memoir writing class

The first day of “Writing your memoirs” class I startled at least one student when I said, “It would be best if you wrote at least one page a day, recording memories of places, people and events you want to share with your children and grandchildren. However, for sure when you come next week have at least a couple page done. That way, if you accomplish nothing else with this class and never write again. By the end of six weeks you will have a dozen or more pages for your family.”
To stress the importance of recording personal history, I pulled out my journals, notes and short essays from 20 years ago when my husband decided o dig a basement under our home. I thought I was ahead of the class in preparing my memoirs.
I found out differently. A couple of the class members had already begun to fill journals and computer memory banks with short stories, sketches and events from their past. I’ve spent the past few seeks trying to keep ahead of that class. The only week I was ahead of them was the week we dealt with organizing our personal history into a readable, cohesive fashion with the use of outlines, time lines, categories of events or a list of different areas of interest. They caught on quickly: With essays with recuperating from war wounds in a military hospital, all the off-brand cars Daddy bought when the family was young and growing up in the jail in El Dorado.
When a former school teacher said she was writing everything by had before typing it into her computer, I thought I was introducing a new idea by advocating typing directly into the computer the first time. A World War II vet pulled out the reams of pages he had written the past couple of years just having fun at the computer recording his memoirs.
My lesson on “Show, Don’t Tell” was eclipsed with “I can still remember sitting in the back of the auditorium as freshmen in the old El Dorado High School auditorium and looking down on the front row filled with broad shoulders of the senior football players.
The next couple weeks I caught a glimpse of the shock of a young country girl going to New Orleans for her first job as a medical lab technician.
Last week I decided to introduce a new idea: Inexpensive ways to multiple copies of old photos to go along with the personal histories. I pulled out my pages of three-10 pictures per page that I made at a quick copy chop only to hear, “I’ve done that for my grandchildren.”
Before I figured out how to deal with the emotionally difficult times of our life, one man declared there just were some things about World War II he would rather never talk or write about. I agree. Information I shared glibly with friends at 17 I would never consider sharing with grandchildren at 77 or 47.
But one thing I will tell the grandchildren about is the class on writing memoirs where they taught me as much as I shared with them.