Looking Back, Moving On
by Janice Rubin
FOREWORD
“Your students must think a lot of themselves,” said my neighbor Rosemary, as we ambled along our little dead-end road one balmy spring day. A contemporary of my daughters, she had grown up alongside them and still lived in the house her parents had bought, now with her husband and child.Walking up the road, Rosemary pulling her young daughter in a wagon, I gathered she was implying that people who write their autobiographies think themselves somehow superior to the rest of us, believe that the lives they’ve led were in some ways more interesting, exemplary or noteworthy than the more humdrum lives most people lead. Her comment didn’t surprise me. I had heard the like so often. Some of my students had reported similar reactions from family or friends when they announced they had begun to write the story of their life. Interviewing me for a feature story on my classes, a young reporter said in complete innocence, “I thought only famous people wrote their autobiographies.”
I had attended her mother’s wake a few years before Rosemary married, and her father’s several months after her child was born. Having lost my own mother while I was in my teens, I knew what it felt like to have no mother when facing the momentous occasions in my life. I recalled having wished at times that my mother had written her story so that I might have had her guidance as I made my way.
“Have you never wondered how your mother felt when she married, had her own home for the first time, became pregnant, had her first child? Wouldn’t it have interested you to learn more about the person your mother was through reading her own words?” I asked Rosemary.She said she had never thought about it, but conceded that if her mother had written the story of her life, she would have read it avidly.
I began my autobiography simply to leave for my children a record of whom their mother was and how people and events had shaped her life. I did not suspect I would be opening the door to undreamed-ofadventures in my September years. Now, well along in my story, in the tenth year of a teaching career I had not foreseen, having observed the effect of memoir writing on myself and others, I can confidently endorse it as the cerebral equivalent of a magical mystery tour: you don’t know where you will end up when you begin, you can’t be sure what means you will use to get there, and you may not be the same person at journey’s end as you were when you started out!
Rosemary’s comments had caused me to feel somewhat defensive, but they provided the impetus I needed to get to work on this book. Of course Rosemary was correct; my students and I were involved in a self-centered activity. Ours was an autobiography workshop; its aim was to facilitate the retrieval of memories and encourage people to write about themselves and how they were affected by the life around them. Wasn’t that what we would have liked to know about our forebears?
My daughter, Rena, had planted the germ of an idea for this book several years before. I had shared with her my admiration for the quality of work my students were turning out and expressed regret that the audience was so limited.
“I would love to see some of these pieces in print!” I said. She suggested I begin collecting the writings that I thought were especially fine with the idea of putting together an anthology one day.
So I began, with no particular motif in mind, to gather the essays and vignettes and chronicles that I thought were evocative or representative of a period in history or of a universal sentiment, and often of all three. Rereading them as I placed them at the ends of each of the chapters, I knew full well why I had chosen them. Who could remain unmoved by Peggy O’Hea’s tales from the orphanage? The inability of Ginny Michel’s parents to hear her out still tugged at my heartstrings. June McLaughlin’s imaginative children’s games, and the portraits of days gone by of Fred Zuendt and Kevin Loughlin were as charming to me as when we’d first heard them. The first-hand accounts of the horrors of war and occupation by Bill O’Connell and Karin Pessa made us more intimately aware of the suffering war brings not only to our so-called enemies but ourselves as well. Dan Oliff brought to life the Depression’s despair and Prohibition’s speak-easy life.
My daughter, Ann Elise, read and vetted the first few chapters. Her imprimatur was all the encouragement I needed to see this project to its end.
In the years since the publication of the first edition of Looking Back, Moving On, I collected many more fine pieces of writing. I couldn’t help myself; I had become a memoir junkie! When a student reads an essay, story, poem or vignette that resonates with me, I must have it. That is why I asked Stephen James for his poignant piece on shining shoes and Pamela Grant for her touching history of a ceremonial gown and Erna Trocola for the story of her wonderful Papa. That is why Winnie Kelso’s tragicomic tale of tender devotion to her failing husband could not go unmemorialized. That is why Frank Lucibello comes of age on these pages; Denise, his wife, revisits the forest home of her childhood; Frank Dobrowolski’s miracle drug is acknowledged, and due notice is paid to Philip Walker’s cure for agita. John Galvin sensitized me to the suffering of the children of alcoholics, as others increased my awareness of the grief of barren couples who want children. Kathryn McGrath made me aware of the second-class status of southpaws, in a world that caters to the right-handed, to such a degree that I can no longer undo a twist tie without thinking of her. In all, forty-two students have contributed fifty-nine stories to this volume.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I first began teaching. I was more than sixty years old and had never thought of myself as other than a student. While writing my memoirs, I developed my own guidelines, which I later copyrighted as a syllabus for autobiography workshops. I had found nothing that might teach me how to encourage others to review their lives and to persevere when unpleasant memories were encountered that threatened the continuation of the project. My training in psychology and my own experience had made me aware of the benefits of writing my story and sharing it in a non-judgmental setting. I was also aware that, like me, others might eventually come face-to-face with painful episodes or periods in their past that would be difficult or impossible to share or that might even cause them to abandon their quest.
In spite of everything, I went to my first class feeling certain this was something I could do well. Looking back, I think of it as the confidence of the inexperienced and, although at the time I didn’t know where it came from, I was most grateful it was there when I needed it.As the years went by, I understood that the workshops have special meaning for those people who return semester after semester to continue their explorations and share their findings. Some say they know they are not sufficiently disciplined to write unless they have a deadline to meet. They return for as many semesters as they feel they need to complete their stories, beginning each where they left off the previous term.
Many discover early on that the supportive atmosphere that prevails in the classroom allows them to retrieve, examine and share memories they had been unable to confront before. As they read, sometimes stopping to wipe a tear or swallow a sob, I see heads nod and I know others comprehend the feelings that are being expressed even if they have not had the same experiences. Bonds form among writers as they continue to examine and share, sometimes for the first time, events or situations that had been too fearsome to deal with alone. By the third or fourth meeting, almost like magic, we discover the class has become a supportive community that embraces each member. Enthusiasm for their own and others’ works is high. It is unusual for a student to come to class unprepared to read and absences are rare.
From time to time, members of the group have asked me to read from my memoirs. With the exception of two small pieces included in Chapter One, each of which I’ve read on occasion, I have refrained from doing so. It is not that I think of myself as a private person or am reluctant to open up to the group; I do not hesitate to inject incidents from my life into discussions when it seems appropriate to do so. It is simply because the two-hour sessions are hardly long enough to permit each writer the opportunity to read and receive feedback.
Like most authors, until I see a manuscript in print, I make changes each time I have it in hand. This book is no exception. In this final revision, with a nod to my students, I have added two pieces I wrote during the past year.
As I finished the last chapter and wrote the Afterword, it amused me to realize that the project, begun as an anthology of my students’ writings, had become, in turn, an apologia for memoir writing and a how-to or self-help manual. How appropriate that it too should be the result of a process. After all, our autobiography, begun with the intention of leaving behind a record of who we were, had become an instrument for discovering who we are as a first step in moving forward in our lives.
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by Janice Rubin
FOREWORD
“Your students must think a lot of themselves,” said my neighbor Rosemary, as we ambled along our little dead-end road one balmy spring day. A contemporary of my daughters, she had grown up alongside them and still lived in the house her parents had bought, now with her husband and child.Walking up the road, Rosemary pulling her young daughter in a wagon, I gathered she was implying that people who write their autobiographies think themselves somehow superior to the rest of us, believe that the lives they’ve led were in some ways more interesting, exemplary or noteworthy than the more humdrum lives most people lead. Her comment didn’t surprise me. I had heard the like so often. Some of my students had reported similar reactions from family or friends when they announced they had begun to write the story of their life. Interviewing me for a feature story on my classes, a young reporter said in complete innocence, “I thought only famous people wrote their autobiographies.”
I had attended her mother’s wake a few years before Rosemary married, and her father’s several months after her child was born. Having lost my own mother while I was in my teens, I knew what it felt like to have no mother when facing the momentous occasions in my life. I recalled having wished at times that my mother had written her story so that I might have had her guidance as I made my way.
“Have you never wondered how your mother felt when she married, had her own home for the first time, became pregnant, had her first child? Wouldn’t it have interested you to learn more about the person your mother was through reading her own words?” I asked Rosemary.She said she had never thought about it, but conceded that if her mother had written the story of her life, she would have read it avidly.
I began my autobiography simply to leave for my children a record of whom their mother was and how people and events had shaped her life. I did not suspect I would be opening the door to undreamed-ofadventures in my September years. Now, well along in my story, in the tenth year of a teaching career I had not foreseen, having observed the effect of memoir writing on myself and others, I can confidently endorse it as the cerebral equivalent of a magical mystery tour: you don’t know where you will end up when you begin, you can’t be sure what means you will use to get there, and you may not be the same person at journey’s end as you were when you started out!
Rosemary’s comments had caused me to feel somewhat defensive, but they provided the impetus I needed to get to work on this book. Of course Rosemary was correct; my students and I were involved in a self-centered activity. Ours was an autobiography workshop; its aim was to facilitate the retrieval of memories and encourage people to write about themselves and how they were affected by the life around them. Wasn’t that what we would have liked to know about our forebears?
My daughter, Rena, had planted the germ of an idea for this book several years before. I had shared with her my admiration for the quality of work my students were turning out and expressed regret that the audience was so limited.
“I would love to see some of these pieces in print!” I said. She suggested I begin collecting the writings that I thought were especially fine with the idea of putting together an anthology one day.
So I began, with no particular motif in mind, to gather the essays and vignettes and chronicles that I thought were evocative or representative of a period in history or of a universal sentiment, and often of all three. Rereading them as I placed them at the ends of each of the chapters, I knew full well why I had chosen them. Who could remain unmoved by Peggy O’Hea’s tales from the orphanage? The inability of Ginny Michel’s parents to hear her out still tugged at my heartstrings. June McLaughlin’s imaginative children’s games, and the portraits of days gone by of Fred Zuendt and Kevin Loughlin were as charming to me as when we’d first heard them. The first-hand accounts of the horrors of war and occupation by Bill O’Connell and Karin Pessa made us more intimately aware of the suffering war brings not only to our so-called enemies but ourselves as well. Dan Oliff brought to life the Depression’s despair and Prohibition’s speak-easy life.
My daughter, Ann Elise, read and vetted the first few chapters. Her imprimatur was all the encouragement I needed to see this project to its end.
In the years since the publication of the first edition of Looking Back, Moving On, I collected many more fine pieces of writing. I couldn’t help myself; I had become a memoir junkie! When a student reads an essay, story, poem or vignette that resonates with me, I must have it. That is why I asked Stephen James for his poignant piece on shining shoes and Pamela Grant for her touching history of a ceremonial gown and Erna Trocola for the story of her wonderful Papa. That is why Winnie Kelso’s tragicomic tale of tender devotion to her failing husband could not go unmemorialized. That is why Frank Lucibello comes of age on these pages; Denise, his wife, revisits the forest home of her childhood; Frank Dobrowolski’s miracle drug is acknowledged, and due notice is paid to Philip Walker’s cure for agita. John Galvin sensitized me to the suffering of the children of alcoholics, as others increased my awareness of the grief of barren couples who want children. Kathryn McGrath made me aware of the second-class status of southpaws, in a world that caters to the right-handed, to such a degree that I can no longer undo a twist tie without thinking of her. In all, forty-two students have contributed fifty-nine stories to this volume.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I first began teaching. I was more than sixty years old and had never thought of myself as other than a student. While writing my memoirs, I developed my own guidelines, which I later copyrighted as a syllabus for autobiography workshops. I had found nothing that might teach me how to encourage others to review their lives and to persevere when unpleasant memories were encountered that threatened the continuation of the project. My training in psychology and my own experience had made me aware of the benefits of writing my story and sharing it in a non-judgmental setting. I was also aware that, like me, others might eventually come face-to-face with painful episodes or periods in their past that would be difficult or impossible to share or that might even cause them to abandon their quest.
In spite of everything, I went to my first class feeling certain this was something I could do well. Looking back, I think of it as the confidence of the inexperienced and, although at the time I didn’t know where it came from, I was most grateful it was there when I needed it.As the years went by, I understood that the workshops have special meaning for those people who return semester after semester to continue their explorations and share their findings. Some say they know they are not sufficiently disciplined to write unless they have a deadline to meet. They return for as many semesters as they feel they need to complete their stories, beginning each where they left off the previous term.
Many discover early on that the supportive atmosphere that prevails in the classroom allows them to retrieve, examine and share memories they had been unable to confront before. As they read, sometimes stopping to wipe a tear or swallow a sob, I see heads nod and I know others comprehend the feelings that are being expressed even if they have not had the same experiences. Bonds form among writers as they continue to examine and share, sometimes for the first time, events or situations that had been too fearsome to deal with alone. By the third or fourth meeting, almost like magic, we discover the class has become a supportive community that embraces each member. Enthusiasm for their own and others’ works is high. It is unusual for a student to come to class unprepared to read and absences are rare.
From time to time, members of the group have asked me to read from my memoirs. With the exception of two small pieces included in Chapter One, each of which I’ve read on occasion, I have refrained from doing so. It is not that I think of myself as a private person or am reluctant to open up to the group; I do not hesitate to inject incidents from my life into discussions when it seems appropriate to do so. It is simply because the two-hour sessions are hardly long enough to permit each writer the opportunity to read and receive feedback.
Like most authors, until I see a manuscript in print, I make changes each time I have it in hand. This book is no exception. In this final revision, with a nod to my students, I have added two pieces I wrote during the past year.
As I finished the last chapter and wrote the Afterword, it amused me to realize that the project, begun as an anthology of my students’ writings, had become, in turn, an apologia for memoir writing and a how-to or self-help manual. How appropriate that it too should be the result of a process. After all, our autobiography, begun with the intention of leaving behind a record of who we were, had become an instrument for discovering who we are as a first step in moving forward in our lives.
GoHome