Previous Grandma Camps have included traveling to exciting locations like New York City, where I introduced my granddaughters to my love of theater. It was a big step down, from New York City to Yakima. I was worried the girls would be bored by my small-town memories. I needn’t have been concerned. They did me proud. They were fascinated by my childhood and wanted to know how we did things “in the old days.” They asked me countless questions about my youth, about my friends, about my school days. By showing them my own history, reliving my own childhood, I shared with them the very things that shaped me into the woman I became. My hope is that one day they will look at their lives differently and will learn that they too are shaped by their life experiences, by their friends, their schools, their own history.
When I look back on my childhood settings, I can see God’s hand so clearly over my life. I can see the seeds of who I became from those earliest days. The English writer Graham Greene said it best: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”3
For me, those moments came during my childhood in Yakima. A good example of this was when my eighth-grade teachers held a fashion show with all the sweaters and items I had knit. Because I’m dyslexic, school was always difficult for me, and Sister Seraphina looked for a way to show me that while I struggled with reading, math, and just about every other subject, I had the ability to create something beautiful. I could be a success. So she organized the show to showcase the things I had knit. This came at a time when I badly needed a sense of self-esteem, an identity. I became known as the knitter. Who knew what a profound effect my love of knitting would have on my life . . . and my writing career?
Another example of the importance of setting in shaping my life is the hours I spent at my father’s upholstery shop. The feeling I had in my father’s shop crept into my writing. In my novel A Good Yarn, I wrote, “The flower boxes immediately reminded me of my father’s first bicycle shop, and it was almost as if my dad was giving my venture his nod of approval. The colorful but dusty striped awning sealed the deal in my mind. I knew this old-fashioned little shop could become the welcoming place I’d envisioned—and it has.” My father did not have a bicycle shop, but I was describing the feeling of a daughter whose father was proud of her choices. That came straight out of my own life.
Anne Rivers Siddons, when asked about the Southern settings of her books, described those settings like this: “When you get into the smaller towns, the suburbs, you see everything through a kind of shimmer . . . . It’s like all those years, people and events dance a little ‘squim’ in front of your eyes and you see everything through that.”4
Don’t you love that? All the years, all the people . . .
As we begin to remember our own stories, it’s important to consider our own settings. The home of our childhood. The neighborhood or city streets. Our church. Our school. Our friends. Our extended family. As we reexplore our roots, it becomes easier for us to identify those seeds of who we are today. For instance, that fashion show that Sister Seraphina arranged for me may well have sparked my lifelong love of knitting and birthed the novels that have centered around knitting. Or my father’s upholstery shop—which forever colored my attitude toward small businesses—may have been the impetus for the creation of Blossom Street, a community of small businesses created as a setting for the series of books by the same name.
Take out your photographs and look at them with new eyes. Like the clues and glimpses C. S. Lewis discovered as he reached back into his childhood to the memory of that tin box his brother had decorated. When you do, you’ll discover that God has already planted those seeds deep within you and you should be able to trace their germination.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Writer John Updike offered this advice in The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, Volume II:
No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and plain, and the dusty corners of the world more interesting than its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers.5
Updike was talking about interesting settings for fiction, but don’t you think those humble, dusty settings make some of the best settings for growing interesting people as well?
I’ve met people who seem embarrassed about their humble beginnings. Don’t be. Think of Jesus. He chose to be born in a stable. We’ve heard those words—born in a stable—so often we no longer imagine it with our senses. We picture the artistic crèche of Christmas that is lovingly familiar, with angels at hand and shepherds kneeling reverently before the manger.
When was the last time you visited a stable? Do you remember an actual barn being anything like that? Unless it had just been mucked out and scrubbed down, Jesus’s birthplace would have been less like an exquisitely sculpted Fontanini nativity scene and more likely to make the Holy Family gag. Yet out of that rank stable came the Savior of the world.
When we consider the setting God chose for His only Son’s arrival into the world, doesn’t it make us want to think about the settings He chose for us?
Storytelling Prompt
Describe the house of your childhood—the one you remember best. Take us on a tour, pointing out the quirky things and the parts that make you wish you could go there again. Be sure to include ethnic details, the good, the bad, the scary, and all the things that make your roots unique.
Recognizing the Seed
Even when I was a young child, the clues about who I would become were all there—my love of books, knitting, storytelling, cooking, swimming, family, Christmas, and all things spiritual. God planted the seeds of my lifelong pursuits before I even had language to express the desires.
