Finding the Mini in Memoir

AN INTERVIEW WITH JENNIFER LANG

By Lisa Rizzo

Jennifer Lang

Writer and teacher Jennifer Lang’s memoir, Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature (Vine Leaves Press 2023) takes the reader on her journey with her French-born husband, Phillipe. Using experimental prose and forms, Lang reveals her struggle with their different religious needs while making peace with Israel as their final home. Poet and memoirist, Lisa Rizzo met with Jennifer to discuss her artistic decisions.

Lisa Rizzo: How do you describe your book? Would you call it a collage memoir?

Jennifer Lang: This book is a love story with a lot of conflict about home.

I wouldn’t describe it as collage because it’s linear, chronological. I call it unconventional, untraditional, experimental. Sometimes people equate experimental with hybrid, but I don’t consider my book hybrid because I didn’t combine different genres.

LR: What was your impetus for shaping your pieces as you have, putting prose on the page in different ways?

JL: It’s been a non-linear writing journey. I started with a 65,000-word manuscript that felt overwritten. After working with an editor who gave me extensive notes, I put it away for a few months. During that hiatus, I took a Kathy Fish Fast Flash workshop that rocked my world. I started writing compressed prose about my Israeli life and tightened long, over-written pieces to 500 words, 300 words. The words popped!

When I saw a submission call from the women’s magazine Mslexia to write a 300-word piece using the prompt “J is for …” I went back to my manuscript and found the word “jury” buried in a 3,015-word chapter. I zoomed in closer on the word and cut the excess to create a flash piece.

Then I used the same process to identify words for every letter of the alphabet, reshaping my manuscript completely. But the arc of the story still wasn’t right. I kept thinking about how a mentor during my MFA program and a friend who’d read the overwritten manuscript said the same thing: “I think you’re asking the wrong question.” I kept searching.

LR: What was the right question you needed to ask of your book?

JL: “What was my journey?” I realized that journey, which I had first framed within the context of my marriage and in geographical terms, was different than my internal journey, which began in 2011, as soon as we landed in Israel.

With that understanding, I started a new manuscript, beginning anew from when we returned to Israel in 2011, which is the topic of my next book, Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses, (Vine Leaf Press, 2024). Crafting the earlier story into Places We Left Behind came later.

LR: I love this book’s subtitle: memoir-in-miniature. Why miniature?

JL: Because my book is 13,000 words, much shorter than a traditional memoir. The chapters or vignettes, whatever you want to call them are compressed, some only one sentence, or charts or lists. They’re mini.

For example, one reader gave me the feedback that they wanted to see the pros and cons of my quandary over moving in with Phillipe. That’s when I realized I could rearrange the prose into lists to mirror my conflict in a different way.

(page 9)

LR: You also have one chapter titled Coordinates. Why did you choose that form?

JL: I was fearful of sounding repetitive. I put the directional coordinates of White Plains, NY, where we were living at the time, and Israel to show their locations. I had already written about the distance between these two homes, but I could show this again without using traditional prose, without sounding redundant.

(page 61)

LR: And the flow chart, why did you choose to begin your book with that chart?

(page 5)

JL: I needed a way to help readers understand the geographical leaps my husband and I made as a young couple, then with our children, to show how different my young adult life was from my childhood. I wanted to use a very spare form to do that.

LR: One technique you used was striking through text. What were you hoping to accomplish by using that technique?

Here’s an example:

“Do I understand that he changed his lifestyle for a country? Absolutely not.” (page 2).

JL: I wanted the reader to know what I was thinking but felt ashamed by some of my own thoughts. The striking through gave me distance in an odd way.

LR: What is a connection between using these different forms and the “aboutness” of your book?

JL: I like pithy writers; I like self-deprecating writers. But I’m not like that. I didn’t know how to find that voice. I kept trying to go at it from different ways until I finally figured out that these forms were a way to embrace my voice.

LR: It’s interesting that you were looking for your voice in writing at the same time you were looking for your voice in the story.

JL: Now, because I don’t know how to write “normally” anymore, when I heard you say that I saw Voice².

LR: I love that. Any final words for others?

JL: Ironically, as a writer, I felt that words didn’t suffice. That pushed me to try unconventional forms to express ideas that prose couldn’t. To keep writing another draft until I liked what I got. To do something to change the writing. To dare to find something new. 

