Hello, writers and book lovers!
I hope this finds you well in the first month of 2014. We're all looking forward to a healthy and happy new year, filled with lots of great books of all formats: print, eBooks, and audio books!
Following is a great piece by a good friend of MurderBy4 - Mr. Robert Sutherland. Mr. Sutherland's article on legacy-memoirs is a little longer than our usual posts, but I wanted to keep it all together instead of breaking it into parts. I hope you all agree and that this wonderful piece might inspire you to write a memoir for your descendents!
Thanks, Mr. Sutherland, for joining us today.
Aaron Lazar
www.lazarbooks.com
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WRITING A LEGACY-MEMOIR
by
Robert D. Sutherland
Copyright © Robert D.
Sutherland, 2012
A legacy-memoir is an autobiographical
record that one writes for one’s descendants. Other
types of personal memoirs are usually written for publication, with potentially
the entire reading public as their audience. Typically, they’re designed to
describe or demonstrate one’s importance as a player in major events, or to
provide humorous or titillating anecdote, or to explain oneself, or justify
one’s actions (to “have the last word”), or (in the case of celebrities) to
please one’s fans and make money. In contrast to this, the purpose of
legacy-memoirs is to provide to the niche audience of the author’s descendants
reference materials regarding family history, and, in so doing, acquaint
subsequent generations with the life, thoughts, and experiences of a
far-sighted forebear.
The value in writing such a work (besides
supplying family reference material) is to give your descendants an awareness
of who you were as their ancestor, an understanding of how life was lived when
you were living it, information regarding what you found to be important,
interpretations of major events you lived through (which they may know of only
through their study of history), and reasons why they should find all of this
worth knowing.
A
legacy-memoir is a gift to the future, a reaching out to generations of one’s
own family yet unborn, sending a message to your great-great-great
grandchildren (and beyond) that you care for them, wish to participate in their
lives by sharing yours, and hope thereby that they will be able to see how
theirs and yours, though different, are yet similar. Your descendants are the ultimate “niche audience”: not much
money to be made there! And, as you hopefully launch your gift into the void,
you have no certainty that any of those descendants will ever read your words,
will want to read your words, or will
appreciate or have a response to your feelings if they do. A legacy-memoir is
thus both an act of faith and a labor of love.
Legacy-memoirs
are edited to accomplish certain
specific objectives. In this, they are akin to projects in oral history, which
bring skillful interviewers to people “who were there” to glean their memories,
impressions, and opinions while they are still present to record them. Everyone
has a lifetime of experiences, memories, stories to tell. Everyone, if so
inclined, and with the time and leisure to do it, can create a legacy-memoir.
If individuals can’t write it themselves, they can dictate it and have it
transcribed.
An
archival-quality, acid-free, print-on-paper book that can be passed on from
generation to generation is a useful, permanent, and portable format to serve
as default and backup (who can say what technologies will have evolved by your
great-great grandchild’s day?). Magnetic tape is currently obsolescent; here in
2013, digital CD formats, and computer PDF files are available for storage and
reading—but what will be the case in 2280? It will be your descendants’
responsibility to continually update the text for retrievability in the
technology current to them. Your
responsibility—if you wish to leave them a legacy-memoir—is to write it.
I
am currently writing a legacy-memoir for my
descendants. What gave me the idea to do so, and why I think it’s important to
leave a personal record, is the joy and enlightenment I experienced in
discovering a group of writings by my great-grandfather, Robert John Sutherland
(1838-1921), of which my immediate family was unaware. These writings (a text
of over 61,000 words) are currently in the possession of my second cousin,
Catherine Muir Butterfield, who inherited them from her grandmother Catherine
Sutherland Semple, who was Robert John’s daughter and my father’s aunt. The
writings are contained in a scrapbook as a series of newspaper clippings; I
borrowed this scrapbook, transcribed the clippings, and published them in 1999
as The Observations of Ulysses or, Notes
by an Occasional Correspondent, being Dispatches Sent to THE EVENING STAR, a
Newspaper in Dunedin, New Zealand by Robert John Sutherland, of Keokuk, Iowa
from March, 1881 to January, 1883. Robert John was an astute observer,
highly opinionated, well-read, and an excellent writer inclined to ironic
humor. I learned much history from editing his dispatches and found him to be
an interesting and engaging man.
