Behind the Scenes on the moment you decide to write about your life and an Exclusive Writing Lab exercise on organized chaos. And, a prompt.
Welcome into Flight School:
You’ve decided to write about your life. You’re spooked, worried, excited, curious, worried again, and then wondering…where the heck does one begin?
For me, the path went from remembering to researching, and then to what I call “organized chaos” which fit into two parts: writing a news report with primarily facts and straight journaling.
The story and then, the prompt.
A Path Unfolds Vertically🪜
It was around 1994-95 and I balanced rather precariously on a ladder leaned against an old arts and crafts style house that my second husband and I had purchased. (Remember, Mr. Steady from an earlier post?)
Steve felt renting didn’t make good financial sense, so we bought an old house and were fixing it up together.
Me, who had always lived in rentals and preferred modern and reliable construction. Sure. Yeah. Let’s buy a run-down, ramshackle, moldy, dry-rotted, insect-infested pile of timber a block away from a collection of porn shops and stripper bars. I love it! Let’s do it.
Back up that ladder (🪜 and talk about a metaphor).
There I was thirty feet in the air scraping bubbling old paint while NPR played through a transistor balanced on the window sill below.
When you’re up that high—after that initial terror you will fall off (no safety straps back then)—and performing manual labor in the hot sun, time bends, turns, and even seems to decelerate. At least it felt that way to me. The wind blew, the birds sang, and the sun arced west as long-forgotten memories lifted and then drifted into the most painful losses of the past.
There was no debating that my mother had died when I was seven, my father when I was nine, and my brother when I was twenty…but I found myself wondering how, why, and most of all what those deaths meant. I had been an investigative reporter for several years by then and had learned to ask difficult questions, but until I was up that ladder, I hadn’t begun to ask many of myself.
All that changed, making the purchase of that house on the edge of Portland’s red-light district an act of grace. Thank you, Mr. Steady.
How did my mother die, anyway? I had been told cancer…but here I was thirty years old, knowing a thing or two about cancer treatment, and my mother never had what appeared to be cancer…didn’t lose her hair, or go through any cancer-like treatments. And how did my father die? I was told a heart attack, but really? He was like what? Thirty-five? Maybe forty? Geez! So young. And then I was back to my mother. How old had she been? Thirty-three? Thirty-four? And what about my brother? Why did he end his life at the age of twenty-three? What was going on there?
I climbed down that ladder and got on the phone, calling around for procedures on requesting records.
Cause: quiet and reflection ➔ Effect: curiosity, questions, and then the search for answers. (If you are tracking our posts, are you seeing an arc?)
What began as a trickle of memory lead to piles of papers arriving at the house and the mailwoman calling, “You-hoo,” because she couldn’t find the darn mailbox…it had fallen off the house. Soon, I was buried in one hell of a story, only it wasn’t a news report, it was my life.
First, I typed up a timeline of events which became a factual accounting of each life and then death. Mother. Father. Brother. Since I had also managed to accumulate all the addresses of the various homes my family had lived in, I included a detail of where we lived to correspond with the dates of illness, hospitalization, and finally deaths. If you’ve read Blackbird, you will see this undergirding of homes. It was my structure.
Second, I invested in a Mead spiral notepad and planted myself at Torrefazzini over on NE Weidler. With an Americano and a cookie for fuel, I unloaded a storm of feelings that ranged from amazement, sorrow, confusion, betrayal, denial (that couldn’t have happened was a constant refrain), and fury. In the end, I think I filled about twenty of those notepads.
Report
n: a usually detailed account or statement
v: to give an account of
~ From Merriam-Webster
Reporting is an excellent skill that requires a person to step back and stick to the hard, provable facts. Emotions are there but you are encouraged to let facts take the lead. Think of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Marginal movie but Hunter was remarkable in the role as a producer in network news, weeping before the day began, and then focusing on her job.
I liked reporting and the work I did in various newsrooms from Billings, Montana to Portland, Oregon. Back in the day, I dated Edward R. Murrow’s great-nephew for a few years too. Talk about a man with integrity…both Murrow and his great-nephew who I’ll call J.
J and I used to listen to recordings of his Uncle Ed’s reports from WWII and later would talk about ethics, fairness, and the value of an impartial media for the security of a free nation.
J and I were devoted to those ideals until we learned, firsthand, how they were being eroded by capitalistic rot, the greed of our station owners, and spineless management. The journalism we had signed up for became a soul-less joke. J, me, and countless other remarkable men and women left the business in droves.
Heartbreaking, but predictable, I suppose. A necessary aspect of human evolution beyond my ability to comprehend.
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