Comments on: Memory, Fact, Imagination, Research: Memoir’s Hybrid Personality

By: exotaarticles.com

exotaarticles.com — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:02:02 +0000

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By: Lois Jellison

Lois Jellison — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:29:26 +0000

I found these articles reassuring. I have almost completed what I’ve been calling a memoir manuscript. Then selfdoubt stepped in,and I begin to wonder if I was remembering facts or had I colored the events to make them sound great. My confidence is back. Thanks again for the great articles.

By: Sarah Stromeyer

Sarah Stromeyer — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:23:48 +0000

I find parallels between Mike Steinberg’s thoughts on memory, imagination, and how they elicit truth in memoir, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s statement on Realism and Abstraction in painting: “Nothing is less real than realism…It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”

By: Mary Collins

Mary Collins — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:37:33 +0000

In the debate over “the truth” in memoir, I am inspired by this growing reaction against the narrow confines that stifle the evolution of the creative in creative non-fiction. It seems to me that, as literary memoirists, we may not succeed in, nor even wish to focus exclusively on, conveying what actually happened. We can convey what we remember having happened, while interrogating why we remember things in the shape that we do, or at all, or not at all. But since the past no longer exists, only our memory of it, that memory, processed as it is down through the psyche and out through the pen/keyboard, once written becomes only a reincarnation of the past. It is essentially some event or the self I was back then set to life again, but never conceivably in its original form. I cannot recreate that exact self – nor my exact mother, brother, lover – only give it another shot at life in some other, proximate, form

I welcome your championing, too, a movement away from a fixation on genre boundaries. Genre as a construct seems to carry a whiff of intolerance and seems to be fast becoming as outmoded within our current culture as every other form of segregation: Writers as one nation under the pen/word, free to set their own definitions of genre, or to eschew definitions altogether, even perhaps, in time, definitions of hybrid or mongrel…

By: Michelle Cacho-Negrete

Michelle Cacho-Negrete — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:10:37 +0000

As a psychotherapist, now a writer, it was clear in working with clients that what we remember is actually what we preceive. It’s one reason that our memories are different than sibblings or parents or friends. Mike Steinberg points out, rightfully so, all the reasons why an imaginative retelling of incidents enhances the truth of memoir rather than detracting, and the essential truth is what we fashion.