About
1848, Robert John emigrated from Thurso, Scotland and settled in Carleton
Place, Ontario, in Canada; from there he moved as a young man to northern
Illinois to study; in 1861, he enlisted in the Union army to fight in the Civil
War. In 1865, as an aide to Brigadier General Joseph B. West, he was present
when the last Confederate generals surrendered in New Orleans. After the war he
married and lived in Keokuk, Iowa for many years, working for a railroad that
ultimately merged with the Rock Island line. He became an American citizen in
1886.
Some
years before, his brother had moved to New Zealand in the wake of an Australian
gold rush. In 1881, this brother suggested that Robert John write dispatches to
the Dunedin newspaper discussing current issues and events in the United
States. From 1881 to 1883 Robert John did this, using the pseudonym Ulysses;
the brother sent the newspapers to Iowa as they were published, and Robert
John’s dispatches wound up as clippings in his scrapbook.
My
great-grandfather reported on a broad range of topics, among them American
grain and wool production (with tables of statistics), the latest international
trade agreements, the legal controversy over Mormon polygamy, the Chinese
Exclusion Act (that terminated Chinese immigration, a law he eloquently
opposed), the introduction of refrigeration for shipping meat by sea from New
Zealand, the closing of the U. S. government’s program for homesteading on
public lands, the assassination of President Garfield (whom he supported), the
trial of Garfield’s assassin Guiteau, and his personal opinion that Garfield’s
successor Chester Arthur was a political hack. He saw the building of the
transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad as a scam perpetrated by big
business interests against the Canadian people. Of Oscar Wilde’s visit to
America in 1883, he said “The Southern States have Oscar Wilde this summer as a
substitute for the yellow fever. He is now in Texas. From either infliction
‘Good Lord deliver us’ say I.”
As
I edited the old boy’s dispatches one hundred and sixteen years after he wrote
them, I found all of this fascinating. Eye-witness commentary on history
unfolding! Getting to know a striking and formidable personality whose genes I
carry! It was then I began to see the value of legacy-memoirs for those with
interest in the past and eyes to see.
I
decided to frame my legacy-memoir as a direct address to my descendants, a
communication to the future from the past. This was a rhetorical choice. Anyone
who undertakes to write such a memoir has to decide what to tell, how much to
tell, and how to tell it. I decided to present mine as a cross-referenced
mosaic, organized around general topics. I am not writing a conventional
autobiography beginning as David Copperfield did in Chapter One with “I am
Born”, and proceeding from there. The topics I’ve tentatively chosen (which may
change as I progress) are as follows:
FOREWORD (direct address:
introducing myself to my descendants and explaining my hopes and intentions)
CHRONOLOGY (timeline of significant life-events with
historical context)
FAMILY (brief genealogical
summary; description of my immediate family)
EDUCATION
READING
PHILOSOPHY
WORKING (jobs, training)
TEACHING (professional
career)
WRITING
EDITING AND PUBLISHING
ARTWORK
MUSIC
CONCERNS
SOCIAL ACTIVISM
POLITICS
AMUSING INCIDENTS
PEOPLE
TRAVEL
SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
HOBBIES
PARENTING
THOUGHTS ON AGING
CONCLUSION (a summing up and
wishing my descendants well)
Each
of these topics will be treated in its own section, and each section will be
free-standing, able to be read for
itself. I conceive people reading in
the memoir, not through it from
beginning to end: picking, choosing, dipping at will. I’ll cross-reference
between sections where appropriate.
So
far, I have drafted the FOREWORD and am currently halfway through the sections
on EDUCATION and WORKING; in both of these I am proceeding chronologically
since both are developmental, earlier experiences providing a foundation for
later. But not all sections will follow this model: I can see PARENTING,
READING, PHILOSOPHY, CONCERNS, and SOCIAL ACTIVISM having their own topical
subcategories. Some sections of the
legacy-memoir will be relatively long, some relatively short. Part of the fun
is figuring out how to structure the sections. All persons who write
legacy-memoirs must determine what they wish to say (choosing what to include,
what to omit), how they wish to say it, and how to structure their
presentation. There is not a single way to write a legacy-memoir.
