Isthmus route, too, but if they kept diaries or wrote letters about the experience, I haven’t been able to find them. That’s not really surprising since the vast majority of gold seekers took the overland trails across the prairies and mountains of North America, and the percentage of women and children traveling that route was much higher than it was for the other two main routes, including the one across the Isthmus. But women generally have a different perspective than men, so it would be nice to hear their side of the story.

It isn’t as much of a problem for me when writing the ocean part of the trip. Ships varied, and those that carried passengers usually had separate sleeping accommodations for women and families. So privacy probably wasn’t an issue.

It was for the trip across the Isthmus, however. It’s amazing how similar the experiences of the eight men were, sleeping crowded together in crude one-room buildings—or in even more primitive conditions when the “hotels” were crowded or unbearable. As far as I can tell, the women would have had to sleep right alongside them, to turn away when the men relieved themselves, and to find their own spot in the jungle—complete with snakes and fire ants—where they wouldn’t be disturbed when they took care of their own needs. I’d love to know their thoughts, but I can only infer them.

Unfortunately, my protagonist has to live with those conditions. I can imagine how she would feel, but I’d rather have confirmation from women who were there.

Still, I’ll figure it out.

__________

The image at the top of this post shows a painting called Crossing the Isthmus. A.D.O. Browere painted it around 1858, and it is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

They Were There

 

I enjoy reading historical fiction, but only if it is an accurate portrayal of the times and events. So when I write my own historical novels, I am careful to get the details right. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to experience the events. Researching the facts helps some, but I want to know what people went through and how they felt about it.

That’s why I love personal accounts. Memoirs. Diaries and journals. Newspaper interviews. Letters.

My first middle-grade historical, Desert Jewels, is about a Japanese American girl living in California when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and it follows her through a temporary assembly center at Tanforan to a more permanent camp at Topaz, Utah. I picked that particular path because there was a wealth of personal experience information, including four memoirs—with Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family by Yoshiko Uchida providing particularly valuable information. My research also made use of newspaper archives from Tanforan and Topaz, where the articles were written by residents and columns showed their sense of humor and unique take on their experiences.

Diaries were an important resource for my as yet unpublished book about the Civil War siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Diaries were fashionable in the mid-1800s, and I had plenty to draw from, especially the diary of Mary Ann Webster Loughborough (published as My Cave Life in Vicksburg). I am currently working on another book that takes place a few years earlier and tells the story of a girl sailing around Cape Horn on her way to the California gold fields, and the journals kept by men following that path are extremely helpful.

Those are all events that cover months and, in the case of the Japanese American internment, years. But what about disasters that cover periods too short to generate memoirs or diaries? Historical society collections can be helpful there. When I was writing about the Great Chicago Fire, I studied the many memories collected by the Chicago Historical Society to understand what my characters would have done and what path they might have taken to flee the fire.

But it isn’t just fiction that can benefit from personal accounts. I just finished reading Liar Temptress Soldier Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott. Those women’s notes and memoirs gave the book a story-like quality that a purely factual account would have missed.

Letters can be helpful, too. When I wrote my first non-fiction book, In God We Trust: How the Supreme Court’s First Amendment Decisions Affect Organized Religion, I included several chapters on what the founding fathers meant by the First Amendment. But I didn’t want to rely on other people’s opinions. Thomas Jefferson was in France when James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights, and the two men corresponded as often as the slow mail service would allow. Those letters gave me a better insight into their thoughts than I could have found elsewhere.

The point is simple. If you want to add authenticity to your writing, read what it was like for those who experienced it.

Then give your own characters those same thoughts and feelings.

Memoirs Need Research, Too

As I work on my memoirs, I keep stopping to check facts. Not my impressions or beliefs at the time—nobody knows those better than I do—but the actual details. My parents are long dead and my older brother’s memory can no longer be relied on, so my first research tool is my other brother. But because Gordon is two years younger, his memories aren’t always any better than mine.

Consider the distance from our first apartment at 6 Fettes Row in Edinburgh, Scotland to the school Gordon and I attended there. In my memory, the walk to Stockbridge School was about a mile, mostly along Dundas Street, which ran north-south. But when I checked with Gordon, he said he had paced it off when he went back several years ago and thought it was between one-half and three-quarters of a mile. So then I got smart and decided to MapQuest it. Turns out, our walk to school was four-tenths of a mile with most of it along an east-west street.

