Can a bridge be a memoir? Heck, yes! Add bridges to the list, along with all your other stuff from my last blog.  Nj.com and the "New Jersey" section of The Star Ledger reported this week that Paul Bartick, of South Orange, New Jersey, is working with Miriam Sumner, Lynne Smilow, and the Village of South Orange to name a bridge over the Rahway River in South Orange after Jonathan Felsman, a beloved South Orange community leader who died at the age of 57 of cancer on July 9, 2009.

Jonathan’s community initiatives included the South Orange Performing Arts Center (SOPAC), the town soccer league, building baseball dugouts at Meadowland Park, beautifying the Rahway River waterfront, and programming ideas at the public library.

“He didn’t give a damn about people’s reactions to his ideas,” says Bartick. “He sold his vision by capturing people’s imagination. Then he took action to make his shared vision a reality.  Jonathan really was the bridge that brought people together to make things happen.  That’s why the bridge is such an apt memorial.” 

Have you built or created something that is a memoir? (A wall, a bridge a window, a shrine, a monument, a statue?)

Write to me about it. Send me a photo. 

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?

Lucinda Mock’s Ginger Cookie Recipe by Martha Jewett

1. leaving your country of origin;
2. growing up in a faraway land;
3. being raped or sexually abused.

Past experiences such as these may seem too big to write about comfortably. But perspective changes everything. Check out these three memoirs and how each woman’s viewpoint has shaped her storytelling.

Leaving Your Country of Origin

Marie-Solange Benedict, author of Child of a Mountainous Land: Odyssey of a Haitian Refugee, writes a memoir about leaving her native Haiti in 1962 to escape the Duvalier dictatorship. She describes how she moved first to Liberia, West Africa, then to England, where she attended boarding school, and finally to the United States, where she currently resides in the Miami area. Marie-Solange, now an attorney, tells stories of how as an immigrant she encountered racism, struggled to overcome the frustrations faced by blacks in the United States, and finally transcended these problems through her faith in Jesus, God, and the Gospels. Thanks, Marie-Solange, for giving me an inscribed copy of your book.

Growing Up in an Exotic Land 

Jean Naggar, author of Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt, is a literary agent, book reviewer, writer, translator, and editor. Jean writes about growing up in the closely knit Jewish community of pre-1956 Cairo, Egypt. Her detailed descriptions, along with lots of photographs, detail a life that no longer exists, in the vein of Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, and Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt.

Being Raped or Sexually Abused

Ann C. Willis, author of The Secret Behind the Church Altar, sat at the exhibit table next to mine. She told me she had driven from the Dallas area to attend the Self-Publishing Expo with her nephew, who shared the driving on their 27-hour trip. Ann’s memoir, like the movie Precious, takes up the theme of a young woman who is raped, sexually abused, and pregnant by her father. In Ann’s case, her father was a minister. Now a pastor herself, Ann gives seminars for others on how to deal with rape and sexual abuse. The Secret Behind the Church Altar is also available on Amazon.