_____

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jennifer Lang lives in Tel Aviv, where she runs Israel Writers Studio. Her essays have appeared in Baltimore Review, Under the Sun, and Midway Journal. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is an Assistant Editor at Brevity, and a longtime yogi. This October, she’ll teach “Dare-Push-Play on the Page” workshop at Manhattanville College. She has two unconventional books forthcoming, Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature (9/5/23) and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses (10/15/24), with Vine Leaves Press. Find her on Instagram and Facebook, here and here.

Lisa Rizzo is the author of Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 National Federation of Press Women Awards, and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her work has been published in Longridge Review, The MacGuffin, Rain Taxi and the Brevity Blog. She was a 2022 writer-in-residence at Craigardan Collective. Visit her in Portland, OR where she is busy at work on a memoir or at her website. 

When Memoir and Poetry Meet

AN INTERVIEW WITH TANIA PRYPUTNIEWICZ

By Lisa Rizzo

Poet and tarot teacher, Tania Pryputniewicz’smemoir in poems, The Fool in the Corn (Saddle Road Press, 2022), travels through pivotal periods in her life beginning in early childhood on an Illinois commune and ending with the death of her mother. Poet and memoirist, Lisa Rizzo met with Tania over Zoom to discuss the writer’s decision to meld poetry and memoir together in her new book.

Lisa Rizzo: Why did you decide on using poetry in your memoir?

Tania Pryputniewicz: Poetry was my first love, but I’ve always written prose. When I went to the Iowa Workshop, I found myself back in the same landscape as the Illinois commune where I lived with my family from five to eleven years old. Surrounded by fields of corn, I spent months writing prose chapters about that time. I showed it to an agent, but she wasn’t interested. I let that writing lie for twenty years but never stopped writing poetry.

I began writing prose again in 2017 because the pull to make sense of my time on the commune was strong. I took a memoir workshop for the deadlines to produce work and to receive feedback. But the material was too painful for me to directly confront or name what had happened in my family. As I wrote prose, I realized I had poems that dealt with the same subjects. I decided that the poetry made it easier for me to deal with the difficult feelings that arose.

LR: How did you write your memoir in poems?

TP: Each poem deals with a significant incident from my life. But since poetry has an associative arc that’s more intuitive than prose, it requires the reader to do a little more work. Because of that, I felt the poems needed to move in a straight line, like beads on a string. The memoir unfolds chronologically from living in the commune, leaving the commune, and re-engaging with society, then on to graduate school, marriage, motherhood and losing my mom to cancer. At the end, I loop back to the years in Illinois with my last conversations with my mother about why we were on the commune.

I also wanted to make sure my readers understand that while these poems are very imagistic, they all deal with real events, so I included a preface that gives background information about the commune. That’s not something I would normally do in a poetry collection.

LR: Do you see advantages to poetry and/or prose?

TP: For me, poetry has always been that magical language where I can witness and dream about possibility. Poetry is image driven, and I love that an image can carry layers of meaning through its associative power. For instance, in “Sanctuary,” one of the poems about my mother’s illness and death, the line “the auroras of sorrow” recalls the aurora borealis, the beauty of the vast night sky and those dancing colors, but here it is also linked to my grief.

You could say that I’m hiding behind poetry and its fairytale nature instead of writing directly about difficult situations. Instead of going into the everyday details like why at the commune we had no food in the house or were controlled by an unstable leader. I believe poetry gave me the language to deal with that pain. 

LR: How are memoir craft elements like narrative arc or transcendence presented in poems?

TP: Just as you structure a memoir by listening to what each chapter does to the one next to it, you pay attention to the order of the poems within a section and how they resonate with each other to find your story.

Memoir is very anchored and rooted, dealing with themes that arise within the narrative arc. I would argue that sometimes you can even find that whole arc within the world of one poem. It’s just more distilled and compact. Then the narrative arc develops poem by poem. When you meld poetry and memoir, there’s this beautiful crossover. The poetry invites you, the writer, to find images significant to your life, while memoir gives you the power to reflect about the interior growth you experienced once you find those images.

I hope that through the accretion of poems you do get that arc of change. The reader can see that an image that appears in the beginning has shifted in some way by the end. For instance, there is the central image of corn that first appears in the title poem, “The Fool in the Corn,” in which, as a young girl, I used corn kernels, the only thing I had, to make my brother a birthday present. This image will return, especially in the last poem, “Letter to the 8-Year-Old Living in the Corn,” in which I address my child self on the commune, reassuring her that the corn of the commune gave her the strength she needed.

LR: Any final words?