The conversation with Gordon and the MapQuest route sparked more memories. I can see Dundas Street in my minds eye as it rises steeply toward Princes Street with the Castle looming beyond. So research not only gave me the facts, it also prompted more memories.

Two good reasons why memoirs need research, too.

__________

The image at the head of this post shows our flat at 6 Fettes Row and comes from a slide my father took in 1961.

What Am I Writing?

As I work on my memoirs, I’ve been struggling with the designation. Is it memoir or memoirs? Or is it neither?

Actually, I’ve already answered that last question to my satisfaction. Although my intent is to cover my entire life using a loose chronological structure, the manuscript (or manuscripts, as I explain below) does jump forward and back at times. It is an informal account that keys in on my emotional reactions to those “small” moments that had a significant psychological effect on me. In addition, the first part has a theme based on my identity as a preacher’s kid. So my work in progress is memoir, or memoirs, rather than an autobiography.

But that still leaves the first question unanswered: memoir or memoirs? I hear the two used interchangeably and find myself doing so, too. Even dictionary definitions tell me that they mean the same thing. Researching the issue, however, I came across two blog posts that, while not necessarily authoritative, provide a distinction that works for me.¹ According to them, writing “a memoir” means you are focusing on a particular aspect of your life, while writing “my memoirs” means you are covering your life to date. That doesn’t necessarily make it an autobiography, however, since an autobiography focuses on facts while memoirs look at the author’s memories and highlight the feelings and reactions those memories and experiences produce.

So I’m writing both a memoir and my memoirs. I’m splitting my memories into two parts—one from my growing up years when I was saddled with the unwanted distinction of being a preacher’s kid, and one from college on where I learned to create my own identity. Part I is clearly a memoir, singular, and the two together are my memoirs, plural.

But I still don’t know whether I should tell people I’m writing a memoir or my memoirs.

__________

¹ See http://memoirmind.blogspot.com/2016/09/memoir-vs-memoirs.html and www.albertflynndesilver.com/blog/memoir-as-opposed-to-my-memoirs/ (both accessed 8/4/19).

A Tale of Three Memoirs

I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately, and they highlighted something I already knew: reading tastes differ. This is a statement I’ve made before, but my point then was that a writer shouldn’t be discouraged simply because someone doesn’t like that person’s work. This time I have a different point: don’t feel that something is wrong with you simply because you don’t enjoy a book that your friends or the newspaper critics rave about.

I’m going to illustrate this with my recent experience. Although my reading covered a broader selection, I will limit this discussion to three memoirs written by white women, including two from my own generation. All of these books received both popular and critical acclaim, but I enjoyed one, struggled with another, and couldn’t make it through the third. (They are discussed below in the opposite order.)

CAVEAT: All of these books are well-written. Don’t treat my analyses as traditional reviews or assume that you will share my opinion. If you do, you have missed my point.

I’ll begin with The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. It started out well enough with the aftermath of a seemingly dramatic incident and a few hints about the incident itself, but then the author says, “Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while.” Unfortunately, I never got there. Karr may have thought it was a carrot, but she dangled it so far from my eyes that it wasn’t any motivation at all. I don’t understand why she did that, either. Memoirs don’t have to be chronological, and Karr plays with time elsewhere in the book, so why not here?

After the opening, I found The Liars’ Club boring and dull. Yes, I know those are synonyms, but it deserves to be said twice. I heard or read at some point that a reader should give a book fifty pages before giving up, but I quit at page 46. The story was riddled with profanity, but my main problem was boredom. I simply couldn’t get interested. And yet, according to the back cover, The Liars’ Club was “selected as one of the best books of 1995 by People, Time, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly.”

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard also started with an intriguing story and then stalled. In many ways, her childhood is the most like mine. Yes, there were some obvious differences: Dillard was a city girl and I a small town one, she was fearless and popular and I was timid and tolerated, and her parents had a substantial income while mine learned to wring the most from their more limited funds. But we both grew up in the same era to loving parents who gave us plenty of freedom, and we both had a privileged childhood, although I didn’t realize how privileged mine was until much later. Even so, the book stalled because of the passages where she describes her growing consciousness of self and the world around her. Unfortunately, I can’t find the right words to describe them. Metaphysical? No. Philosophical? Closer, but still not right. Even abstract doesn’t work because Dillard is masterful at using concrete images to describe her abstract thoughts and perceptions. Whatever you call them, I found those passages tedious because they didn’t match my own thought processes or emotional experiences.

