Memoir class helps alumni connect with their stories and with each other
By Chelyen Davis
In a nondescript room on the third floor of Cabell Library, a dozen or so people gather around a wide u-shaped table. Most brought something to write with and on, while a few have laptops.
“The first principle is you can’t go wrong,” VCU associate professor Sonja Livingston reassures them. Whatever you write about is the thing you should write about.”
Livingston is leading an Alumni Memoir Writing Workshop, offered by the Office of Development and Alumni Relations and the Humanities Research Center. The attendees are all VCU alums, mostly Golden Alumni who graduated 50 years ago or more.
Stefani Bonner (B.S.’15), director of affinity programs at DAR, says the alumni memoir workshop is something offered a couple of times a year, and it’s always popular. She says it helps alumni foster nostalgia about their lives and their time at VCU.
Cristina Stanciu, director of the VCU Humanities Research Center, says the collaboration started years ago, when she worked with Diane Stout-Brown (B.S.W.’80) (now retired from DAR) to offer alumni programs that included writing workshops.
“It is a wonderful collaboration we are very proud of, and look forward to offering every year both on and off campus,” Stanciu says.
Livingston tells the class that often, people don’t know where to start their memoirs because one’s life story is such a massive topic.
The good news is, there’s no one right way to write a memoir.
“Any writing is good writing,” she says as her second principle.
And finally, Livingston says, don’t worry about what your family will think.
“Your job isn’t to figure out what other people are going to think about it. Your job is just to write,” she tells the group. “Get everybody out of the room. Let it just be you.”
Different ways into a memory
Over the next two hours, Livingston, who teaches in the Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences, leads the group in reading short passages of memoirs to illustrate ways in which a story can be told. Some examples focused on people or places, or what Livingston calls “perhapsing,” a way of writing about something that happened while letting the reader know the details may not be literal.
She gives them prompts to try out different ways into a story — a list of things that identify where you’re from, or a description of people in a photograph. Then she asks for volunteers to read what they’ve written.
The prompts bring out a variety of writing. One man writes of remembering his grandfather through “the sweet moldy smell of his record albums.” Another recalls his young experience in the Boy Scouts and, when prompted, recites the entire Scout Law (a 12-point code of conduct) from memory.
Readings bring affirmations from others in the group, commenting that a piece was good. Livingston pauses to ask what specifically they liked, and two of the women say a particular piece — about the place where a woman raised her sons — resonated with them.
Livingston nods.
“We recognize in your story something of ourselves,” she says. “When you write your stories, it is for you, but it’s also for other people. Human beings are hungry for these ways of connecting.”
Stories matter
People come to memoir writing, Livingston says later, because they not only want to tell their own stories, but they have a “hunger” to hear other people’s experiences.
“Sharing our stories increasingly offers a rare opportunity to connect beyond the ways we normally connect,” Livingston says. “As they sit there and hear each other’s stories, they’re reminded of how connected we are to each other.”
Livingston says it’s not necessary to write a book-length memoir to get something out of writing about memories.
“It’s a way to explore our lives and make meaning of them,” she says. “It’s revisiting but also organizing or putting together, making sense of, there’s a lot of meaning-making that goes into memoir writing.”
Often people are interested in memoir writing because they want to share family memories.
“We are hungry to know our people, and sometimes we don’t know that until we’re older,” Livingston says.
Family memories are what brought Cindy Chisholm (B.S.’84) to the workshop. She wants to write about her family’s history, including her parents’ immigration from Scotland and Ireland and Chisholm’s childhood in North Carolina.
She recognizes that writing about her parents’ lives before her own will require some creativity.
“I like the part about where I could do ‘perhaps,’ because there’s a lot of perhaps,” she says.
Wenda Pancotti (B.M.E.’77) came to think through ways to preserve memories and share a life story, but not one that’s entirely her own. Pancotti’s daughter, who had cystic fibrosis and died a couple of years ago, was a prolific journal-writer. Pancotti wants to take her daughter’s journals and put them together with chapters about her own experience of her daughter’s short but full life.
“She did an awful lot during the short amount of time,” Pancotti says.
Livingston said that people come to her classes unsure and overwhelmed about where to begin. They come with two major fears, she said.
“One is just not knowing how to begin or to organize. They might know they have all these stories they want to tell but they have no clue how to get them together, and their worry is that they’re somehow supposed to know that,” she said.
The other fear people have is that simply, nobody will care, “that their stories just don’t matter to anyone else.
“But they do. I can see them seeing, ‘Hey, I have a little gem here,’ and people will respond,” Livingston said. “Both of those things get helped by coming together in a workshop like this.”
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