The stories they tell

Once again, my summer is turning out to be full of stories.

I say “once again” because I feel like a summer of adventure-through-narrative hearkens back to my childhood, when summer vacation meant spending hours reading – reading in the air-conditioned library, reading in cars and airplanes en route to vacation destinations, reading in cabins or motel rooms or condos, reading in bed late at night.

When I was in grade school, I read adventure stories: Island of the Blue Dolphins; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. By middle school, it was more likely to be realistic fiction about the modern-day lives of girls in middle school or high school.

This summer the stories are different, though. They’re true stories, and they’re being told to me in person, and they range from tales of being sent off to boarding school or summer camp to stories of enlisting in the Royal Air Force to remembrances of being the only woman at medical school to stories of discovering a passion for painting at the age of eighty.

All spring, I foundered for a summer project: I wanted an endeavor related to writing that I’d be able to really sink my teeth into. The answer arrived serendipitously, after the Globe sent me to a nearby retirement community to cover an environmental activism group that had recently taken hold there. “This place is so full of stories,” I thought to myself as I left, after an hour of interviewing a group of women in their eighties and nineties. “I wish there was some way to capture those stories.”

Well, it turned out there was. I consulted with a staff member at the retirement community, and she and I designed a project: members who opted to participate would be interviewed on the topic of their most formative experience, the events or circumstances that they consider most responsible for making them the person they are today, and then I would write up the stories into a compilation.

So far I’ve completed 28 interviews, with another 12 scheduled for later this week, and it turns out my intuition was right. The place is full of stories, indeed, and one by one, the residents are sitting down at a conference table to tell me about them. A 90-year-old woman traveled 6,000 miles through Europe on a motor scooter when she was in her early 20s. A man from rural New Hampshire was sent off to Philips Exeter at the age of 13; eventually he became president of the student body. A woman in her eighties immigrated to the U.S. from England as a young mother and found herself befuddled by the cultural differences between metropolitan London and suburban New Jersey. An early entrepreneur in the computer field was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the height of his career and learned to reprioritize to save his health.

So far all I’ve done is listen and record; the writing and editing will take place later, and I’ll get to explore all of these tales and anecdotes all over again as I revise.

What a perfect summer job. My family isn’t leaving town for any summer travels for several more weeks, but I’m getting to venture through time as well as space through these narratives. And just as in childhood, my summer resonates with stories.

Kaleidoscope writing

Among the most interesting observations I’ve heard this week at the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference is this one, from National Book Award winning novelist Colum McCann: “There are no new stories to tell. As writers, we must be kaleidoscopic.”

What a fitting image for the way we writers tell stories, I thought to myself. Kaleidoscopic. You look through a cylinder at a specific object, and you see its colors and approximate form – but it is variegated strangely, and if you turn the cylinder, the colors will change as the shapes will shift. That’s exactly what we do when we tell stories, especially if we are in the genre of day-to-day narrative nonfiction as I am. It’s fair for me to assume that nothing that I write about hasn’t been written about before. Right now there are millions of women writing books, drafting essays and blogging about the same topics I cover: daily life, child-rearing, writing, running, friendships, life lessons. In none of those spheres are my experiences unique, or even unusual. But we each shift the kaleidoscope and watch the pieces break into different shapes, colored in different hues: we each tell the same story a little bit differently.

Sometimes the same story can be told differently even when being told by the same person. When I was growing up, my father told us lots and lots of funny stories about pranks that he and his friends played when they were kids in school, or at camp, or at home. In one of his stories about junior high, a science teacher left the room briefly and all the kids put their heads down on their desks and closed their eyes. When the teacher returned, he thought the students had all passed out, and in his flustered confusion, he flung a chair through a window. I’m quite certain that the way my father told this story amused us when we were young. But years later, I heard him tell the same story with different nuances; in this one he included the detail that the science teacher was a World War II vet, and in this telling it became a disturbing story about a prank gone wrong as the teacher apparently had a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback and thought some kind of chemical had been released into the room and knocked all the kids unconscious, breaking a window out of panic.

The memory has stuck with me for just the reason Colum McCann identified: its shape-shifting, color-changing qualities. Sometimes the same thing happens to me when I remember stories from my own past: something that seemed funny or entertaining at the time becomes unnerving or alarming in retrospect. Lots of my favorite and funniest childhood memories involve glitches in household operations that as a parent myself I now realize were probably sources of frustration rather than amusement to my parents (the way that the Blizzard of ’78 knocked out our electricity for five days, for example).

A simpler way of saying it is just that most of the stories we know vary with perspective. The parable most often used to illustrate this concept is the one in which several blind people describe an elephant, each feeling a different part of the animal. I like McCann’s invocation of the kaleidoscope image, though. I’m exploring the same stories as millions of other writers: stories about children, households, community life, marriage. Shift the kaleidoscope and it’s a little different for each of us, and from there comes the art of narrative.

Helping tell stories

I’m helping a lot of people tell their stories these days, and I’m more convinced than ever that this is the work I was intended to do.

For several months now, I’ve been helping a 76-year-old woman in Concord write her memoir. She’s a second-generation American born to Italian-American parents. She grew up in the Boston area, met her husband on White Horse Beach in Plymouth a few days before her eighteenth birthday, and spent her college years having fun with him and his friends around the Harvard campus.

People who know I’m working on this project ask me why I find it so worthwhile. It’s not that I think the story will be of great interest to people who don’t know the main characters. It will be self-published with a print run of 25 or 30; our target audience is the woman’s children, grandchildren and a few family friends. But the fact that it’s no literary masterpiece doesn’t keep me from loving the time I’m spending working on it as a ghost writer. I like hearing about people’s lives, but more importantly, I embrace the challenge of using words to impart the same sense of importance that the people involved sense intuitively. To the woman in this story, whose husband died three years ago, this is a love story, a tale of how two young people from humble backgrounds grew up to be valued citizens, good parents, and dear friends to many. It’s a simple story – but it matters to her, and it matters to me.

I’m also helping another client compile inspiring interviews with NFL players. Each player has been interviewed and has told us the story of his life: my job is to weave those stories into a compelling and accessible narrative. And again, just as with the story of the Italian-American immigrants, it doesn’t take a lot of effort for me to sense and to try to convey the heartfelt importance behind these stories. The men in the NFL book all became successful professional athletes. They took a variety of paths to get there, but they all have lessons to impart if I just listen to them carefully enough and give enough consideration for how to explain what they are trying to say.

Last night I went out for dinner with a friend who wants to write the story of her family’s current life, which is a lot different from either of the other projects. She was a divorced mother of three; a year ago she met a divorced father of three, and the two married. She has started crafting the anecdotes from their first year of marriage into a memoir, and as we had dinner, I told her how genuinely I believe in the potential of her project. She too has a vital story to tell, one that will be meaningful and significant to a particular audience.

I like writing my own stories too, but as I work more with other people on theirs, I am beginning to believe this is a calling of sorts. Everyone has a story to tell; I feel as though I have an ear for discerning the narrative thread in each person’s account of their own life and helping them to weave it into a whole. I love these stories, and I’m honored to help tell them. Stories are an archetypal part of being human, and it’s fascinating work to be playing midwife to so many examples of how people turn their lives into narratives full of meaning, significance and ultimately even profundity.