Category Archives: Creative non-fiction

Is the memoir trust worthy?

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I  recently met with members of the history department at the University of Washington, professors who are interested in the Cold War. One, Professor Elena Campbell, born and raised in Russia’s closed military city where their nuclear submarines were manufactured, has memories of the Space Bridge contact between KING 5 TV and Glastelradio in 1985. She watched with the fascination of a young girl and worried that her city was the primary target of our NIKE missiles. Dr. Campbell is interested in oral history as one major source for her research and writing.

Our conversation turned to how much the historian can rely on oral history or written memoir for assembling the factual content of written history. These professors teach their students to beware of assuming a memoirist has the historic “truth” in their pages.

Professor Eric Johnson followed up on our conversation by sending me two articles that analyzed the problem of taking memoir as history. The first, and you can read it by clicking on this link. hudgins_autobiographers_lies-1, is a scrutiny by Andrew Hudgins of his own memoir, The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. His article, printed in The American Scholar in 1996, is titled An Autobiographer’s Lies.

I commend it to you as you contemplate memoir. The byline of my blog comes from Ernest Hemmingway who said about his last work, the memoir of his early years in Paris The Moveable Feast, “all memoir is fiction”.  My Life as Fiction. The truth as best I can remember, yes. But…..

Enjoy, Betsy

writing this memoir

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Open Borders, A personal story of love, loss and anti-war activism.

Writing this memoir served two aims. Through the examination of a period of intense political activity in my life, I have been able to trace my passage to independence. Mine is the story of many women born during World War II and raised at a time when the prevailing expectation of women in America was that they’d marry, raise children, and be a supportive wife. This conflicted with the beliefs my parents had instilled in me. They’d sent me off on teenage adventures and challenged me to do anything I wanted in life. These messages fought for expression in my own development and early marriage to a man five and a half years my senior.

The second aim is political. During the 1980s a group of citizens in Seattle organized around a belief that ordinary people could influence governments to settle conflict through diplomacy rather than war. I took up one small piece of this peace-making effort and charged forward. Open Borders chronicles those efforts. Hundreds of other Seattleites and ordinary citizens across the country have stories to tell about their friendships across the Iron Curtain, all of which may have contributed to its fall in 1989. Four friends who were involved in such efforts have granted me permission to include an essay by each of them documenting how their life and work were affected by the anti-nuclear war efforts.

Writing Open Borders made me realize how proud I am of the many people who worked so hard in the 1980s to prevent nuclear war. We embraced our so-called enemies with curiosity, compassion, respect, and the firm belief that we all shared the common values of love of place and love of family. Nuclear war was not an option for us ordinary people. It would destroy all we hold dear.

Today, I am more frightened by the possibility of nuclear war than I was in 1982. I also feel alone. If there are others trembling before the “fire and fury” rhetoric and the repeating rocket and hydrogen tests, I hope this story of our activism will stir others to find ways to organize and seek peace through cross-border understandings of our common humanity and the love we each have for our homeland.

Why does it seem so few are alarmed at the threat of nuclear war today? Are we in denial or overwhelmed by the enormity of so many doomsday crises at once? Or have we, as I worry, left behind as antiquated that practice humans have engaged in for millennia of gathering in groups to work things out with minds firmly connected to hearts? Eye to eye conversations are much more effective than thumbs tapping through electronic devices. Through the latter half of the 20th century, as much as the Kremlin and the White House disagreed with how our world should be organized, one felt the leaders grasped their sober responsibility for the future of the whole world and genuinely did not want to put all that fire power to use. Today, I am not so sure. Putting words on paper is my way of taking up arms again. Action gives me hope.

Citizen Diplomat

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Not everything belongs in a good story, even when the scene was an important one in the dramatic arc. Perhaps that is one service a blog offers a writer, giving her a place to share what will not be in the final version.
Not every title is the final and best one. I began Evil Empire as an exercise in Fiction Writing I at the UW under Scott Driscoll. The assignment was to describe someone getting a surprising bit of news. I chose to fabricate a moment in the trip Don, my first husband, and I took with thirty others to the Soviet Union in 1983. We went as tourists, but our objective was to deliver 3000 letters signed by 30,000 Seattlites to people in our sister city, Tashkent.

In the middle of our Tashkent visit, a large peace rally was staged. Don gets some very bad news just as he is about to deliver our message to the good people assembled to hear us.
That scene is in the middle of the first part of the story.
It turns out that the story Evil Empire had a subplot I needed a couple friendly readers to catch and explain to me. The story is really about the protagonist’s unconscious desire to step out from behind the dynamic leadership of her husband and take her own path. I have renamed the piece, Citizen Diplomat.
Here is the scene that ends up on the cutting room floor.
We checked into a Soviet-style modern hotel outside of central Moscow. Don and I joined an optional bus tour of the city, a Soviet version of the Gray Line tour. I wanted to keep moving while there was daylight, but the slate sky and leafless trees, concrete block buildings and empty streets could not keep me from dozing off. I jarred awake at the mention of the College of the Atlantic by a couple of young students. Their English accents called to mind our goddaughter, Elizabeth Ransome, who was a student in that little-known boarding school in Maine. It had been years since we had seen her, talked with her or written. Elizabeth, the young man informed us, was in Moscow but not on this tour. He gave us the name of their hostel and said she’d be there the next evening. What a coincidence. We told him who we were and to warn her that we would find her the following evening if at all possible. There were no cell phones or other methods of communication in 1983. The official plan for our evening was a performance of the Moscow Opera. How could we excuse ourselves from this event to find Elizabeth?

