Category: Writing

Drafting Part II of my memoir is proceeding well. During the last ten years I did so much work writing bits and pieces that paragraphs now fall quickly into place. I have a solid draft of chapters 1-17, which is before we moved to Indiana. Because the time is so recent (1988), and because I wrote a lot while living through it, there are ample documents and memories available. Too many, really. I have choices to make. Sadly, the choice is what to leave out.

I wrote this description of where we lived last week:

The dominant geographic feature in the Calumet is Lake Michigan. I remember endless flocks of geese migrating above our house, noise of their honking entering through open windows continuously and for hours at a time. There was “lake effect” snow that piled up quickly during winter. Outside our house, it never really got dark because of the proximity of Chicago and Gary which indirectly illuminated our yard. The hum of traffic from nearby Highway 30 was a constant white noise, muffling the broader world.

I don’t remember much of what we ate in Indiana but my grandmother gave us money to buy a stove and refrigerator for the kitchen. We bought them at Sears, which was a short drive from our house. Grocery stores were not open on Sundays, so we had to plan. We got to know several family-style restaurants, many run by Greek immigrants, where we would get away from home for a dinner out. (Excerpt from a draft memoir, March 16, 2025).

The Calumet Region can be characterized by its proximity to Lake Michigan, and being the home of the largest concentration of steel mills, oil refineries, and chemical plants in the world during the 20th Century. I adapted the name to characterize my life as “living in the Calumet.” The havoc wrought by the Reagan Revolution resulted in many tens of thousands of unemployed industrial workers who were the raison d’être for our company to establish a driver recruiting operation there. During my six years working in the Calumet, I personally interviewed some 10,000 job seekers spread out across the states north of the Ohio River. A person learns a lot about American culture while doing that.

That’s the problem. I’m stuck with getting out a literary funnel to narrow the scope of my narrative. There are simply too many stories to tell.

My time in Indiana has a fixed beginning and end point which can be dealt with. Long time readers of this blog have likely heard some of these stories, like the post Flint and Reagan’s Wake which tells about my experience in Flint, Michigan in 1988. The balance a memoir writer must achieve is in the mixture of hardened memories and rediscovering our past lives through research. Including some of the hardened narratives is a must. They just can’t dominate the overall story.

Achieving this balance is the real work of autobiography. In my early years, the stories remaining are fewer and the inclination is to include them all because it was reasonable to do so. Not so when the main work of a life begins. The issue of my ideology, combined with specific experiences that stand out is not a given. We need to turn more pages to make sure we get the narrative to align with our intentions.

Like many Midwestern homes, ours has become a cornucopia of stuff. I think about downsizing, and had better get on that or face an estate sale at the end of the line. For now, though, the accumulated memorabilia is the equivalent of a limestone quarry: the stuff of which to build my literary edifices.

Instead of disciplining myself to write a book of fiction in 1986, I continued to collect writings, journals, photographs, clippings, books, musical recordings, posters, and such until they would press hegemony into my 2025 writing space. One book into my autobiography, I am now mining this personal memorabilia to tell my story.

Let’s frame this with a passage from a letter I wrote to a friend:

I got a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald On Writing from the Book of the Month Club. Though I had little good to say about Fitzgerald before now, there is much of what he says here I find pertinent. I recommend this book; much of it makes sense to me. He speaks of an attic of albums, files and clippings being the bank account of a writer, I look around my study and say, ‘Of course.’ This spring I hope to draw on my account and invest in creative endeavor. Appreciation will come close behind. (Personal Letters, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, April 6, 1986).

I’ve been back and forth with Fitzgerald, but he got this right. The part he missed is the role living memory plays in writing. Sometimes memorabilia can trigger living memory, and that is the point of keeping it. The trouble I’ve found is letting go of it, both literally and figuratively. The best use of attic findings is to allow them to be a springboard for new ideas or a germ of creativity. What writers do here isn’t coal mining. It’s more like panning for gold in California. If an artifact doesn’t present value, we should get rid of it.

Organizing personal memorabilia for use is not a straight forward task. Like anyone, my tendency has been to throw things in a box or folder and tuck them away wherever there is space. As a result, memorabilia is scattered all over the house in a semi-organized mess. The wall of boxes outside my writing space is intimidating and inadequately marked. Boxes are seven high and seven wide, or 49 of them. This doesn’t count the other two walls of boxes, or the trunks, desks, and stashes in the living room and bedroom closet. Since I am following a chronological narrative, it would be best to arrange everything by date order. That in itself would be a too-long task.

There is a lot of writing to be found in memorabilia. That raw material is the easiest to convert to new narratives. Sometimes I quote directly from the past with minimal editing. Sometime I take previous pieces and completely rewrite them while preserving the essence. Either way the presence in the original usually shines through its new use. That’s what a writer wants. By the time I finish book two I expect I won’t have touched half of the memorabilia. If the narrative is good, I’m okay with that.