Still, there were two differences between An American Childhood and The Liars’ Club that made me give Dillard’s book a chance. First, she completed her opening story right away rather than leaving me feeling unsatisfied. Second, sprinkled among those problematic passages were events that I understood, such as her fear of the glowing monster that traveled around her bedroom walls at night—a fear that continued but could be controlled after she discovered the monster came from the headlights of a passing car. There were just enough of these latter scenes to keep me reading to the end. I am not sorry I finished it but am unlikely to read more by the same author.

My tepid reaction to An American Childhood doesn’t match the back cover blurb from The Chicago Tribune, which states: “An American Childhood more than takes the reader’s breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that when you have put down this book, you’re a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood.” And I wouldn’t have guessed that it was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

My favorite of the three memoirs is Wild by Cheryl Strayed. The book’s subtitle is “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” and it tells the story of her three-month-plus hike along the rugged trail. As she takes us with her, she weaves in the events that lead her to the mostly solitary journey and the lessons she learned from it. Like The Liars’ Club, Strayed begins—in the Prologue—with a story she doesn’t finish until later, but this time we know what happened and it is only the consequences that are left hanging. That difference made the incident intriguing rather than frustrating.

If you are expecting a hiking manual or a pure wilderness adventure, you won’t get that from Wild, but as a memoir it resonated with me. The Wall Street Journal called it “vivid, touching, and ultimately inspiring,” and this time I can understand why it was voted a best book of the year by NPR, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and Vogue.

One word of caution for some of my Christian friends: there is some profanity in Wild, although it is far less obtrusive than in The Liars’ Club. There are also references to sex and drugs, but those experiences are necessary to show who Strayed was at the time, and the story would be incomplete without them.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, you may not feel the way I do about one or more of these books, and that’s okay. In Wild, Strayed mentions that James Michener was her mother’s favorite author and Strayed liked him too while she was growing up. Then a college professor called Michener an entertainer for the masses and not worthy reading for a serious writer. Strayed passed that opinion on to her mother at the time but regretted her arrogance after her mother’s death.

Every reader is different. Trust your own taste, and don’t let anyone make you feel inferior because yours differs from theirs.

To Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth?

As I record memories from my life, I face a dilemma. If I decide to rework the manuscript for publication, the dilemma will get worse. Should I tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or should I gloss over situations and events that may embarrass others? Unfortunately, this is a dilemma that everyone who writes a memoir must struggle with.

I’m not talking about making stuff up or leaving out details that would mislead the reader—both of which I believe are unethical in nonfiction. It’s more a question of blurring identity—changing names (or not using them at all) to protect the innocent and the guilty.

The problem is that it doesn’t always work.

In the photo at the head of this post, my husband is pretending to have been caught by the East German border guards. Roland’s face is hidden, but his body shape and white hair are familiar to anyone who knows him well. In the same way, I could try to make people anonymous by leaving out their names, but unless I bend the truth, which I believe is unethical in a memoir, people who know them will recognize them from the circumstances.

I attended a memoir-writing workshop several years back with a presenter who had painted a very unflattering picture of the people in her family. She knew they would be hurt and the memoir might create a breach that would never heal. But she felt the story needed to be told, and she was willing to risk the hurt and the breach to tell it. That was her response to a personal question we all must decide for ourselves.

I’m not worried about my own family, but I have had situations in my life where co-workers and so-called friends did things they would not like to see in print. If I prepare my memoir for publication, I’ll have to decide how important those incidents are to the theme. If they aren’t necessary, I’ll leave them out. But if they are, then changing names or using none at all might be the only option that feels right.

But it’s a dilemma.

__________

I took the photo in 2016 when we were visiting the Berlin Wall.

To Publish or Not to Publish?

