An important building in the Jewett family's Civil War experience still stands. It is a church. Thanks to Vic and Dollie Masters, parents of Civil War historian Vicki Profitt, for providing the current photo. And kudos to Clay Feeter, publisher of Standup Journal, for the old photo. Side-by-side they show the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee (on the right) and Hospital No. 8 for wounded Union soldiers (on the left). Same building. Different purpose.

My great-great-great aunt, Mary Jewett Telford (1839-1906) , was the only female nurse caring for the 600 Civil War soldiers in Hospital No. 8 for eight months from 1863-1864. When Mary first applied for a nursing position with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, she was turned down. She told no one of that rejection letter, but "throwing it into the grate made of it a 'whole burnt offering to her righteous wrath.' " With her parents' blessing, she set off from her home in Lima, Michigan, to Nashville, Tennessee.  Eventually she was offered a position as a nurse in Hospital No. 8, after proffering letters of recommendation, including one from Michigan Governor Austin Blair, her father's friend. 

After eight months, exhausted and ill, Mary resigned her commission. She returned home and married Jacob Telford. They became adoptive parents of Civil War orphan girls. She was granted an Army pension. She went on to be a founding member of the Woman’s Relief Corps, a post-Civil War veterans support organization, speaker on the temperance circuit, and activist for woman's suffrage in Colorado. 

Check out Vicki Profitt's profile of Mary on page 4 of the latest issue of Historigram, a publication of the Perinton Historical Society. 

Was the building originally a church before it became Hospital No. 8? Was it re-commissioned as a hospital for Union soldiers during the Civil War? Does anyone know? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

Photo of Mary Jewett Telford

Courtesy of Floris A. Lent

Check out Di's blog memoir: He is a statistic. He is also a man. She writes about her grandfather, one of the 850 WWII vets who die every day:  "He was special in the sense that every kind and wonderful person is special. And he deserves to be remembered." In my blog about Frank McCourt, I said that his memoir, Angela's Ashes, taught us that we are all ordinary. But our memoirs can be extraordinary. Do you have an ordinary grandfather? Have you written something extraordinary about him? HHH  H

Here’s a free memoir form—a Dossier á la James Bond. I’ve been a 007 fan for a long time, starting with Ian Fleming's books and Sean Connery's movies, though I'm not crazy about Daniel Craig's 007 (way too brutal for me). Tom Hardy, recently in Inception, would be better. 

This past week marked the publication of The Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949 , the official history of the British intelligence service, the real-life inspiration for James Bond. Author Keith Jeffery writes that Ian Fleming based James Bond on MI6 spy Commander Wilfred Dunderdale and that the scene from Goldfinger where Sean Connery comes out of the water, unzips his wetsuit, and reveals his tux underneath is based on a real-life MI6 spy.

Even if you haven't had as much cloak-and-dagger adventure as 007, you will still find the Dossier entertaining, with topics such as "My Last Meal Would Be" and "Most Fun I've Ever Had." A lot of people have trouble getting started on their memoirs. The Dossier jumpstarts the process. It's easy. You just fill in the blanks. Instant memoir.

I bet when you're done with your Dossier, it will include at least one thing no one else knew about you, even if it wasn’t "Top Secret." 

I've blogged  about how your stuff  and a bridge can be a memoir. But as I was reading a Family Circle letter to the editor , I thought of something else. 

In "Thanks for the Memories," Terasa Goggins Gipson of East Amherst, New York, writes that as a new wife and mother, she devoured the pages of Family Circle. Flipping through an issue for the first time in years, she wrote, she was overwhelmed by many wonderful memories. "The articles on parenting, the fun recipes, the decorating ideas and wellness advice added up to a wealth of knowledge that has stayed with me."

Family Circle was a memory trigger taking Terasa back to her early days as a wife and mom.