I don’t think that is unusual. Recently I read about William Morris—writer, decorative artist, and designer. He is considered to be the single most influential designer of the nineteenth century, leading the Arts and Crafts movement. His designs and patterns were inspired by nature, with a distinctive medieval influence. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who knew him as a child. At four years old, he was already reading Sir Walter Scott. The boy loved all things medieval. He even wore an authentic, child-sized suit of armor when riding his pony into Epping Forest. His biographers point to his childhood fascination with forests, gardens, flowers, and birds—all seeds of the art he would later produce.
Watch the children around you. When you observe a child absorbed in a particular interest, chances are that interest will only deepen with age.
As you begin to delve into your own story, take special note of the origins of your adult interests and longings. I’m guessing you’ll find the early signs of your grown-up interests and passions in things you loved as a child. “It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds perched in its branches” (Luke 13:19).
Three
IN THE DAYS . . .
Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.
—DEUTERONOMY 32:7
When we think about telling our stories, we tend to think in terms of events. What came next? Many writers do the same—we call it plotting out the story. Equally important, however, is discovering what came before. That’s referred to as backstory. It’s the important history of what happened before page one that motivates the hero or heroine for what is about to happen, for what comes next. In other words, the backstory is what leads up to the story that’s about to unfold. It’s everything that went on to get the characters to the place they are, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, when the story opens. By the time I write the opening line of a new book, I know each character’s motivation, because I know his or her history. You may never see the backstory, but if I didn’t have it, the characters wouldn’t ring true. A good writer knows that if you added all
of the backstory into a book, it would end up being a thousand pages—too much backstory slows down the action. We’ve all read books in which the writer dumps tons of information that has nothing to do with the story itself into the narrative. Those are usually the books we end up putting down after reading only a few chapters. The book has gotten bogged down in detail and the author has lost sight of what’s important to the reader. And what’s important to the reader is the core story. But you can’t get there if the author doesn’t know the backstory.
The author creates the backstory in order to get the story right. J. R. R. Tolkien was the master of backstory. He created his Middle Earth world rich with legends and lore. He spent so much time on it that some of his backstory eventually became novels in themselves, like The Silmarillion.
THE STORY IN CONTEXT
As you think about telling your own story, one of the first things you need to consider is your own backstory. We’ve heard it said hundreds of different ways: we are products of our age—children of a particular place in history and our unique setting. Our environment shapes much of our thinking. For that reason we’ll want to explore our backstory.
An important part of backstory is setting the milieu. Milieu is a French term that has no exact translation into English. It means the social context, circumstances, setting, time, and even the sphere in which the characters live and the action takes place. It’s the ethos of a period, not just a chronicle of events. For instance, I grew up in the fifties and sixties. The milieu included the controversial birth of rock ’n’ roll with Bill Haley and His Comets and the much-talked-about hip swivel of Elvis Presley. We enjoyed a carefree postwar optimism, the move to suburbs from the cities, and the idea that space might even become a new frontier with the launch of Sputnik. We saw a sharp rise in the fascination with the automobile and our national optimism was reflected in the soaring tailfins on the backs of cars. The advent of television changed the way we viewed ourselves, and we began to sense its influence on our lives. It was the age of hula hoops and hot dogs, processed food and French fries, drive-in movies and sock hops, boys in cars and . . . well, you get the picture.
My own milieu was unique, though it did include many of those iconic fifties elements. While the nation turned on black-and-while televisions to watch Donna Reed baking cookies and doing her housework in a freshly ironed cotton shirtwaist dress, apron, and high-heeled shoes, my own mother was a working mother. I didn’t come home to freshly baked cookies and a Donna Reed–like mother who couldn’t wait to find out how my day went. I came home to an empty house filled with books, an empty kitchen where I could cook, and a knitting project in my school bag. My milieu helped shape the person I became. And because of my hardworking parents—parents who loved my brother and me, even though their love didn’t look like the television sitcom kind of love—I knew early on what it meant to juggle home and work. And my mother was every bit as stylish as Donna Reed.
My world consisted of Catholic school, complete with uniforms and nuns, and a whole passel of cousins who lived nearby, went to school with me, and became like brothers and sisters. Oh, what incredible fun we had together.
