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Craft of Writing

Celia Jones

Writing to Remember

"It's all like a dream," was my father's response to my question about what it was like looking back on the last 70 years of his life. Now my own daughter is bemoaning the fact that I haven't told her enough about my life, especially my 20s. Since her father and I immigrated to Australia from Berkeley, California, before she was born, she has had to grow up with little extended family or the gatherings that are usually a rich source of family stories. Her grandparents have passed away. Her father died four years ago, and I suppose she feels her connection with my personal and family history is tenuous. So, in my 50s, I felt that I should begin transforming the collage of mental images that represent my past into coherent stories.

As I approached this task, I reflected on something Dorothy Parker said about writing being the process of "applying bottom to seat." So, I sat and sat for hours, playing computer games, reading e-books, surfing publisher sites for contributor guidelines, and not writing one word of my autobiography. I lacked confidence. I regretted not having regularly kept a diary when I was young, and was afraid I wouldn't remember enough detail from my past. Also, since I'm not anyone famous, I wondered if I could write anything that would make a connection to not only my daughter but other readers as well. Would I read this myself? Only if it was genuine with intimate details, but I was uneasy about what I'd find when I started digging and equally uneasy about sharing personal experiences. Writing true tales is a bit like amateur acting: in both cases, your performance can awkwardly expose your vulnerabilities and innermost feelings to the scrutiny of others.

What finally helped me were "memory triggers" – music, photos, and objects through which I could resurrect, in amazing detail, significant events and life experiences – and the ability to stand back and look at these memories as a third person with "me" as one of the main characters.

Stories From Song
My first trigger came via the radio, in the form of the old Carpenters’ song, "We've Only Just Begun."

Appropriately, this was the same song on the car radio that very early morning 34 years ago when my husband and I drove to the airport and took the plane to Reno to get married. That song conjured up from my magic memory box details of the tacky wedding chapel, the Southern minister, and his wife. An old postcard I found in the desk of the Christmas Tree Inn evoked little details of the dark, wood paneled dining room where we sat in front of a roaring stone fire with our brandy balloons and, later, the snug cabin where we spent our "blizzardly" wedding night.

As I wrote, with that song in the background, these memories became not just mental images, but complete stories. So, I wrote "My First Wedding" – not as a memory, but as a short story with a plot, a beginning, and an ending.

Photographic Memories
After seeing how the song and postcard triggered a story, I got out my huge collection of old photos. You can tell so much from the background in a photo, the clothes and, most of all, the body language. Even stiffly posed photos, where people sport fixed smiles, reveal underlying emotions and relationships in the way the subjects arrange themselves and touch or do not touch each other.

A photo of my brother and his new wife taken at his first visit home after his long estrangement was most revealing. In the photo, my brother was standing behind his seated wife, Jane, with his hands on her shoulders, smiling tensely. Though obviously petite in comparison to my brother, it was evident she was the strong one in the relationship, exuding a quiet confidence that things would go well. In the background was the typical disarray of my mother's kitchen, and on a table near Jane were the three homemade cakes she brought for us. Studying this photo gave me a sense of the setting, characters, and emotions. This spurred me to write a story called "The Homecoming," about my brother's reconciliation with our family, and years later, a tribute to my brother's wife on her death, "Jane, as I Remember Her."

Things Past
In Remembrance of Things Past, the French writer Marcel Proust, ill and confined to bed for years, wrote about how a madeleine cake and cup of tea brought alive a wealth of memories: "...so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea." I also found that certain objects helped me recall whole scenes.

The other day, I came across the tassel from my high school graduation, and I suddenly remembered the awards ceremony where my proud parents were secretly summoned to watch me receive a scholarship. It reminded me how this represented an important crossroads, where my parents finally gave their approval for me to pursue an academic course of study at a university instead of the business course they had envisioned for me. That, in turn, led to me writing "My Name is Celia," based on the memory of a summer job as a receptionist for an employment agency following my first year at university. The manager at the agency made me change my name to "Jill" because her last receptionist was Jill, and she couldn't remember to call me by my real name. At the end of the summer, I really appreciated getting back to university academia, where I could be Celia again.

The inspiration for my story "Flying Home" came when my granddaughter, playing dress-up with the hallstand hats, uncovered my father's old tweed flat cap. Fingering the soft wool and the frayed peak of the cap, the years peeled back as I remembered my first European trip as a callow 19-year-old asserting her independence. I remembered how I excitedly scanned the Arrivals crowd, anxiously looking for this hat when I returned from my adventure. Describing my joy at seeing my father, I realized that at that time, I still needed my parents in my life much more than I knew. This piece led to another piece that evoked memories of the trips home from Australia, when that cap and my father were always there to meet me, except for the last time when my father lay dying.

Magic Memory Triggers
By relying on the three magic memory triggers – music, photos and objects – and forming my memories into stories with plots, themes, and endings, I came to see patterns of behavior and glean the significance of the particular incidents of my life. I relived the joys and sadness of those memories and realize that in re-creating my past through the writing process, I am writing to remember. But I'm also leaving something very personal of myself to my children and grandchildren, and perhaps to others who will read these stories and appreciate and identify with them.


About The Author

Celia Jones earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors at UC-Berkeley in 1969 and immigrated to Australia in 1972, where she gained a Diploma of Education at Monash University, Clayton, Victoria. She worked as an English, French, Drama, Social Studies, and Library high school teacher for 25 years. She has been published in two anthologies: When Parkinson's Strikes Early by Blake-Krebs & Herman, and Voices from the Parking Lot by Greene, Saydler and Kendell. Her booklet called My Spirit Still Sings accompanies a video of the same name on Parkinson's Disease.