I’ve been recording my memories in an informal memoir written with my children as the intended audience, I recognize that my life hasn’t been as hard or as tragic as the ones chronicled in some of my favorite memoirs, but it has been interesting. I took my first trip across the Atlantic when I was six and my family travelled to Amman, Jordan to spend the school year. Four years later, we lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, for most of a year. Although living abroad isn’t as unusual as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s still not a common childhood experience. And living with my father was exciting in other ways, as well.

The question is, should I use the “get-it-all-down” manuscript as source material for a memoir aimed at a wider audience? If I do, I will need to choose a theme, develop a structure, and decide which memories and events to use, since much of what I am recording for my children wouldn’t interest people who don’t know me. Writing a memoir for publication would be a far more difficult project than simply recording my memories for my children.

Fortunately, there is help at hand. I learn best by example, and I have read many good memoirs over the years. My favorite is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Then there is Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston, which inspired my first middle-grade historical novel, and The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, which goes beyond The Diary of Anne Frank in providing insight into the horrors invoked by the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.

I’m also grateful for the help provided by my good friend and writing colleague, Janine Harrison, in an October 26, 2017 post she did for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog. If you are interested in writing a memoir, check it out at http://indiana-writers-consortium.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-space-between-giving-voice-to-real.html.

At this point, the most important task is to make a record of my life in case something happens to my memory.

But I’m not ruling out a formal memoir.

__________

Daddy took the picture at the head of this post in September, 1957. Mama, my brothers, and I are posing in our cabin on the HMS Nova Scotia as we crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

Tomorrow is Too Late

Lately I seem to have written a lot of posts about preserving memories, but that’s because the subject is on my mind. My mother-in-law died in February without preserving hers. One of my friends returned from a trip to Africa in early May to discover that three elderly acquaintances had died while she was gone—they had all started memoirs but never finished them. But the most significant reason is that my older brother, Donald (on the far right in the photo), has Parkinson’s Disease, and he took a turn for the worse in March as the result of a fall. I don’t know if he was planning on writing his memoirs—although it wouldn’t surprise me—but it is less likely now.

Although I had always planned on writing my memoirs someday, the operative word was “someday.” I still have other projects in the works, but “someday” has just changed to weaving it in whenever I can. I pulled some electronic resources together before Roland and I went on a Baltic Sea cruise in May, and I wrote during our down time, especially the two days at sea. I still have a long way to go but am determined to get it done as soon as possible.

My current goal is simply to record all my significant memories in one place to preserve them for my children, so once I get this informal document written, I will put it aside for a while. But if I decide to prepare it for publication, I will have the first draft done.

That’s my motivation.

What about you?

__________

The photo was taken in 1995. The other people in the photo are me and Roland, in the back, and my children, John and Caroline, in the front.

 

Dueling Memories

My older brother has Parkinson’s Disease and has been spending a lot of time with his memories lately. That made me think of one of the problems with writing memoirs. Here is a reprint of a post I wrote for the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on October 5, 2016.

Dueling Memories

One of the first things I learned in law school is that if ten people witness a crime, they will have ten different versions of what happened. Everyday life works that way, too.

Memoirs tell what happened to the writer through the writer’s eyes. But memoirs are not fiction, so they must also tell the truth about the actual events. How do you balance and reconcile these two concerns?

Take an example from my life.

My family lived in Jordan when I was six. We didn’t own a car, but we hitchhiked and took buses all over the Holy Land. It was mountainous country with narrow shoulders and no guard rails along the roads. So whenever the bus or car I was riding in went up a mountain, I closed my eyes and asked, “Are we on the falling off side?” If the answer was “no”—meaning we were on the side of the road near the mountain, I would open my eyes and look around with interest. If the answer was “yes,” they stayed tightly shut.

My entire family agrees on that much of the story.

On the day before Christmas, we were on a bus headed up a mountain on the way to Bethlehem. It was raining, and the roads were slippery, but we weren’t on the falling off side so I wasn’t worried. Then, without warning, the bus slid across the road. Again, we agree on that much. But from there, our memories differ.

I swear that one wheel slid off the mountain and left the bus hanging over the side. That’s what my terrified six-year-old mind saw as we scrambled out and huddled in the rain. My mother had a different memory—she said the bus slid sideways until it blocked both lanes but it never left the road.

With help from the male passengers and other men from the cars that couldn’t get past, the driver got the bus back on the right side of the road, loaded the passengers who were brave enough to chance it, and continued on to Bethlehem. Make that the passengers who were brave enough to chance it and one terrified six-year-old who had to be bribed by her parents.

