Since this newsletter is, or at least was before October 7th, about writing family histories, I thought I’d share with you a workshop I’m giving tomorrow in Graz. (Since October 7th, I acknowledge its been more about being Jewish in the world and in writerly spaces, and I thank each of you who’ve stayed for that conversation as well.) The workshop is about using the collage essay in narrative medicine, but it is a useful form for writing family essays as well, because it is a form that allows for—in fact depends on—gaps between elements of the story and what both the reader and the writer can find in those gaps.
Here is the handout for tomorrow’s workshop:
You’ll notice that it uses a number of craft techniques that are also very useful in writing family stories. It shifts perspective frequently. It asks the author to speak alternatively from their patient, friend, and employee positions, interspersed with the authorial voice of the first person essay. When we are writing about family history, we also have to speak in a variety of voices: the voice of the researcher, the voice of the descendent, the voice of the inheritor of our family’s choices, etc. We may also be including the voices of other people, such as relatives who have graciously given us the stories of our past that only they know, or even the voices of authorities who have documented some elements of our family’s past.
Stories of family history rarely present themselves to us in a continuous narrative, and often we mute their complexity if we try to force them into one. Novels and short stories depend on the idea that what happens to the characters in them is the direct result of those characters’ actions and choices. When something external drives the plot (except in many forms of speculative fiction), literary critics shake their heads and mutter “Deus ex machina” at the author… “G-d from the machine,” meaning a thing which comes out of nowhere to impact shape the story. But the truth is that in real life, particularly if you are telling Jewish stories, many of the events in our lives are things that happen to us rather than things we’ve caused. Our family narratives are shaped by pogroms, expulsions, attempted genocides, all interspersed with periods of peace. The collage form allows for us to show event and impact, rather than cause and effect, by doing away with the need to create linkages between those two things.
I hope some of you who are writing your own family history find this exploration useful. And now, because this newsletter is indeed most often about being Jewish in the world at this moment these days, a picture of my cousin Rachael (who is the keynote speaker at this conference) and me in front of my favorite piece of graffiti in Graz:
Great pic. Love that.
Sarah, Thank you for sharing techniques about writing family histories. So many times we heard the stories from our elders and now it is our time to reflect, see how they affect our lives and record them. My best, Martha