And my milieu included books that took me out of my world and landed me in all kinds of different places. Children who are readers become romantics in the classic sense of the word. They live far beyond their own scope.
CAPTURING THE DETAILS
Sometimes it is difficult to catch the ethos of the era—the sense of immediacy. One of the ways to do that is to focus on details. Reread some of the descriptions above, like the size of tailfins on cars—make note of those unconnected details that come to your mind when you read that. These sorts of details often come up when we are talking with siblings or longtime friends. Sometimes just one detail will evoke a flood of images. “Remember old Mrs. Miller? Remember how she used to go out to the sidewalk with a knife and peel the wax blobs off?” You could take your notebook and scribble in this memory, plus the details like “the sidewalks of our childhood had greasy spots of melted wax all around the corner store, the remains of wax lips, wax mustaches, pickles wrapped in wax.” Those quirky details will usually spur further memories. If you are writing about these memories, or even talking about them around the table, you might want to explore how you reacted to those things. When you add your reaction, you’ve added another important layer to the storytelling fodder. Like: “When I looked at those blobs of wax on the streets I used to wish I lived near the pristine sidewalks of Mayberry.” Or you might imagine what your mother would have said if she ever caught you spitting gum or wax on the sidewalk.
In her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott offered a favorite story starter: “Sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches.”
It seems that everybody has a school lunch story.
She goes on to tell her own lunch story. “Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is . . . . The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay.”1
Lamott advises her students to “start with your own story.” She’d say, “Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don’t worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.”2
Just as backstory does for a novel, these details will add texture and interest to your own story. Chances are, remembering them will offer even more clues about why you are the way you are.
DEEPENING THE STORY
In addition to the milieu of your life, you’ll want to plumb the depths of your own backstory. Who were your people? Where did they come from? What is your spiritual legacy? My own family were Germans who had settled in Russia. They were hardworking farmers. I can trace much of my work ethic and love of family to my grandparents and their parents, who left Russia for a new life in America.
Many of you have rich immigrant stories in your family, too. That’s your backstory. Delve into your own history and that of your grandparents and great-grandparents. You might be amazed by what you find. There is something powerful in the stories of people who uproot themselves from everything and everyone they know and head into the unknown. We’re going to talk a little bit about the hero’s journey in chapter 7, but the immigrant story is a classic take on the hero’s journey. If your people came to America by way of Ellis Island, for instance, make the trip there. Trace the names on the wall. Try to imagine the adventure.
I wonder how many of us can catch even a small whiff of the fear that must have been part of the immigrant experience. Can you imagine being in a strange culture where you can’t communicate and probably have precious few resources? Like my maternal grandfather, many left their entire families behind, forsaking all that was familiar and comfortable. One of the most stirring things I saw when I visited Ellis Island was the strands of woven hair that immigrants brought with them—hair from those they loved and had left behind.
In every family that emigrated, there were a multitude of fears and dreams. Dig beyond the surface. Maybe Papa wanted to come. He longed for land, for a hope and a future. Mama, on the other hand, had to say good-bye to her own aging parents and to all her sisters who lived in the same village. She may have had to leave an oldest daughter behind because of a longstanding betrothal. They would miss the wedding. Who would prepare the wedding supper? Would there be grandchildren? Mama knew that in all likelihood she’d never see them again. Never hold them close to her heart.
Some immigrants embraced the adventure. Others hated to leave friends and familiar surroundings. A writer knows that it’s
not hard to tell the story of an avid adventurer who enthusiastically starts out on a journey. Think about it—where’s the inner conflict in that? It’s too easy, because he relishes the challenge and it costs him nothing to leave. But give us a painfully shy girl whose stomach gets knotted at the very thought of change . . . now, there’s a story.
Once you begin to collect your own backstory, you’ll have the raw material to tell many different stories in any number of formats. The important thing is to write it down. You’ll be surprised to discover new meaning—richness you never intended or expected—as you go back later and reread what you’ve gathered.
Storytelling Prompt
Come up with ten quirky things from your growing-up days that modern kids wouldn’t understand. Describe the one piece of clothing you wore as a child that you detested. Dig deeper: how did it make you feel?
Exploring Our Roots
Alex Haley, author of Roots, said this about discovering our story: “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”
One of the ways to dig into your background and discover your history is to become involved in genealogy. Learning to research family and discover your ancestors is far more than idle curiosity. Here are some of the reasons you may want to begin shaking the family tree: