The writing teacher is in

For the past year, I've been teaching courses in creative nonfiction writing, specifically a course in memoir and a course in literary journalism (also sometimes called narrative journalism). This last course kind of binds my journalism background with my MFA training.

And both are genres that I have practiced and which I aim to refine, myself -- the eternal writing student.

They have elements in common -- literary journalism often springs from a writer's particular interests or background. 

And memoir is all about mining the past, and attempting to find some order -- a story that can emerge from the most salient events of your life.

The courses have shown me the importance of learning our histories. For example, Walt Harrington, a White journalist who worked for the Washington Post Magazine and was married to a Black woman, decided to research his wife's family after he overheard a racist remark that brought home the importance of the family history to his biracial sons. So he travels to Kentucky, where his wife's family has deep roots, and he slowly, methodically interviews family members about their shared history.

We learn so much about Harrington's in-laws, including the racism they faced. But we also learn about a strand of American life completely unknown to me -- African-American bootleggers. I know about Kennedy's father and I've read The Great Gatsby, but that's where my bootlegging history ends. Or did end.

The piece also conveys the absolute primacy of interviews. Harrington sits down with all of the major members of the family. He describes the setting, and he quotes generously. Judging by the deep information he ferrets out, it was as if his wife's family was just waiting for someone to ask. They knew their history. They were ready to share it -- and now Harrington isn't the only person who benefits.

When I give students assignments -- especially graduate students at Wesleyan who are almost inevitably working full-time and possibly raising kids -- I occasionally worry, momentarily at least, that the work will seem unnecessarily onerous or arbitrary. 

But that worry vanished when I encouraged them to learn the story of their families for major course projects. When did your family arrive in America? What drove them here? Who was left behind and why? Where they did settle here and what work have they done?

No moment lost when you're discovering what brought you -- yes, you -- to this point in your life. And that's what family history is. The story of how we got here.

In the course of teaching the class on literary journalism, I discovered (as I mentioned in a previous post) that my grandfather had been quoted on the front page of The New York Times (in connection with his wartime work with Brooklyn's blood supply). Wait, hold up: The paper I've read religiously since childhood and which my parents quoted more often than the Bible, when I was growing up -- THAT paper quoted Grandpa Tisdall on the front page? Wow.

My hope is that others will do early what I've been doing late. And there's help! For example, UCLA has some many online resources to walk people through interviewing family members (there is an art to how to ask questions, as any journalist will tell you, in order to get the most useful information). Here's a step-by-step guide from UCLA about preparing and conducting "oral histories" with family members:

https://www.library.ucla.edu/destination/center-oral-history-research/resources/conducting-oral-histories-family-members

All of this to say, start asking questions, record your family members and find out what can only be gleaned while your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, et al, are still alive.