The New York Times reported recently about yet another scandal, this one with quite a twist. Apparently, the Christmas essay Neale Donald Walsch posted at Beliefnet.com a few weeks ago was plagiarized from an essay Candy Chand published in Clarity ten years ago.

The essay relates the story of the writer’s young son (both Walsch and Chand have sons named Nicholas) participating in a school Christmas pageant. When members of the choir were meant to hold up letters spelling the name of the song “Christmas Love,” the girl with the “m” held hers up upside down, creating the phrase “Christ Was Love.”

Heartwarming, yes. Which is why it has been circulated around the internet for years, where Walsch apparently found it. It’s beginning to look a lot like plagiarism.

But here’s the trick: Walsch is claiming that he actually believed the story was his own. He had told the story so many times since first hearing it that somehow his memory wove it into his own experience. When he meant to remember the words on the page, his mind provided images instead—of his own Nicholas no doubt—and he took it for a real memory.

Sounds plausible, but many are skeptical.

As one whose mother has corrected his memory on more than one occasion, I want to believe Walsch. But does that excuse him? Is it still plagiarism if it’s unconscious plagiarism? And what does it say about the memories we write that aren’t being claimed by someone else? Are they to be trusted? How do we manage our memory?

DG, M.E.

I’m not sure if this is sign of mental instability or pure genius, but our friend James Frey (author of the memoirs A Million Little Totally Made-Up Pieces and Leonard: My Inspirational Best Friend from Jail Though I Wasn’t Really in Jail) has a blog and voicemail, and he is urging you to leave him a message:

Just call (917) 720-7510
(Be cool Be Nasty Say whatever you want)

Yes, he is inviting abuse, and if you wish you can even listen to what everyone says: http://bigjimindustries.com/saynow2.php

But the disturbing part is that most people are calling in to say nice things like “you are the literary voice of this century” and “despite the critics, your books rock.”

Of course, all of this underway to create a groundswell of interest in his first new third novel:

**** BUY IT HERE ****

(Another note from Gary Presley, author of the Brevity essay Proselegy and Coda)

Funny things happen on the bumpy road from life to death, and being mauled by a grizzly bear would rank far down on my list of incidents to include in a memoir. But as part of a discussion group focused on creative nonfiction piece, I did read an interesting take on a bloody confrontation with Ursus arctos horribilis.

One member of the group asked, “Why do we read this stuff?” I knew what she meant. When I was a kid, I was a worry wart, and a kindly teacher once told me “Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof,” which I learned later she borrowed from the Holy Carpenter.

But the question also made me realize that I believe reading for information and knowledge may be secondary in the human dynamic. I think we crave Story. I think we seek to fill the same need once expressed around campfires thousands of years ago – when we had nothing to protect ourselves from grizzly bears and other things intent on blood and slaughter but a flint-pointed stick.

The thing is, every person has more than one Story, and sometimes, at least for me, I write and rewrite and edit so much that I feel as I’m drifting away from those memories that comprise who I am. By that I mean the the internal narrative I relate to myself, the film strip that unwinds in memory as I subjectively reconstruct what happened.

I begin to think, “Is it a true internal narrative, at least in the sense that readers will understand as true.”

Hold on now — I’m not going to go all Peggy Seltzer on you.

The quality I am attempting to describe is more akin to remembrance. We humans are prone to back-construct a narrative, one often more dramatic than what actually occurred – primarily because we need a memory with which we can live without huddling in a corner crying.

I’m a forgiving sort, and so understanding all the foibles which plague our fragile psyches, I think most internal narratives may consist of both remembrance and amnesia, missing perhaps some things so deeply painful or guilt-inspiring or less-than-heroic that we cannot face, explain, or even understand.

Obviously then, if there is an internal narrative, there is a narrative constructed from outside perceptions.

There are people I know who look through the window into the zoo enclosure where this creature named Gary Presley lives, and they glimpse a beast far different from the one shining in its internal narrative. There are windows for my wife, for my brother, for his wife, for my one-time boss — for every person who knew me “when” and those who knew me “then.”

Like every other human being, I am a prism. No single person (call that person a “biographer,” or classify that person as yourself with the memoirist label) will ever be able to construct a complete and unbiased and entirely truthful narrative of a human life.

I suppose – no, let’s say “I have faith” – that there is be One Mystic Ultimate Truth, but there are many truths. The best we can do is to find the truest part of our own when we want to set down our world on paper.

–
Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

Memoir scandals show we need a new definition of ‘truth’

Are memoirs and their authors bound to tell nothing but the truth? I’ve been asking this question for years and the answer, it seems, is yes. And no.

After reading about the recalled memoir “Love and Consequences,” I gasped. The author, Margaret Jones, aka Peggy Seltzer, lives only a few miles from me, near the dingy classroom in the Lane Community College Downtown Center where I teach memoir writing one evening a week. Jones has written a complex, beautiful hoax. In my mind, it doesn’t make the writing any less complex or beautiful. What I don’t know is what to call it.

Or, Why You Should Never, Ever Send Your Children to School in Oregon.

FROM AN EXCELLENT OPINION PIECE IN THE EUGENE REGISTER-GUARD:

While commentators elsewhere in the country were condemning [Peggy] Seltzer [and her fraudulent memoir, Love and Consequences,] for deceit and betrayal, the intellectuals of Eugene have been circling their academic wagons around her. So far, a professor of English and one of philosophy at the University of Oregon have put their prestige on the line with spirited public defenses of Seltzer’s moral right to lie. A teacher of memoir writing at Lane Community College has also been very sympathetic.

Linda S. Clare, the LCC memoir teacher, admits in a March 13 guest viewpoint that she herself advises her students to “embroider” their dull life stories with untruths.

Seltzer, she says, simply went too far. (Perhaps it should be noted here that Seltzer, who is white and was raised in middle class comfort, somehow passed herself off as a half-Native American, who was brought up by black foster parents in South Central Los Angeles where she ran drugs for the Bloods.)

“In my mind,” says Clare, “that doesn’t make the writing any less complex or beautiful. What I don’t know is what to call it.” While commentators elsewhere had no trouble in knowing what to call Seltzer’s book, Clare reluctantly concludes only that: “ ‘Love and Consequences’ probably can’t be a memoir.”

But Gordon Sayre, a professor of English at the UO, has no such ambivalence. Seltzer’s book, in his estimation, is a fine example of a memoir in the great American tradition.

“Since the early days of American literature,” writes Sayre in a March 9 guest viewpoint, “the boundaries between novel and autobiography have been indistinct, and readers have eagerly confounded them.”

Sayre’s point is that readers like to be duped by fantastic true life tales, and so what if they do? Who’s hurt by it, anyway?

Certainly not Sayre, whose Native American literature students at UO included Seltzer. The professor feels no resentment that his prized student fooled him with her memoir and snookered him with a class paper in which she fabricated a childhood on an Indian reservation.