Could you turn any favorite magazine into a memoir? Yes! Here's how. Find old magazine articles or covers (check eBay), and cut and paste them into a scrapbook, frame, or shadow box. Add anything else that's meaning ful to you. Some "memoir items" might be: photos, your children's homework, prize ribbons, school projects, recipes. Add your favorite recollections and memories–handwritten or typed. Decorate with ribbons, stickers, drawings.

If you would like to share your "magazine as memoir," you could give it as a gift to a new mom, perhaps your daughter or daughter-in-law, along with a subscription to Family Circle or one of your other favorite magazines. 

Offer to babysit so she has time to read!

I used to think memoir consists of three things: (1) writing, (2) in the first person, (3) about a thin slice of a person’s life. “The reader doesn’t want the whole iceberg, just the tip,” to paraphrase Russell Baker.

Now I realize memoir is much broader. First of all, you have a lot of other objectives–besides the act of writing itself–when you create memoirs. You want to: 

• record family stories
• research family history
• find lost relatives
• socialize with lost relatives once you've found them
• discover your DNA
• collect and preserve family data
• get over something traumatic
• tell the story behind a family memento
• create personal documents (video, audio, shadow boxes, etc.)
• get rid of something heavy which you've been carrying around (secret, imposition, demand)
• catalogue, organize, and archive family documents, photos, and memorabilia
• take the sting out of something painful
• save and identify family heirlooms
• capture family information that would otherwise be lost.

I now have a working definition of memoir which is much more broad. Memoir is the communication of what you want to remember and what you want to be remembered. Which leads me to two more points. First, you can get really creative and use any of the following as the basis of a memoir:  

• letters you quote
• recipes
• random memories
• your hopes for the future
• a secret you no longer want to keep
• family sayings
• something that always got on your last nerve
• a mystery you never figured out
• funny family anecdotes
• what you want your legacy to be
• describing what’s going on in an iconic family photo
• a list of your favorite things and why
• describing how you got around a long time ago
• how a business used to make money
• your worst vacation
• how you kept the house cool in the summer
• the most expensive thing you ever bought
• a portrait of a relative using your five senses (see, hear, feel, taste, smell).

Second point. You don’t have to write at all. Lots of your "stuff" can be turned into a memoir:    

• Photographs
• Video
• Audio
• What things cost
• Collages
• Political buttons and pins
• Jewelry
• Fabrics
• A telephone bill
• “Shrines” you create
• Scrapbooks
• Songs
• Guns
• Music
• Portraits
• Paintings
• Statues
• Pottery
• Drawings
• Furniture
• Clothing
• Games
• Puzzles
• Tools
• Maps
• Drawings
• Self-portraits

Even a packing list from 50 years ago could be the basis for a great memoir. So, I ask you:

• What do you want to remember?
• What do you want others to remember?

Tell me about the memoir you create. Send me a photo.

Abraham Verghese recommended in yesterday’s Five Best in The Wall Street Journal five of his favorite books by physicians, including two memoirs. Adventures in Two Worlds is A. J. Cronin’s memoir about being a young physician in a Welsh mining town. The Puzzle People by Thomas E. Starzl is the memoir of the pioneer transplantation surgeon.

The same thing is true when you write a memoir about a place that no longer exists. What is the transaction between you and the place? What is its pull? What memories do you bring? What is the real place like now? Who used to live there? Who lives there now? What is still there? What is gone?

Barbara Krasner visited her grandmother’s ancestral home, Ostrów Mazowiecka (Ostrova in Yiddish) in Poland while she was doing research for a young adult novel that takes place in nearby or Zaromb (Yiddish). Her 30-photo exhibit of these Jewish communities which no longer exist, “My Home Is Gone—Remnants of Jewish Poland,” will be shown at the JCC of Metrowest in West Orange, New Jersey September 12-October 31, 2010.

What is the pull of a place that no longer exists? How do you write about it? Let me know.

I once found a photo tucked inside a book at an estate sale. The photo showed a Model T in ruins, destroyed by what looked like a head-on collision. The photo jumped out at me. I took it the man, about my age, who was running the garage sale. His mother had just died and he was selling the contents of her house. I handed him the photo. "This looks important," I said.