Mama and I have different memories about where the bus landed after sliding across the road. Mama was probably frightened, too, but she was older and more rational. And the fact that the men managed to get the bus back on the road with no special equipment and without sending it over the edge strengthens the argument that her memory is probably the correct one.

But my memory was my reality, and that’s part of the truth, too.

So how should I handle this incident if I were writing a memoir about my childhood in Jordan? It is among my strongest memories and one of the most dramatic things that happened while I was there, so I couldn’t leave it out. But should I tell the story as I remember it or as it really happened?

I would treat it the way I have treated it in this blog post. I would start by giving you my reality and then describe why the external facts were probably different than I remembered them.

In my case, the evidence indicates that Mama’s version is the correct one. But sometimes people have dueling memories and the fight ends in a draw. When I am sure that my version is correct, I go with it. But if there is any chance that the other person’s memories are more accurate, I will at least acknowledge them.

A memoir has to be true to the world as the writer saw it at the time. But it isn’t fiction, so it also has to be true to the actual events. Or as true as you can be when people have dueling memories. Sometimes that means qualifying your memories by adding someone else’s.

But your memories are your reality, and that carries its own truth.

__________

The photograph at the top of this post shows the road descending from Wadi al-Mujib in Jordan. My husband took the photo on a family trip in 1998.

Telling History Through Story

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I managed the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog for six years before IWC closed its doors at the end of 2018. The idea was that all IWC members would contribute posts, and some did. However, there were also many gaps where we would have missed our weekly publishing schedule unless I came up with something. The blog missed fewer than a half dozen posts during those six years because I filled in the slots. Some were fairly generic posts, such as quotes from writing masters or recommendations for craft books, but others were more substantive. Although all posts are still available in the blog archives, I have decided to resurrect some of my substantive posts and reprint them here from time to time. I’ll start with one that may explain why I write middle-grade historical novels. “Telling History Through Story” appeared on the IWC blog on July 2, 2014.

__________

Telling History Through Story

When I was a child, I hated history. Well, hated may be too strong a word. It’s probably more accurate to say that history bored me. But I loved reading, and I loved stories.

I also loved what I used to call the “blue true books.” They were biographies of famous Americans that concentrated on the childhood years, and they had a blue cloth cover at that time. As the picture shows, the cover has changed over the years, and the series now has an official name: “Childhood of Famous Americans.” I’m guessing that many of the incidents in them are pure fiction, at least for the earlier books that would have been harder to research.

But I learned something about history because it was told as an engaging story.

These days I enjoy history in most forms, but I still prefer it as story. My library contains an ever-increasing number of memoirs and autobiographies and first-person accounts of historical events. When those primary sources aren’t available, or when they need supplementing, I turn to well-written biographies and other secondary sources. And I still read the “blue true books” when I come across them at used book sales or museum book stores.

Even as an adult, I learn best when history is told as story. That’s a good lesson for authors who write history as either fiction or non-fiction. If you want to capture the attention of a reluctant audience, use story. Don’t just write about the 4^th of July—write about people who lived it.

One other caveat. Even when writing fiction, the story must be historically realistic. Not every detail needs to be accurate, but it must be true-to-life.

I recently heard about a novel set at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. It sounded interesting, so I went on Amazon and read the reviews. They said it was well told but historically inaccurate. The author had the Americans liberating the camp instead of the Soviets. So even though it might have been an engaging story, I didn’t buy it.

But as long as you keep the important details intact, you can broaden your audience by telling history through story.

Audience Matters

This year’s vacation will take me back to a place where my family spent several weeks when I was a child, so I pulled my father’s unpublished memoir off the shelf to look up his comments. From time to time I wonder about editing his memoir and getting it published, but it would take more work than I have time for. It isn’t that Daddy couldn’t write—he could. But some parts of the manuscript would appeal to one audience and others to another one. Unfortunately, they are often interwoven, and my opinion is that they would have to be separated before appealing to either audience.

Daddy loved to travel, and his travels are the focus of his memoir. However, he was also a Biblical historian and a theologian, and his account of his travels is both a story and a dissertation. The story is my favorite part and could be written to appeal to a wider audience, while the dissertation would appeal only to amateur or professional theologians and historians. Unfortunately, most readers would find the extended discussion dry and uninteresting, and they would either skim over it or, more likely, skip the entire memoir.