TP: As a writer, you only write what you can withstand. Poetry freed me to write this book. It was the only way I could tell this story at this point in my life. If I decide to go back into it in a different way, I’ve given myself a springboard from which to do that. To me what’s important is getting your story out there in whatever form you are called to write.

____________

Tania Pryputniewicz is the author of the full-length poetry collection November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, 2014), Heart’s Compass Tarot: Discover Tarot Journaling and Create Your Own Cards (Two Fine Crows Books, 2021), and a memoir-in-poems, The Fool in the Corn (Saddle Road Press, 2022). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tania teaches poetry and tarot-inspired writing classes for San Diego Writers, Ink and Antioch University’s Continuing Education program, including a course on poetry and memoir. She lives in Coronado, CA with her husband, three children, Siberian Husky and formerly feral feline cat named Luna.

Lisa Rizzo is the author of Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 National Federation of Press Women Awards, and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her work appears in journals including Longridge Review, The MacGuffin, Rain Taxi and Brevity Blog. She was a 2022 writer-in-residence at Craigardan Collective. Visit her in Portland, OR where she is busy at work on a memoir or at www.lisarizzowriter.com.

A Review of Marcia Meier’s Face: A Memoir

By Lisa Rizzo

At seven years old I fell out of bed, slicing open my chin. I woke up with blood pouring onto the rug. My mother scooped me up, pressing a towel to my face as my father sped through empty streets to the hospital. The towel, originally white with a bright polka-dots, slowly turned red.

I tried not to cry at the stinging shot of Novocain and a blue cloth placed over my face. Overhead lights shone through the material turning the shadow of the doctor’s hands into terrifying five-legged animals. No pain but the tug of needle and thread piercing my skin. Afterwards, I shivered at the row of black stitches crawling like a spider out of my face. Now the only reminder of that night is a thin white scar across the bottom of my chin.

My experience, while frightening, cannot compare to the devastating, life-threatening injuries Marcia Meier suffered as a five-year-old. Her book, Face: A Memoir, shortlisted for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award grand prize and an honorable mention in the memoir category, opens on a bright summer day in Muskegon, Michigan. Marcia, proud that she has just learned to ride her new red bicycle, was in the middle of a crosswalk near her home when she was struck by a car. She writes:

I had been dragged, caught with my bike under the car, nearly two hundred feet…
I was lying on the street under the driver’s side. The bike was stuck under the carriage;
I was still holding the handlebars. The left side of my face was gone.

She begins recounting her recovery with the question What is a face?  Her memoir asks the reader to consider what a face represents to a person as well as those around her, and how losing that familiar face could affect who we become. Weaving the past and present together, Meier seeks answers to help her heal. Using a braided structure, she moves deftly from the voice of a hurt child to that of the reflective adult seeking to make sense of how that initial trauma influenced her life.

Meier spent her childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring twenty surgeries until, as a teenager, she gained the courage to refuse more operations. With her injuries partially mended, she began to build a better life for herself: graduation from college with a degree in journalism, a successful newspaper career, marriage, and motherhood.

A few days before her wedding, Meier’s father gave her an envelope filled with photographs and documents related to her medical treatments. Unable to face them, Meier tucked the packet away along with other unwanted items in a storage unit, just as she tucked away thoughts of those treatments, believing she had accepted her past and its scars. But in 2006 when her marriage began to fall apart, Meier realized she had to confront her childhood.

Many of the book’s chapters open with epigraphs using excerpts from the surgeon’s notes of her procedures. In much the same way that Joan Didion returns again and again to her husband’s heart attack in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, these notes create a circular pattern, returning to the little girl in her hospital bed before spiraling into future events. The repetition of medical terms reminds the reader of the terror Meier as a child must have endured, even as she deals with how that suffering influenced the adult she became.

Similarly, Meier cycles back to the people in her life: her mother and father, husband and daughter, siblings, the clergy and nuns of her parish, and the surgeon who reconstructed her face. This highlights her struggle to understand how the aftermath of her accident affected them as well as her relationships, particularly with her mother. Even as her mother kept vigil at her hospital bed, she remained emotionally distant from her child. Meier seeks answers to what happened between them and how her mother’s own tragedies influenced their interactions.

Meier makes good use of her background as a journalist by including investigation into subjects such as Jungian psychology, the history of skin grafts as well as research about childhood complex trauma. This information is skillfully woven, moving from objective facts to personal narrative, giving the reader the impression of the author stepping back now and again before coming close to confront the extent of her pain.

