One of the best things about staying with your work for a very long time is that you have a chance to understand, year after year, what exactly you’re doing. Not even because you’re trying to do it better, but because each year your work reveals itself even more to you, and you can deepen your understanding as to what it is about your work that you really care about.

 

I knew I was teaching people something about writing for the last 14 years, but each year was an opportunity for me to peel away a little more the layers and get to the center of that work. Yes I could help people get published and find homes for their books and stories. Yes I wanted to help them tell their stories in engaging ways, but the more I worked with people, the more I understood that what I really cared about – more than whether someone published – was to inspire and to be among people who were striving to find the most honest language to tell their stories with.

 

My aim is to help people find the words that open like doors and which invite both the reader and writer into deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.

 

What I look for in a story is a chance to learn something – – not even a lesson per se, but perhaps some instruction on how to behave in the world. I remember seeing Ira Glass from the radio program, This American Life, on stage in S.F. many years ago and he told this story about the editors deciding whether or not a certain story should be aired. It wasn’t one of their most tantalizing stories, but they decided to run it in the end because, Glass said, “so that if somebody else is in this situation they’ll know what to do.” That stuck with me, and it’s part of why telling true stories is so important to me.

 

I am not alone. I am surrounded by engaging writers who are doing the same kind of work. When I asked my friend Sonya Lea why she wrote true stories, this is what she wrote:

 

I travel to visit my son Joshua a year after his father had a brain injury where he lost the memories of his life. We sit on Joshua’s bachelor couch in his apartment above a grocery co-op, and reflect on all the things that have been permanently altered in our lives. He makes me tea and we talk much of the night. He asks questions about his father’s reality until I hear the sound of held tears in his throat. I reach my hand to his leg.

“Please cry. It’s okay.”

When he can speak, I’m surprised at the source of his sadness, though I ought not be. “It’s like being cut off from your history, when there’s no way back to your father’s people.”

I tell my son a story I can recollect, of discovering I was pregnant with him, our first, the first grandchild on both sides, that we’d found out two weeks after his grandmother died, how she’d been driven over on the street while giving directions to a stranger.

I’d forgotten that the man needed the stories, needed them as much as the food we’d send him when the demands of school and work intensified. I’d forgotten that when your children get older, they still require the stories. That there’s something in the narrative of our lives that can locate us.

I tell true stories not only for my children, but for everyone whose heart is breaking because they’re alone with a difficult reality. I tell true stories because it’s the hardest kind of story for me to write, to see the places where I’m hiding from my truth, where I’d rather be more valiant, more special, less unkind. I tell true stories because to speak with radical honesty keeps me sober. I tell true stories because there’s so much love, and I want to remember that it’s so available. I tell true stories because one day my husband forgot his life and I want to paint beautiful images for him.

I tell true stories because I’m alive.

Find out more about Sonya, her work + at www.sonyalea.net and at her blog wonderingwhoyouare.tumblr.com

 

And if you’d like to tell some true stories of your own, join me on March 3 for Telling True Stories, my 5-week online writing class. It’s a rich world, join us.