For instance, Daddy tells about an overnight walk he took during his first trip to the Middle East. He picked up a couple of unwanted “guides”—boys who were looking for adventure and possibly an excuse to skip school. The night-time hike along little-used paths and the boys’ attempts to find food along the way are interesting and even amusing. But Daddy keeps interrupting the story with Biblical references. For example:

     From this point the road became practically non-existent and the descent increasingly difficult until soon we found it almost impossible to climb down the rocks from level to level. We frightened up large numbers of partridge as we went along that rocky way—birds common even in those days when David was a fugitive from King Saul as I Samuel 26:20 bears witness: “The King of Israel is come out to seek a flea, as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.”

A theologian or a Bible scholar might appreciate the diversion, but most readers would not.

If you had asked Daddy, I think he would have said that the theological and historical discussions were his favorite part of his memoir and the one he was most interested in publishing. I couldn’t do it justice, though. If that part ever gets reworked for publication, one of my brothers will have to do it.

But someday I might pull out the story and prepare it for a different audience.

Record Your Memories

I recently mentioned that we held my mother’s memorial service on March 16. At the lunch afterwards, I reminisced with my brothers and cousins. Unfortunately, we are all getting older and our memories are fading. And the day will come when none of us will be around to pass on stories about our parents' and grandparents' lives and our own experiences.

That’s why I’m grateful that both of my parents wrote their memoirs.

As I mentioned in my January 4, 2016 post, Mama wrote for her family. Mama’s memoir is an easy read written so her children and grandchildren would understand what it was like growing up on a farm in the 1920s and 30s. She also wrote some shorter pieces about her life after the farm, although she left most of that to Daddy.

Daddy’s memoir is different. He wrote partly for his family, but he also had a broader audience in mind. He never tried to get his manuscript published, but that may have been his original goal.

In my opinion, Daddy wrote two memoirs and wove them together in one manuscript. One tells about the interesting things that happened to him (and us) during his adult years. I can see extracting and editing those portions into a book for a popular audience—if I ever find the time. The other one is an academic commentary on political, social, and geographical conditions in the Middle East, with some side comments on the United Presbyterian Church and its predecessors and successors. That’s the book Daddy was probably most interested in, but I find it rather dry reading. I’ll leave it to one of my brothers to edit that one—if they find the time.

Even if we don’t find the time, though, my parents’ memories have been written down and scanned, so they won’t be lost to their descendants.

That’s something we should all do.

A Legacy of Memories

My mother died on December 15. She was 96 years old, had a good life, and was ready to go. She didn’t want to be here for Christmas, and she got her wish.

Mama left her family a number of legacies, including her love of God, her love of music, and her love of each of us. She also left us a legacy of memories.

I’m not just talking about the memories we shared, either, although those are important. She spent her retirement years putting together a family history, which she later updated, and writing down her own history. Her married life was included in my father’s memoirs, so she concentrated on her childhood.

Mama published a few memories and stories, but she didn’t strive to be an author. She wrote mostly for her family. The family history was widely disseminated among the Wagners, the Gugelers, and their various branches, and she shared her memoirs with her children and grandchildren. That was enough for her.

I keep telling myself that I should write up my own memories for my children and any grandchildren I may have someday, but I can’t seem to find the time. And that’s a shame.

Because everyone should leave a legacy of memories.

__________

The picture at the top of this post shows Opal W. Page celebrating her 96^th birthday. The others in the picture are my son-in-law Pete, my daughter Caroline, and my brother, Donald.

Chasing Details

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am working on a middle grade historical novel about the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. My research included numerous memoirs and other non-fiction accounts. While they agree on the broad picture, they do not always agree on the details. So what’s a writer to do?   

Here’s one example.

My protagonist lives in Berkeley, California when the war breaks out, and she and her mother are sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. The sources agree that the Japanese Americans at Tanforan ate all their meals at a mess hall. But they don’t agree about who provided the dishes.

A minor point, you say? Yes, and the story certainly doesn’t hinge on its accuracy. Still, I’d like to get it right if I can. When I read a story and notice an inaccuracy, it makes me less likely to read anything else by that author. An error in my story will bother me, but it may also shrink the audience for my next book.

