Post #159 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Busy But Still Important to Remember
We woke up at 6:30 this morning and quickly moved into our usual routines. My partner was in the closet dressing for the day when the light went out. He came into the bedroom and tried a lamp. Nothing.
This was our first power outage in almost two years. When we lived in the countryside in California, we frequently lost power due to aging lines. So this one was a surprise. It seems that even Corvallis, Oregon can lose power. Thanks to a smart phone, we could look up the phone number of our electric company to check on power failures. I called the number. The recorded voice caused my stomach to drop. She said, “It is September 11 and Corvallis is experiencing a widespread outage. We are looking for the problem and do not have an estimated time when power will be restored.”
As soon as she said September 11, my mind saw the images from 11 years ago. They will always be with me. Probably you feel the same way.
Now, three hours later, we again have electricity and all is well. I won’t remember this incident in 11 years. I probably won’t think about it in 11 days. But 9/11/2001 will be remembered.
Exactly one year ago, we wrote a blog post about 9/11. I shared my story of what I was doing that day and what Kendra was doing. Those are the kind of small stories that stay with us and are told and retold at various times and occasions to different groups.
Click here for the link to that article that discusses how to incorporate time and place into your memoir.
Memoir Writing Prompt
1. If you didn’t use last year’s prompt to write about what you were doing on 9/11/2001, then use some of today’s writing time to capture those memories. If you still feel deeply connected to that day and that event, you might start with an outline rather than writing the narrative. Consider all aspects of that day — where you were, when you learned about each of the four planes, who you first talked to and what you said, what you did later that day, the impact of 9/11 on you personally and on your family, donations you made to the 9/11 families, your sense of the world before and after that day, etc.
2. The small world phenomenon, sometimes called six degrees of separation, hypthesizes that we are not very many links away from almost any other person in the world. Research on this social networking phenomenon was conducted long before we had the Internet and social networking sites. Two early researchers, Kochen and de Sola Pool, worked on a model in the 1950s.
A social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, visited the two researchers in Paris and returned to the US to test their theory. Milgrim wanted to see how many people it would take to connect two individuals who were unknown to each other. Here’s a brief discussion from Wikipedia:
Mathematician Manfred Kochen and political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote a mathematical manuscript, “Contacts and Influences,” while working at the University of Paris in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of social networks, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness).
The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks.
Milgram took up the challenge on his return from Paris, leading to the experiments reported in “The Small World Problem” in May 1967 (charter) issue of the popular magazine Psychology Today, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in Sociometry two years later. The Psychology Today article generated enormous publicity for the experiments, which are well known today, long after much of the formative work has been forgotten.Milgram’s experiment was conceived in an era when a number of independent threads were converging on the idea that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected.
If you have already written your memories of 9/11, then you might consider this prompt:
How many times did you talk with someone who knew a person touched directly by the events of 9/11? For example, the brother of one of my colleagues worked in the World Trade Center. He got out. A friend lived in Arlington and was out walking that morning. Suddenly there were people all around him rushing to leave the area.
(a) Write about how “knowing someone who knew someone” made the event more vivid for you.
(b) Write about how 9/11 helped you to better see the interconnectedness of the world.
No Memoir Writing Today?
Perhaps you are too busy today to write. If so, do the mental exercise of thinking about your memories of 9/11. Consider the personal aspects of that large, public event.
