Memoir–What Is It?

     Candida Lawrence,

     Founding Editor 

When we first considered publishing a journal focused on memoir, we were confident that we knew one when we read one, heard one, wrote one. After industrious spelunking into the fog of literary critical theory, book ads and blurbs, we have concluded that memoir will have to be defined by the submissions that come to us and our reactions to them. This position is a cowardly one, but we truly have looked so far afield that we cannot confidently erect a fence and say this belongs inside, this is definitely outside. We have even asked each other if a poem (Ginsberg’s “Howl” or “Supermarket in California”) or Kate Wolff’s song “Great Divide,” or most of Hopper’s paintings, or even Peanuts cartoons that Schultz claimed were childhood memories, are these memoirs? If not, why not? If so, why so?

What we call memoir usually is first person, but need it be? My three published books (Reeling and Writhing, Change of Circumstance, …Fear Itself,) my publisher calls ‘memoirs’ and he names me ‘memoirist.’ Yet they are not always in the first person. Sometimes I want the distance of third person, the music of a poem, the pretense of speaking from another’s mind. Could a series of photographs be a memoir? Is a child’s drawing of a jail with barred windows and bombs dropping down from on high, a memoir?

And here comes St. Augustine, of all people, placed in front of me at the kitchen table by Joan, our managing editor:

And when indeed I wish to speak of Carthage, I seek within myself what to speak, and I find within myself a notion or image of Carthage; but I have received this through my body, that is, through the perception of the body, and I saw it and perceived it, and retained it in my memory, that I might find within myself a word concerning it, whenever I might wish to speak of it. For the word is the image itself of it in the memory, not that sound of the two syllables when Carthage is named, or even when that name itself is thought of silently from time to time, but that which I discern in my mind, when I utter that disyllable with my voice, or even before I utter.

Clear?

And Thoreau:

…we hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain.

That chain is, I believe, memoir, in whatever form it assumes. If you think otherwise, argue with us please.