Introduction to All That Matters
by Peggy Rambach

At the first session of the Wellness Community’s Memoir Writing Workshop, the word “cold” came up. How cold it was in the examination rooms. How cold it was outside of Radiology. “I wanted to tell everyone to wear warm-up suits,” said Christine Micklitsch of her less experienced waiting-room companions. Cold tables, cold instruments against warm skin. Room thermostats set low for the optimal performance of the machines inside them and only johnnys to protect the people who would go inside the machines. The johnny: a garment that was universally reviled. “Who designed those things, anyway?” someone said, and everyone laughed.
The room was filled with a long and polished conference table, light from the two walls of windows that looked out over trees and rocks and the Charles River, and a group of people whose shared experience and purpose generated a camaraderie that guaranteed that cold would never be part of this experience. Hard work—yes. Some frustration, it’s true. One student did confess to groaning and temporarily abandoning (or maybe throwing) her manuscript across her living room when she saw how thoroughly I had covered it in roller-ball green.

But the participants in this writing class were not going to experience the emotional catharsis that comes from writing in free-form. No. If they were going to experience any kind of benefit, therapeutic or otherwise, it was going to come from a strict adherence to discipline. Mine was the Boot Camp, you might say, of support center writing workshops. But this was only because we were writing in the literary form called memoir, and because we were writing for an audience. And that is hard.

Here at the Wellness Community was a roomful of people who shared an intimate knowledge of how life is inclined to distribute loss, pain, hardship and heartache in the manner of chicken feed. You’d think, given their raw material and enthusiasm, the actual writing would be a cinch. But the more immediate and deep a story’s emotional significance, the more challenged I am to show the writer how to write it well.
Writing anything feels like jumping off a boat into the middle of the ocean, so of course you want to grab onto something that promises to keep you afloat. Well, chronology always appears to be just the thing. The linear approach. After all, our lives are stories that unfold in the manner of a timeline: we’re born, we live, we die. So why not begin all stories at the beginning and just record one part of it to the next, to the next, until there are no more parts to record. But unfortunately what you get is something about as interesting to read as a Palm Pilot calendar; the experience so recorded might be good for posterity, but not for meaning.
So if chronology is out, then what? Well, that’s where all the green ink comes in. You chop. You add. You rearrange. And you begin at the beginning again and again and again to find a path to the single moment, the sole image that will, when rendered with honesty and specificity, open up to reveal to both writer and reader a great surprise: the moment when the personal truth becomes universal.

Christine Micklitch’s hat, for instance, becomes her, who she was before she had cancer, and who she will never be again. The feel of breeze in a place Pat Connolly never felt it before hints of new discoveries in unexpected ways; Patricia Griecci’s inexplicable preference for the color pink becomes the first sign of her emergence into a life she never wanted, but nevertheless must live. The touch of Elaine Brilanstone’s mother’s hand on her hair, the feel of Harriet Berman’s daughter in her arms, hands stained with blackberry juice in Sazi Marden’s memoir of her childhood, and the taste of a cookie that Cheryl Sisel eats with her grandchildren—every image speaks of more. A wedding charades as a funeral in Debbie Hemley’s memoir, “Veteran.” And in the opening of a piece that Leo Sicuranza wrote in the only class he could attend, a hospital sign that says “Patients” shows how we should never be defined.

And though these writers might have thought that the drama and gravity, the beauty and personal significance of their experiences were reasons enough to make them worth writing down, they were to discover the real one by doing the hard work of the writing itself, by embarking on what writing really is: a search.
I was privileged to be the leader of their expedition.

Opening the Door to Healing Arts
By Peggy Rambach
Originally published in The Boston Herald and in Literacy Champions 2003-2008, a publication of the Massachusetts Literacy Foundation

I decided to be a writer when my chemistry professor told me to drop his course before I flunked it the very same week that the poet, Denise Levertov, told me she liked my poems. So, I graduated in 1980 with a BA in English and did what most writers do who want to teach for a living; got a terminal degree, began to publish stories and articles, and won grants and fellowships while I taught year after year as a college adjunct instructor. Then, finally, in 2001, I published a novel.