He stood transfixed, staring at the photo. "Mother told us about that crash. Both she and Dad survived it. But I never knew if the story was true."

My mother-in-law, Maxine (Shanbar) Marshall, has an iconic memoir photo. Her photo shows an apartment building (not hers) being moved from its location near Poplar Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The reason? The construction of The Mystic River Bridge (now the Tobin Memorial Bridge).

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Why not make your memoir writing easier? Why not organize it around an iconic photo?

Tom Jewett, my younger brother, builds and flies airplanes. Tom is a lifelong aviation expert-amateur. When he was a little boy, he told Mother he wanted to learn how to read in order to build model airplanes. He went on to earn an aeronautical engineering degree from Purdue. In the photo above, he's at Centennial Airport in Colorado, showing off the upgrades he recently completed in his Long EZ. Tom has an April birthday. On his birthday, he always has Ton Cake, his favorite. Here is Tom's recipe memoir about Ton Cake:

Ton Cake Recipe Memoir by Tom Jewett

Our friend Julie from Cedar Grove, New Jersey, got stuck when she was writing a family memoir about her mother.  Julie wanted to include her “bits and pieces”— her random memories about her mother. But she felt they wouldn't be as good as the rest of her memoir, which was structured chronologically. She quit.

Beginning memoir writers often get stuck at this point. They want to write about material that is unconnected or unrelated, but don't know how. Memoir Writing Technique #1 enables you to write coherently about unrelated items, such as: random memories, fun you had, childhood memories, collections of family sayings. We like to compare the random "bits and pieces" to pearls. The key to making a beautiful necklace is how you string the pearls together. 

Step One–Write and Organize the Bits

Write down the memory bits. Don’t worry about the order.  Then, group the bits into segments or sections by theme. For example: Let’s say you want your memoir topic to be about sayings you heard growing up.  Write them down in no particular order, as they come to mind. Then, categorize the sayings into segments or sections, for example:

• funny things your Uncle Bill always said—that’s one segment or section
• something a gas station attendant said to your mom which became part of the family lore—that’s a segment or sections
• Acronyms your dad quoted all the time because he had been in the Navy—that’s a segment or section

Lastly:

• Something your football coach lived by and which you adopted—that’s a segment or section

 These segments or sections will become paragraphs or parts of paragraphs, depending on how long they are. Note: if your bits and pieces are too short to turn into sections or segments, simply put them in a bulleted list. 

Step Two–Write an Introduction

The introduction must tell your readers what the memoir is about and must signal to the reader how the memoir is structured.  

Here’s how you do that. Look at all the segments or sections you’ve just created. Write an introductory sentence that is broad enough to encompass all of them. For example:

“These are the family sayings I heard growing up.”

“Here is everything I remember about living in Utica, New York, in no particular order.”

Step Three–Insert Transitions

Step three is to insert transition sentences between the sections or segments, as necessary. Transition sentences are like the string in a necklace. The string turns the separate pearls into a work of art. Transition sentences or phrases give the reader a heads-up about the structure you are using and provide coherence. Here are examples of  how transition sentences would start:

• “Another thing that happened was…”
• “Another time”
• “In addition,”
• “Also”
• “There is also”
• “He also said”
• “Nothing else meant more to me than…”
• “I don’t remember much more except”

Step Four: Re-Read and Edit 

Read through your memoir. Check whether your introduction is broad enough to cover all the segments or sections in your memoir. Check whether the transitions add the right amount of coherence.  Read it aloud to yourself. Ask a friend to read it. What you are checking is: will my audience be able to see the structure? Have I provided enough transition sentences? Is my overall topic clear? Bear in mind that someone reading this in the future may not know you, or anything about you.

Our Memoir Writing Technique #1 enables you to write a professional-quality memoir about unrelated or loosely related bits and pieces.

Let us know how your memoir turns out. Write to us at writeyourmemoir.com