However,
there are certain things one should consider and keep in mind. Paramount is knowing
what needs to be included. Since
you are writing to be read in the indefinite future, you must anticipate what
your descendants might not know or realize about the time in which you lived,
and supply the background, context, and factual information they need in order
to understand what you are saying. Facts regarding culture, politics, the
natural environment, law and governmental process, means of transportation
(cars and highways, trains, airplanes), the energy supply, communications
(newspapers, radio, TV, DVD’s, e-mail), etc. that are self-evident to you and
taken for granted, may not be at all self-evident to people living two hundred
years from now; may be only vaguely understood, or altogether unknown. You must
second-guess what those readers might need to have explained or described, and
supply that information. (For example, whenever I cite a measurement of length,
or weight, or volume, I use the English system (foot, pound, etc.), but
always include as a parenthetical a conversion to metric (centimeter, meter, gram, etc.): the English system may still be
used a hundred and fifty years from now—but that’s not something one should assume.)
It’s
also important for you to try to guess what kinds of things your descendants
might want to know or would find
informative and interesting about you, your world, your life, your values and
opinions, your activities, and your socio/political environment and be sure to
supply that information. You have to
guess what questions they might like to ask you, and then provide answers to
those questions.
You’ve
got to remember that you are reporting an “eyewitness” account from what, for
them, is a time long past. It’s important to be honest, accurate, clear. (Opaqueness, vagueness, and
ambiguity should be avoided, and remedied in your editing.)
Your
personal history can be told anecdotally, as vignettes (humorous or grave) and
short-short stories within the larger text. Everyone’s style is different. But
it’s crucial that your account of what you’ve done, and where you’ve been, and
what you’ve thought about it be interesting,
informative, and fun to read.
Writing
a legacy-memoir entails a lot of work. In the process, you’ll learn much about
yourself, recall a great deal that you’ve “forgotten”, and gain new
perspectives on what you’ve seen and done.
How many copies of the memoir should you make?
A good question. At least one copy for each of your children, at least one copy
for each of your grandchildren (present and projected)—and probably at least
three each in addition that they can pass on to their children. Potentially burdening your offspring with multiple
copies to supply to their offspring
argues the need for an alternative plan of storing text through electronic
means (continually updated to keep pace with evolving technology). Electronic
storage will allow additional copies to be made by each generation as needed.
Also, you might wish to send a copy to the historical society or societies of the region(s) in which you did the bulk of your living. The archivists there might be happy to have your memoir in their collections.
Some
of your descendants may be grateful to you for having thought of them, happy to
have made your acquaintance, glad to have an accurate and coherent account of
what preceded them. Hopefully they will be empowered by your gift to better
understand their own experiences and to better manage their own thoughts,
actions, and relations to the world.
***
Robert
D. Sutherland taught courses in Linguistics and Creative Writing at
Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois until his retirement in
1992. He particularly enjoyed teaching Descriptive Linguistics, History
of the English Language, Semantic Theory, and Old English. In 1977, he
and his co-editor James R. Scrimgeour founded Pikestaff Publications, a
not-for-profit literary press that published The Pikestaff Forum, a
literary magazine, until 1996. He continues serving as editor at The
Pikestaff Press, which publishes books of poetry and prose fiction. In
2009 he began a blog for writers and readers of mysteries. He and his
wife Marilyn have traveled widely, reared two sons to adulthood, and
worked to promote peace, social justice, and preservation of the natural
environment. His publications include a scholarly book, LANGUAGE AND
LEWIS CARROLL; a novel, STICKLEWORTAND FEVERFEW (containing
74 of his pencil illustrations), which received the 1981 Friends of
American Writers Juvenile Book Merit Award for author/illustrator; a
second novel, THE FARRINGFORD CADENZA; short fiction, poems, and essays
on literature, education, and publishing. His interests include
classical music, the nature of metaphor, reading, travel, film noir, and
the comparative study of mythologies.
Robert D. Sutherland
Author of
Sticklewort and Feverfew: a
novel for children, adolescents, and adults
The
Farringford Cadenza. A Novel
both available from The Pikestaff Press
http://www.pikestaffpress.com