I had no illusions that it would be an Oprah Pick or that it would even stay in print longer than a year or two. All I thought was, Yea! Now I could finally get a real teaching job, full-time, with health care, a retirement plan, maybe even an office, free parking and an actual salary that would liberate me from my dependence on family.
Well, maybe at a college in North Dakota or Nevada, but not in Boston. So after some anguish, I took the philosophical view that my apparent failure was a message. And it said that maybe I should do what I wanted to do, even if it meant foregoing the possibility of making what any self-respecting adult would call a living.
I wanted to be a Resident Writer in Healing Arts.

Somewhere along the way, the New England Foundation for the Humanities had asked me to teach a course designed to encourage the patrons of a senior center to tell their own life stories. And when they did, I saw how it validated who they were, restored their self-worth, and connected them to their community. And I determined that everyone our society isolates and stigmatizes should not be denied the chance to contribute to it through the arts -- in my case, writing.

But after two years of enduring the quizzical looks of elder-care activities directors with budgets that barely covered refreshments for Friday night Bingo, I had to concede defeat and return again to kicking at all those closed doors to academia, until they defeated me too. Which was when a new one opened that led to my collaboration with the Asian Center of Merrimack Valley Inc. and produced the book Seeds of Lotus: Cambodian and Vietnamese Voices in America. Then, in 2005 the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Vermont Arts Exchange knocked at my door and invited me to be a lead artist in their Healing Arts Initiative.
It was my alliance with 501C3 organizations that won the confidence of funders like the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center and the Jane’s Trust and that got the go-ahead from administrations to implement classes at health care facilities and support centers across Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. Places that served my new students: people living with mental and physical disabilities and mental illness, people with early-stage Alzheimer’s, people living with HIV, people with brain-injuries, and the cancer survivors who wrote the anthology, All That Matters: Memoir From the Wellness Community of Greater Boston. I also taught clinicians, family caregivers and the students at Tufts University School of Medicine who wrote memoir to examine their losses and vulnerabilities, to understand their own humanity, so as to heighten their sensitivity to their patients’ and be more apt, as a result, to care for them with greater empathy and compassion.

But no matter whom I’m teaching, my method stays the same. No fancy exercises. We might just read two poems that say different things about the same subject, like a time of day. Morning, for instance. And after we interpret them, I point out how they were constructed, the poets pretty much just listing their morning ritual. That’s it. No adjectives like happy or sad, no explanations. “Yet,” I say, “you all understood what they were saying.” So, I encourage my students do the same. “Write about morning, or afternoon, or evening, or whatever you want, just by saying what you do,” which is non-intimidating and ends up producing good poems, the kind that use concrete imagery to express abstract thoughts.

For memoir, a photo of a rake, an umbrella, a toy, or just saying a word like “hose” “apple” or “bike” is bound to make one memory pop out of a zillion others. Apple picking, or a water fight, or your first two-wheeler. “It doesn’t have to be a major event,” I say, “to be meaningful.” But most of my students choose to write about the major ones anyway -- not births or weddings, but more like, the night they spent locked in a closet, or told their children they had cancer. They bravely step back into their bodies, as I suggest, to record what they smelled, and touched, and saw, so as to dramatize, rather than summarize, a story.

It’s definitely not the journaling, free, or reflective writing we normally consider therapeutic. No, I do the opposite. I encourage my students, from the start, to form memory’s amorphous swirl of image and emotion into a coherent and communicative shape that is the poem or short memoir. Because it is the discipline and challenge of working in a form that moves my students beyond what they already know to discover what they didn’t know they knew. And that’s the moment that heals, the moment when meaningless pain or a forgotten life becomes meaningful -- to everyone. Becomes art.