This is a memoir of self-discovery on both physical and emotional levels. Meier learns to accept her body scarred from skin grafts as well as her damaged face through horseback riding as a teenager and practicing yoga as an adult. She learns to accept her mother’s distance with empathy. She confronts her feelings of betrayal by her religion, recognizing that she blamed her parish priests and nuns for not giving her the solace she craved. And, most importantly, she learns compassion for herself, accepting the wounded child she was and in some respects will always be.

In the end, Meier returns to Muskegon where her story began, completing the cycle. She makes a pilgrimage to the important places of childhood: her family home, the site of her former school, the intersection where she was struck by the car. Completing the cycle by facing those places from her past helps Meier begin the next part of her journey.
___

Lisa Rizzo is a poet who has to turned nonfiction. She is the author of Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016) and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her work has appeared in various journals including Calyx, Longridge Review, The MacGuffin, and Brevity blog. A newly retired teacher, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she is working on a memoir. Visit her at www.lisarizzowriter.com.

69,728 Words and Counting

By Lisa Rizzo

How does a poet morph into a memoirist? It happens when poetry can no longer restrain words that spill over the sides of a container composed of lines and stanzas, instead filling page after page. It happens when the need to lay down a narrative becomes so compelling that a poet must begin to write the story of her need.

I had always wanted to write but in my early years struggled with narrative. I have a drawer full of old short story fragments and aborted novels, all typed on onionskin paper with a portable typewriter (yes, back in those days!). I’d never dreamed I could write poetry but one day, when I admitted to another story failure, in frustration I gave verse a try. Even now I can picture myself sitting in the university library when the thrill of my first (very badly written) poem ran through me. I believed I had found my calling and gave up wrestling with narrative then and there. In my last forty-odd years of writing and publishing, I believed that would never change.

Many decades later, my father, then in his mid-80s, began to slide into the shadow world of dementia. As I watched my father losing words, losing memories and losing me, I tried to capture the progression of that loss, to capture him on the page. I wrote poem after poem, several of which appeared in my collection Always a Blue House, published the year I turned sixty. By then my father, living in a nursing home, couldn’t come to my book launch party. He couldn’t even understand that I’d written a book, much less read any of the poems.

My father had always been a closed man, emotionally damaged by his Depression-era childhood. Abandoned by his mother, he grew up in orphanages and foster homes. That early trauma left him with an inability to express his emotions, turning him inward, into a silent man. A silent father with a daughter who lived for words.

As his disease progressed, I found myself compelled to write about our strained relationship, a subject poetry couldn’t satisfy. I wanted to come to terms with our conflict and with his dementia that had stolen any opportunity to heal our breach. As suddenly as poetry came to me long ago, the desire to write a memoir appeared. Since my father had such trouble expressing himself with words, I would help tell his story. And that required the full sweep of narrative.

In my transition from poet to nonfiction writer, I battled insecurities not very different from those that plagued me starting out. For so many years I had called myself “poet” and not “writer.” Those two labels connoted to me two completely different types of artists. I had to battle the power of those labels to realize: what is a poet if not a writer of poetry?

Since I earned my living as a language arts teacher, I did what I would advise any of my students: start learning. I took online courses and read book after book on writing nonfiction. I read as many memoirs as I could, soaking up every technique and way of telling I could find. I had to learn to combine my poet’s voice with the “telling” reflective nature of memoir, how to lay myself on the page as the genre requires. Poets can, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “tell it slant,” shading their emotions and selves behind metaphor and imagery. I came to see that I’d found it easier to write about difficult topics in poems by keeping myself in soft focus. Memoir requires bold-faced honesty, the reflective voice revealing the writer’s deepest foibles on the page. Still struggling with this, every time I write I replay the wisdom of a writer friend: we must see more of you on the page.

I wondered if I the poet, used to works taking no more than a page or two, could find the fortitude to amass words page after page, until I created a book. A daunting task—but the thrill of pages piling up kept me going.

I persist and the word count increases. Now I can say writer as well as poet. I focus on the doing and not the labels. Next to my computer I keep William Faulkner’s quote: “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.”

________________________

Lisa Rizzo is the author of Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 National Federation of Press Woman Awards, and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in journals and anthologies including Calyx, Naugatuck River Review, Longridge Review, The MacGuffin, and Unmasked, Women Over Fifty Write About Sex and Intimacy (Weeping Willow Books). She is at work on her memoir in progress, Half-Orphan: A Daughter and Her Father. Visit her at www.lisarizzowriter.com