On Writing “The Swing”: Reflections of a Reluctant Memoirist

By Susan Dennis

I am the widow of a passionate black and white landscape photographer. I fell in love with him on our first date and our twenty-four years together flew by. I buried him with two rolls of film, one in each pocket and carried a favorite camera to his funeral. After he died, I began to gather things; I’ll call them mementos.

These sentimental odds and ends were placed into a deep chest drawer to serve as some sort of memory repository. I began to jot thoughts as the mementos surfaced on scrap paper or paper towels or check stubs. The memory repository soon filled up with so much material that it had to be pressed down to close.  

As I exhibited Charlie’s photographic prints, posthumously, I was also asked to speak about our life together. I recalled Charlie’s small field notebook, his collection of light meters, his many favorite pens and mechanical pencils and the cards he crafted for my birthdays. Suddenly, dozens of story-memories poured out of me as I spoke and mingled with attendees. As I filled the memory drawer with notes, a story began to develop in my mind. A love story.   

In 2016 – eleven years after Charlie’s death, I sought the help of a mentor-editor. I was searching for a way to share how Charlie’s passion for his work kept him going for so many years. The first word from my mentor was memoir. “UGH,” I moaned.

As much of a ham as I can be if asked to tell a story about Charlie, I wasn’t a diva-ham looking for a spotlight. After some thought (and initial resistance), I reluctantly realized: who better than I could take the story of us to its most authentic version? I had to accept this in order to rise to the many memoir-telling challenges and to hope that in our story,  pieces of it could resonate with others who loved one who was ill or driven or both.

I drafted a first chapter in less than an hour. I can’t explain why I opened the story where I did. It felt purely organic to open with our most daunting, life and death emergency room event when I was told by loving doctors to encourage Charlie to stop fighting, ease up and let death in, but instead I told him the opposite, to fight like hell and to finish his artistic quest. That’s when everything for us changed in our art versus illness saga.  Five years later, the twenty-five-page first chapter is relatively unchanged, but the rest took tedious development, reflection, wordsmithing and a lot of chocolate covered peanuts.  

To get underway, my memoir mentor guided me to write a story people would be enticed to read. She told me not to overthink every detail and date, but rather ask myself why tell this story. 

Still, I Googled “how to write a memoir,” and discovered Shimmering Images, A Handy Little Guide to Writing a Memoir by Lisa Dale Norton. I liked the title, ordered it and read it twice. After reading Lisa’s book, I pried opened my drawer full of keepsakes, got a bottle of wine and laid out my memory stuff across the floor. It was a wrenching journey of reminders, but I began to sense where I was going in telling this story of the three of us; Charlie, his quest, and me.  

I also drew on my childhood’s more poignant recollections and wove these early-year bits of me into the story. That’s when it happened. My immense and forgotten dislike for a childhood square dancing class shimmered most brightly in my thoughts. After that revelation, I took long walks and allowed my mind to wander. It was while walking that another memory emerged of me as a child locking my mother in our basement to quiet her tormented rantings. It was painful to recall this, let alone to expand upon it in order to figure out what it meant to this memoir.

Soon, it became a challenge to edit out so many memories and even more difficult to drag my mind through the darker times, but I sensed a wholly formed art-versus-illness story was unfolding and this uplifted me to embrace the telling of its grief and its joy.  

So here’s my take from this memoir crafting journey. If over ninety-five percent of the earth is water, imagine earth’s land mass as a publishing world and the writer’s world, the oceans. The memoir writers are out on a raft in Memoir Ocean searching for a shoreline…one with readers willing to check out what you’ve put into a book about yourself…a stranger to them. 

How can you keep your memoir from being lost at sea? You need a pearl! Yes, that’s right. A big beautiful pearl that lures the reader in and keeps them engaged with you and your very personal story.

Dig deep for that pearl in your memoir’s raison d’etre. Once I got outside of my head about creating an art book of essays focused on each of Charlie’s photographs and into the stories behind the images, my pearl began to form.

 Do it any way that’ll work for you, but lay out about a dozen stories screaming to be told.  Which ones don’t let you rest?  Listen to them.  Build out from there. I had far more stories than a dozen crammed into my memory chest drawer. It was like Sophie’s Choice for me, but I went back to that pearl and asked myself, how does this story add another lustrous layer?  

The years and drafts guided and enriched my sensitivity as to what was distraction versus poignancy. That pearl was the boss of me.  

If you’re not crying and laughing while you’re writing – do you think a stranger will?  I still cry and laugh when I read my words, years after the first draft. How far should you go? Go as far and as explicit as makes sense for the core of your story. I wrote about suppositories. I’ll say no more.

 

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THE SWING

After one heck of a first date with an ill artist, Susan was all in for a wild race against the clock. She knew what she was getting into…sort of. Charlie was frailer than she realized and only twenty-seven. But it was clear from day one that he was in search of his own brand of perfection. She’d watch his work magically evolve while his body slipped away.

She’d summon unfettered wiliness, hope, and forgiveness, while still managing to find raw, wicked humor in almost every dark corner. Decades later, over a million images were shot in the field, thousands were carefully cataloged, and hundreds were printed by the artist before he died. Art won. Love won. Illness lost.

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