I purchased and read three memoirs and one near-memoir from people who were incarcerated at Tanforan. All of them mention their first meal there. In Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo says she picked up a plate, knife, and fork at the dishware counter in the mess hall and wiped her plate clean with her handkerchief. Toyo Suyemoto agrees and notes that she had to wipe off the particles of food clinging to the dishes (I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment).

But Yoshiko Uchida and Haruko Obata both remember bringing plates and utensils to the mess hall. The Uchida family’s dishes were in their as yet undelivered luggage, so the three women took their place in line each “clutching a plate and silverware borrowed from friends who had already received their baggage” (Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family). Obata remembers, “At the dining room we had to bring our own plate, knife, fork, and spoon” (Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment). [Emphasis added.]

I could leave those details out, but they provide atmosphere and show the conditions the residents lived in. Either they brought (and washed) their own dishes, or they ate from ones that had food remnants clinging to them. One way or the other, adding the details shows that the Japanese Americans weren’t living a life of luxury at a vacation spa. (Believe it or not, that’s what some Caucasians claimed.)

So what do I do? The best I can, which in this case means to evaluate the sources and make an educated guess.

The accounts from people who were there are evenly split. But since memories fade over time, the account closest to the events is often the most accurate. Okubo’s book was published in 1946—four years after the events—while Uchida’s wasn’t published until 1982, and the other two were published even later. On the other hand, Uchida kept diaries most of her life and, although I don’t know whether she kept one at this time, she may have pulled her description from a contemporaneous account. So it is still a stalemate.

Fortunately, there is other evidence. Two photographs taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 show people waiting in line to enter the mess hall. Lange’s own caption for the photo at the top of this post reads, in part:

Supper time! Meal times are the big events within an assembly center. This is a line-up of evacuees waiting for the B shift at 5:45 P.M. They carry with them their own dishes and cutlery in bags to protect them from the dust.

If you look closely, you will see some of the white cloth bags she refers to.

Another piece of evidence is the official “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry.” These instructions told the Japanese Americans what to pack, and the list included “sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and cups for each member of the family.”

Looking at the evidence as a whole, my best guess is that Uchida and Obata were correct and the Japanese Americans arriving at Tanforan had to use their own dishes.

Am I sure that I have it right? No. And there are other arguments for and against that I don’t have space to go into here. But my job is to do the best I can.

Because even little details can be important at times, and sloppy research is as bad as none at all.

__________

The photograph at the head of this post shows a mess line at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California. It was taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 as part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government. Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.

Precious Memories

The best Christmas present I got last month was the one I gave my mother.

I admit it. I gave my mother something I wanted myself. And I took it home with me rather than letting her keep it.

But Mama still appreciated the gift. That's because she believes in passing on memories, and my present allows her to do that.

My father took lots of slides as we grew up, so I gave Mama a machine that transfers slides to digital files. Daddy took this picture (as a slide) on Easter 1954, when I was three.

I don't have a slide projector and screen, and it's hard to divide one slide among three siblings, anyway. That's why the digital slide converter was the perfect gift for all four of us. It helps us share precious memories.

My parents did a good job preserving their memories for their children and grandchildren. My mother sought out and compiled a detailed family history going back to the early 1800s, when her ancestors were still in Germany. A family history rich in stories as well as dates. And Mama's memoirs tell about her life growing up. She didn't cover her adult years because my father included much of that information in his own memoirs, which became his vocation after he retired from the ministry. My father's family tree goes back to the 1600s for most branches, reaching into England and Canada. I wish I had more stories about my Daddy's early years and his ancestors (especially his Grandpa Gibson), but I still have a solid framework to pass on to my children.

The memories are skimpier on my husband's side. One of Roland's cousins several times removed put together an extensive family history for Roland's father's paternal side, and I am extremely grateful. Unfortunately, we don't have much of a family tree for Dad's maternal side or for either side of Mom's family. Dad didn't think his own life story was interesting enough to pass on, and Mom seems to feel the same way about hers. So I'm glad that we sat down with a tape recorder one Christmas and asked my in-laws a few questions about their early years.

Memories are precious, and once they are lost they can never be retrieved. So make sure you save yours and pass them on.