 
Back at the hotel, most of us caught up on much-needed sleep before a quick supper and bus trip to the Bolshoi Theater. What magnificence. The enormous gold and crystal chandelier sent shimmering light over the elegantly dressed crowd. Sable coats, long black gloves, fur hats and leather boots mingled with tuxedos and evening dress. The music of Russian conversation, strident to my ears, rose and fell. Opera goers spoke in tight groupings in the vast, high-ceilinged hall. The vaulted ceiling with its mosaic patterns, the arched windows with drawn red velvet curtains transported me to the time of Czar Alexander. The revolution and iron-fisted communist regime faded.

 At the intermission, Don and I took all our belongings and left through the great columned entrance to the nearest subway station. The few people on the street hurried along taking no notice of the Americans in their midst. Descending into the underground station was like visiting the catacombs. There was no sound coming from below. To our astonishment, we found the platform thronged with well-dressed people standing in complete silence. Was conversing in public a risk? Or were Russians taciturn and naturally private. We found their silence sinister.
Following the directions Vladimir had given us, we discovered our goddaughter and enjoyed a late night visit with her. After saying goodbye, Don and I stood outside Elizabeth’s hostel waiting for a taxi to take us to our hotel. We marveled at the synchronicity of finding her in Moscow. It got us thinking about the Refuseniks whose families were desperate for exit visas and freedom, the freedom we took for granted. Glancing around in the empty street beneath a cold starless sky, Don remarked that we could talk about them but only there, a solitary place. He wished we could get rid of the letters we carried for them while in Moscow, but he didn’t dare. If those film mailers ended up in the wrong hands and were traced back to our group, we would have risked everything. Marlow would have to keep them hidden and remain above suspicion until our last day in Leningrad. Hard as it was for me to keep a secret, I figured if so many people could keep silence on a crowded subway platform, so could I.
Thanks for reading.
I’d love to hear your stories of diplomacy or chilling experiences when visiting, living or working under totalitarian regimes.
May I live long enough to tell all my stories for then I will die contented.  Betsy

Hope in uncertain times

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“…creative intelligence is especially concerned with solving problems of meaning.” Justine Musk, blogger on writing.
Justine’s post on the power of story to find yourself is exactly what I’ve been doing with my urgent desire to write the stories of my life. Turns out that I have been more interested in the movie of the story’s action than in the self I was becoming.

Stories are how we shape and understand our reality.
We create the world we live in by the stories we choose to tell about it.
There’s a Hopi saying: Whoever tells the stories, rules the world. Justine
I’ve written pages describing life events and missed the inner voice, the emerging Betsy Bell who needed to tell these stories to find out who she was/is.
Citizen Diplomacy in Seattle in the 1980s, culminating with the Good Will Games, changed the direction of many people’s lives. They found their peacemaking voices. I’ve written this story from my husband, Aldon Bell’s and my point of view, but only now recognize how deeply held values from childhood pushed me to uncomfortable action. The kind of action Sam Adams took organizing the Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution, while his brother John Adams remained the gentleman negotiating with propriety. I’ve always identified with Sam Adams.

I’ve written this story from my husband, Aldon Bell’s and my point of view, but only now recognize how deeply held values from childhood pushed me to uncomfortable action. The kind of action Sam Adams took organizing the Boston Tea Party leading to the American Revolution, while his brother John Adams remained the gentleman negotiating with propriety.I’ve always identified with Sam Adams.

I’ve always identified with Sam Adams.
Back in 1976, our family returned from a year in South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Eygpt, Greece, France, Italy and England to Boston. Boston was in the throes of the bicentenial celebration. One exhibit invited the viewer to participate vicariously in various events leading up to declaring our independence from English rule. At each event, we had the opportunity to line up with the actions of the various colonists. Don and I went through the exhibit together and we not surprised to read the computer printout at the end. Who was I most like among the New Englanders of the pre-war period? Sam Adams. I laughed when Don came out the spitting image of Ben Franklin, known for shmoozing on all sides of the issues, sewing seeds in favor of independence without warfare.

Who was I most like among the New Englanders of the pre-war period? Sam Adams. I laughed when Don came out the spitting image of Ben Franklin, known for schmoozing on all sides of the issues, planting seeds in favor of independence without warfare.
My story about Citizen Diplomacy in 1983-4 was more overtly revolutionary than Don’s. I struggled with wanting to play the traditional1950s role of supportive wife and the fire in my belly that called for direct action. This is the central struggle of the narrative, not the Target Seattle trip itself. Many of the original pages have hit the waste basket.

The reader of the final version of my story will resonate (or not) with the struggle we face today in a world lining up US adversaries on all sides against Trump’s American First agenda. Do we give up with the pessimistic view that nothing can be done? Disaster is inevitable. Or do we say it will all be fine while looking through our rose colored glasses?
Neither pessimism nor optimism are helpful. My story is about finding hope in an uncertain world, keeping on with no attachment to outcome. Action breeds hope.