Old Skydiving Memories

We’re cleaning out the garage, straightening out the old boxes of holiday decorations, tools, tents, furniture, books, and old paperwork. In the course of this, I found a manuscript of my 1995 skydiving memoirs. Oh. My. God. I was so earnest at twenty-nine, half a lifetime ago.

At the time, I wanted the memoir to be exploration of the questions, “is truth a static thing to be discovered or revealed, or is it an evolving thing that one grows into?”, “what are the boundaries of self, and when am I not-I?”, “how does one navigate and integrate different cultural groups?” and “what have I got to show for my thirty years on this planet?” Reading the account now feels like a collection of description-lite, barely-strung-together situations.

It mostly works on a mechanical level, but it doesn’t seem to work on a cathartic level—part of the problem is that I am not giving the reader enough background information. If I were going to write it again, I would introduce some of the folks more thoroughly. I would look for and emphasize repeating images and motifs in the descriptions of the jumps. I would address the elephants in the room: Arcosanti, my burgeoning queerness, and my failures at finding True Love and Romance. And I would add the last skydive I ever did, by myself, a few days before I returned to Oregon.

Labyrinth, Dreams, and Memories

Sometimes I dream I'm walking through a large mansion.  Other times, I'll be trying to get to an airport, and I half to walk through suburban neighborhoods where all the streets are thwarting me by dead-ending or running in long perpendicular swaths across my path.

Another labyrinth dream Saturday morning.

I was at my grandmother's old farmhouse, or a house like it near the coast.  The house had been built around 1900 out of wood.  The interior was dark, with darkly stained wood and dark fraying fabric.  The house was falling apart; the lower two floors were mostly intact, but the upper forth floor was falling apart.  I walked up some rickety stairs and up to the third floor and realized the house was a house in a house.  The landing was rotting away, and the floor had the feeling of having once been a roof, but above me was the shell of an outer house.  

I don't remember much about what happened in the dream.  My mother's family was there, and there was some labyrinthine moments going from room to room.  A family ritual of some sort was happening; I think family members who had died long ago were being disinterred and cremated and their ashes were being taken in a silver urn to a special place.  

Over all of this was a sense of an impending tsunami.  

Coincidentally, at a writing conference today, one of the workshop exercises was to remember a childhood incident and work with it.  What came to the forefront was a memory about visiting the old farmstead, getting lost in the woods surrounding it, and sub-sequentially striking onto an old gravel road and hoping that it would lead me back to the farm (it didn't exactly, but I did get back).  

While it was interesting to make the connection between labyrinthine dreams and getting lost at the farmstead, the issues surrounding the memory made it difficult to write and made me think about writing characters and writers writing therapy.

Critiquing Memoir

Every now and then someone submits a memoir to the Wordos.  This is usually confusing to the table because A) memoir is typically an idea plot hidden underneath a event plot, and B) it can be difficult to look at just the text of a memoir and critique protagonist in the memoir as a well-written character and not the author as a person.


One of the things that I learned from a memoir writing class was that a good memoir has a rhythm or procession of symbols that can be discovered within individual vignettes, and this rhythm is mirrored in the overall memoir.  In general, the vignette follows the form stasis, discovery, tension, more tension, crisis, conclusion.  This was extremely helpful to realize when I went to see the movie, "Before Night Falls," based on a posthumous memoir of Reinaldo Arenas.  The movie was much less confusing once I realized that every little story (and the entire piece) was using the metaphor of a rising above everything in a balloon which is out of control and subsequently crashes.

It was suggested by our instructor that the events, settings and people we write repeat -- sort of like the same way the same symbols would aggregate in a dream journal.  She further suggested that we write stories about ourselves to explore a question we are asking ourselves.   For example, in my class assignment, it was pointed out to me that I chose to retell events involving attempts at expansion by ignoring rules of physical safety (a canoe stunt, trancing out on the dance floor, a near-accident skydiving, and an automobile-bicycle collision).  My memoir was organized around self-identity and boundaries.

If you choose to cast a life event as a memoir, you might want to ask, "What does this event (or series of events) mean to me?"  Or you might look for emotional similarities.  Or you might ask, "What have I learned at the end of this that I didn't at the beginning?"   Also, truth is stranger than fiction.  It may be true that X happened in real life, but it still needs to be plausible in a manuscript -- so for the sake of readability, an author can and will take poetic liberties with events.

In terms of critiquing memoir -- or any manuscript for that matter -- it's also helpful to keep in mind the narrator of a manuscript is a character created by the author, and that an author is not one of their characters.  In memoir, it can be easy to lose track of the boundaries between the author as a person, the author's persona, and characters in the manuscript.  Address the text, not the author.


The American form for memoir was set by Frank Conroy in "Stop-Time." (It's not always cheery reading.)  An interesting look at author, persona and memoir may be found in Ruth Reichi's "Garlic and Sapphires."