Managing Editor's Note

JOAN E. CHAPMAN On Breaking Silence My silences have not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.                                                                    —Audre Lorde      One of the qualities I admire most about Candida, our Founding Editor, and my friend and mentor for almost eight years, is her ability to be enduringly, uncompromisingly, bald-spoken. The memoirist of three books (including one about kidnapping her children for almost twenty years in order to protect them) and scores of published pieces, she’s not only a wonderful writer, but her narrator’s “voice” is consistently, well…candid. Candor in a memoir is reassuring, and inspires a reader’s trust. Candor in a friend can be unnerving. But it also inspires trust—you know what to expect, which is truthfulness. When I was a child, I had lamentable secrets, as some children do. I’m no stranger to psychotherapy, where one pays to be candid, so it surprises me that I have trouble shaping these secrets into little memoirs and dropping them into a mailbox. Yet it’s understandable—there are prohibitions against revealing secrets, people’s feelings to consider, real or imagined consequences that might follow. Candida, in her candor, once remarked she thinks I’m waiting for most of my family to die until I finish writing my secrets, and thinks I should not wait that long. She sides with Audre Lorde. There is power in speaking secrets, and they are not protecting me. But I have an irrational desire to protect the people who silenced me; this is a common reaction in children with secrets, and I’ve carried it into adulthood. I believe there are other writers who experience inner prohibitions similar to mine, though their reasons may be different.  After reading thousands of submissions to Memoir (and), and reflecting on Candida and her body of work, it is clear to me it often takes tremendous courage to submit a memoir, whether it’s prose, poetry or graphic narrative. There are stories we want to write but fear to make public; losses still too tender to revisit; events we really tried to bury that keep poking out from under the soil of the past, urging to be exhumed onto the page. Whether focused on self, family, friends, or institutions, a memoirist bumps up against imperatives of silence and denial when beginning a narrative that may portray, and sometimes unmask, what was or wasn’t done, or what was endured: the mistakes and betrayals, the suffering and small joys, the hidden madness or open brutality, the kindness never forgotten or never offered. Courage is needed to keep sharpened the edges of an old memory, to press on with uncomfortable facts, to face a bottomless grief, to struggle to admit all that we know—what we may have known a long time but were afraid to acknowledge. Some of the works in this issue of Memoir (and) have been many years in the making. Like Candida, the authors have shown great courage by exposing themselves in their narratives, and they offer insight. In “What I Did to the Littlest,” the narrator-as-older-sibling plays a game of Slap the Face with the baby of the family; “Recovering Teacher” examines the teaching profession through the prism of a brilliant colleague’s tragic death; “They Won’t Learn” graphically exposes a brutal killing in Nigeria; “Summer Dusk” testifies to a grim moment of initiation; to describe only a few. The visual motif of the issue is “protests and riots,” in which finding courage and speaking against silence is crucial.   I am inspired, as a writer and a human being, by the courage of our contributors and the protesters. Breaking the silence—on a page or at a protest—they change our world.                                                                                 —Joan